Since people saw me tweeting this morning that I was in line at 5:30AM to get a Palm Pre from Sprint they’ve been asking me how I like it. This post is just my first impressions, I’ve only had it about 12 hours so far so a more indepth review will be coming later (or just watch my tweets). Here’s a link to my Tweets about the Pre.

The biggest question that has come up so far has been battery life. I can’t really say anything yet since I’ve been playing/charging all day and haven’t had a chance to test the battery out under my “real world” conditions. One good thing…the battery is USER replaceable and you can buy extra batteries for it. So, if i decide that the battery life isn’t up to my standards, I’ll just buy another battery so I can switch them out. Sorry iPhoners.

Please understand that I’ve been running Windows Mobile on different devices for the past 5 years so some of my comments will compare to WinMo.

Very first impression – It’s small.  Much smaller than I expected. But it’s small in a good way. One reason I wanted the Pre was for the keyboard, I haven’t seen a decent Windows Mobile phone out there with a keyboard that’s not like a brick (all my previous phones were WinMo). The Pre is just the perfect size, it’s only slightly thiker than my old HTC Touch but the same general dimensions. I really think that once people see a Pre in person and get to hold one they will be very impressed.

The Good

  • WebOS is pretty slick. The multi-tasking ability and the “cards” are really great. You can have multiple browser windows open to different websites and just “flick” between them
  • The Exchange sync works flawlessly so far. Once I connected to my Exchange server it only took a few minutes to sync my mail, calendar and contacts.
  • Gmail sync is very good as well. I setup the Pre with my gmail account initially and added Exchange later. If you connect multiple mailboxes you can view them all in 1 inbox.
  • Speed – I have noticed no slowness in applicaitons, even when I have multiple open. WebOS seems to deal with multi-tasking very well.
  • Touchstone charger – I really like being able to charge the phone just by placing it on the charger. The magnet holds it in place very well. The Touchstone is so much better than trying to pry open the micro-USB “door” every time you want to charge. WARNING: The Touchstone charger does NOT come with a wall plug/micro-USB cable. I found this out after I got home. I bought 2 Touchstones, one for home and one for the office so now I also need to buy another wall plug/cable.
  • WiFi – I love having a phone with WiFi again. It was very simple to setup and connect to my home wireless router. I haven’t tried it yet at a public hotspot.
  • The camera on this thing is great. 3.2 MP with a flash. One of my biggest complaints of my last phone was it’s crappy camera. So far the Pre camera has taken excellent pictures and the flash seems to work pretty well.

The OK

  • The keyboard is just OK. It’s not bad, it’s not great. I’ve seen numerous other reviews so I won’t bore you with the details here.
  • Settings (or lack thereof) – Many of the settings are buried within applications themselves or non-existent. For example, there’s no way that I have found to set a different alert/ring tone for text messages, you’re stuck with the default. Also, the screen settings are missing a few things, most noteably the ability to leave the screen turned on when on external power. The screen stays on when on the Touchstone but not with the car charger. Very annoying if you want to use Google Maps.
  • Plastic screen. I’m concerned about scratching it. At launch there weren’t any stick on screen protectors available.
  • Apps – I know it’s only launch day and the SDK hasn’t been widely available so I’m not going to ding this too much. I did find 2 Twitter apps that are OK (Tweed and Spaz), neither are anything close to PockeTwit(the one WinMo app I’ll miss the most).
  • Copy/Paste – It’s there, I just haven’t quite figured out how to make it work very well yet. But hey, at least it’s an option and I didn’t have to wait until update 3 to get it.

The Bad

  • So far nothing to report on the bad side of things. Since I’m new to this phone and platform it will take some getting used to. Maybe after a few weeks I’ll have some “bad” to report.

Summary

Overall I’m very happy that I was up before the sun today and got in line to be one of the first people to own a Pre. I’m looking forward to using it over the next several days/weeks and getting used to it. It’s a big change from WinMo so I know it will take some time. Here’s a few pictures of my Pre:

Update June 8, 2009: Here’s a quick video showing the interface:

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