10 Updates My Palm Pre Needs Now
So Palm’s Pre is nearly a week old. Early reviews and first impressions were generally favorable, but do they get better or worse with age? That’s the recurring question I’m seeing in my Twitter feed, on FriendFeed, and in my email. I still feel that the device is more like a 1.5 version than a 1.0 version. But the beauty is often only skin deep: There’s breadth and depth missing in the Pre. Nearly all of the gaps can be addressed by software or firmware updates, and I hope Palm iterates early and often. To help it (and some of you who are still on the fence about a purchase), here’s a list of what I’d like to see fixed right away. If any of these issues are user error on my part, please let me know and I’ll update the post. Also, the list is based on my own needs and usage. Everyone’s requirements are different, so my list may not be the same as yours. In fact, it might help everyone if you added your own in the comments.
1. Notifications – This feature is one of the strengths of the Pre. It’s also become the most annoying one to me personally. It needs work. Oh, the notifications work well when the phone wants to tell you something. You get an email, and Pre will tell you in an unobtrusive way. That’s great. It’s like an elephant, though: It never forgets them until you dismiss them. The notifications seem to be a fire-and-forget mechanism when they should be in sync and updating dynamically.
Here’s an example screencap I just took. It shows me what I’m listening to on Pandora, and it tells me I have five emails, the latest one being from Intuit about Quickbooks. There’s only one problem: On my computer, I’ve already read the five emails and taken action by deleting them, responding to them or taking another action. Pre’s notification area doesn’t reflect that. I have to manually swipe the notification away into oblivion when it should automatically refresh, update or dismiss. If I don’t do that, the unread email count on the Pre keeps rising — so does my stress level.
2. Quick movement to the top of a web page – There’s simply no way I can see to get to the top of a web page in the browser. This kills my productivity when I’m reading a long or tall page like Friendfeed. I manually have to scroll, scroll, scroll. Am I spoiled by the iPhone’s double-tap feature that offers a quick jump to the top? Maybe, but that’s because it’s a great user interface feature. Apple offers it in apps other than the browser, too.
3. Where’s the scrollbar? – Speaking of scrolling on a web page: Since I have to do it so often, where’s the scrollbar that tells me where I am on the page? To me, this is a very basic bit of functionality that’s required.
4. No internal targets or bookmarks? – Another web browser gap that’s wasting my time: When I click on bookmark link, the browser doesn’t take me to it. I don’t mean web bookmarks like a saved URL. I mean a specific bookmark on a web page. For example, I often browse to our home page and look at the comments in the sidebar. Each comment has its own unique URL composed of the post URL and a bookmark on the post page for the comment. In any other browser, a click of the commenter’s name takes me directly to their comment. Not on the Pre. It takes me to the top of the web page, and I have to scroll down to find the comment I want.
5. Page rendering – This is the last browser issue I’ll raise. It’s a sporadic one, but I see it on various sites; Google Reader is a notorious one. Sometimes when refreshing a page or navigating to another page on the same site, Pre renders it above the screen. You get a blank-looking space because you’re below the actual page. Scroll up and you’ll find what you were looking for. Very odd.
6. GPS – The radio is on by default if you activate Location Services during the initial setup. I have no issue with that, but I’ve since turned the GPS radio off to help save battery life. At least I think I did because I can’t find an indicator to tell me. I could go through the menus and check the Location Services, but why not add a GPS indicator to the main screen? I love how I can tap the top right of Pre to see or mod setting for the other radios, i.e., Wi-Fi, EVDO and Bluetooth. Why segregate GPS?
7. Dictionary is lacking – I don’t know how many words the auto-correction dictionary has, but it’s not even close to being enough. The very minimal basics are there: Things like contractions and common words work well enough. However, there’s just not enough in there to really call this a feature yet.
8. Wasted space in selection areas – I’m specifically talking about those pre-filled scrolling selection fields — things like dates, for example, where you select by spinning the selections up or down. Pre is fitting five selections in the spinning dial, but it could fit more. This is especially important because of the smaller screen that Pre has as compared with other, similar smartphones. It means more scrolling. It’s a minor gripe for sure, but I’d love to see it fixed, maybe even configurable as in “Show x choices” where I can pick what x is from 3 to 8 perhaps.
9. Cut / Copy / Paste – In fairness, I never missed the feature on my iPhone. I’m glad it’s on the Pre, but I don’t think I’ll use it much if history is any judge. Still, I tried it. It needs work. Palm needs just one more hardware key to make it better. As it stands now, you press the Shift key on the keyboard and you scroll on the screen to select text. Then you abandon the keyboard entirely for the remaining steps. Using the top-left menu system on Pre’s screen, you tap the Edit on the display and then tap Cut, Copy or Paste in the menu that drops down. One more hardware qualifier key would make this faster and easier with a two-button combo. Since we can’t add another key, I’m hoping we see a software solution. Or perhaps the center button can get “smarter” and be used with the C, V or X key to cut, copy and paste if text is highlighted. I’d love to see the cut, copy, paste function in non-text fields as well. If I want to copy a paragraph of text on a web page, I should be able to do it.
Updated: Props to Aaron who left a comment with a much better method to cut, copy and paste. He found it in the PreCentral forums. You simply hold the gesture area and press the C, V or X key at the same time. I still want to see the feature extended to non-editable text.
10. Mail movement – In general, I really like the mail application. But as regular readers know, I’ve been jammed up with spam lately. When I get spam on the Pre, it’s taking too much time to move mail into the spam folder. The spam folder is a subfolder of my Gmail folders. On my iPhone, the default Gmail folders are at the top of the folder list. On the Pre, they’re on the bottom which means I have to scroll through all of my mail folders each time I want to “mark” a message as spam. I realize that if Palm flip-flopped this, then I’d have the same issue when moving mail to my personal folders. Let’s make the display order configurable.
The success of Palm’s Pre won’t just be based on the launch weekend. The gun has just gone off, and the race has just begun. The real key to success will be to see how often Palm offers fixes and updates to the various bug and feature enhancement lists. And as I mentioned before, everyone’s list is different and could be even longer. These are the 10 that are impacting me the most right now. What’s bugging you on your Pre?
Regarding #9 (cut/copy/paste):
http://forums.precentral.net/palm-pre/184012-there-copy-paste-hotkey.html
quote: “touching the black part of the lower gesture area and hitting the x, c, or v button will cut, copy, or paste, respectively. ”
No need to use the edit menu at all.
Aaron, thanks for pointing out this excellent tip! Just tried it and it worked flawlessly. I’ll update the post and point out your comment. I’d still like to see this feature in a non-editable text field, but at least the method is easier!
I just saw a Pre in real life for the first time in line at the deli. The owner gave me a quick demo. It looks like a nice phone. Too bad it’s on Sprint.
Funny… I say the same thing about any respectable device on AT&T or Verizon after I look at the cost.
That’s the only single reason I don’t own an Iphone – too bad it’s only on AT&T.
The dictionary is also fully editable if you use some of the hacks that have been surfacing recently.
I know that might be a little too complicated for many right now, but I have a feeling it’ll become easier in time.
Email will need serach and filter capabilities before I buy it. If it wants to compete with Blackberry (and not just the iPhone as some have suggested)
How can you find one message in 1000 without a search, or filter or sort by function???
Maybe the makers of Flexmail for WM will come out with something
Missing features:
1. Alarms on Tasks.
2. Categories on Contacts
3. GCal integration is slow. Often my calendar appears blank. Almost as if the calendar is being downloaded every time.
4. Navigating text using the keyboard. The only way to move the text cursor (to correct a typo, for example) is to tap the screen in EXACTLY the right spot. Needs something like arrow keys or the Treo rocker key.
5. Better/more calendar views. The week and month views are pretty useless. Need better ways to view more than one day at a time.
6. Landscape mode for more apps. Especially for Calendar, which would fix #5.
Great device overall. I just hope Palm fixes things like this quickly.
(sent from my Palm Pre)
Good list, and I’d agree that anything making calendar viewing easier on any device is a good thing.
For number 4, have you checked out the tip in a video previously posted here? You can use the orange button and swipe on the screen to move your selection cursor. I’d argue that needs a fine-tuning option (orange and left side of gesture area maybe?) for moving one character at a time but otherwise it’s working well.
Anyway, I’d definitely be one of the first to agree that there’s a ton of little things that need to be updated on the Pre(and I agree with more than a few here.) At the same time, I’m more than happy with the device as is, and am especially excited about the promise that it shows for the future.
I will also like to see the landscape for the calendar!!! I love my Palm Pre…
If you hold the orange key on the key board you can move the cursor freely by sliding your finger
In the browser, to get to a new URL quickly, just hit the center button and start typing the new address. Universal Search will put the whole web address as one of the matches, and when you tap that, you’ll open a new window for the site. It will even highlight it so you can just hit enter.
Ben, that’s a great tip, but it doesn’t solve any of my listed issues.
Often, I want to click a different link on a web site’s menu bar, which is often at the top. FriendFeed is a perfect example. I’ll read through the full first page which puts me at the bottom. Then I want to read my FriendFeed feed to see if anyone has commented on my postings. That link is at the very top of the page so I have to scroll, scroll, scroll… not good.
So are you a happy Pre user despite leaving Palm, Ben?
So are you happy with it? I am having trouble deciding between this and the iPhone 3GS.
I don’t regret the purchase and I have no plans to return it. I will be upgrading my first-gen iPhone to a 3GS, but not everyone wants/needs two voice lines. At this exact point in time, I believe that Apple is offering a more refined and deeper experience. That can change with software updates by Palm, which was the point of my post.
My recommendation is to spend some hands on time with each of the phones and then make the choice that suits you best.
when comparing these two phones you have to remember something. this is Palm’s first gen for this specific phone. talking about apple, they are on their 3rd gen with the 4th coming pretty soon. they have much more “experience” put into their phone. so if you just be patient and enjoy what the phone has, palm will be tuning and tweaking this all the time and it can only get better. i just left att and my 3g for sprint and the pre this past week. main reason? im saving 40$ a month for almost the same phone. thats a lot of money..
A couple things…how is battery life not the number one issue on this list? I barely use my pre and it doesn’t make it through a day. Definitely with you on the notifications. Also, there is no way to select multiple emails for deletion or marking as read. If you take a bunch of pictures quickly with the spacebar (a nice feature) there is no way to select multiple pictures to delete, you have to go one by one. The sound and notification settings are terrible. There’s no way to say, I want my IMs to just vibrate, my texts to play a sound and vibrate, and emails to just vibrate. It’s pretty ridiculous.
But really….battery life.
Mike, I completely agree with you on the battery life. I was focusing on software fixes more than hardware. It’s even possible that some optimizations can be made with software to help with battery life, so your point is spot on.
I don’t mind the multiple email bit as much as you do. A quick swipe and an email is deleted without confirmation. Ideally, marking email would be a better solution; it would help with my moving mail to Spam as well.
Yes definitely. I think that the software can really improve battery life. On my old Touch Diamond, once I loaded a custom rom the battery life improved dramatically.
my pre was doing the same thing; i took it in (because i was going to return it for this reason — no point in paying so much for a phone that i have to charge more than once a day) but they tested my battery and said there was a short in it. they replaced the battery for free and it seems to be doing slightly better (lasting at least 12 hours with little usage instead of 5-6 like i was getting).
i may still take it back and get the curve. i am in a dilemma.
If the Pre is not working out for you, then it make sense to take it back. But don’t get a Curve! The new Blackberry Tour is due to arrive next month and should be a much nicer device.
I really thought that they would keep what made palm terrific and just add the new stuff. I didn’t realize I was giving up what made palm a really great organizer. I’m hoping for some mighty updates really soon.
Some of my personal problems include:
In the calendar(the site that frustrates me the most): too few colors available, month view has no colors and I can’t swipe to the next month, there is no year view & the alarm settings are too limited.
In the contacts: no groups setting available and most of the data that I had stored in the notes section transferred over as gibberish.
Speed dial is limited and dumb. I have to press a letter and hold it down for a really long time & I have to remember what letter I assigned to each person. Give me back the sorted lists like on the treos.
Hardware: needs a toggle for scrolling and moving the cursor around.
Text messaging: no quick texts or emoticons
Also – on my treo – the main screen had a quick view of my upcoming appts. and of important calendar events like birthdays,etc without opening the calendar section at all.
I feel like I’ve taken a major step back in productivity. It’ really annoying.
You can swipe to the next month by swiping up and down. I completely agree with everything else though. And there needs to be an agenda view.
Hmm, that’s interesting that they would have left out some of the things that made Treo’s popular “to me at least”. I have a Treo and planning to get a Pre this weekend but now I’m going to have to go back to the store and really vet this thing.
I assumed that the standard copy/paste, quick name search feature (when sending text or email), Upcoming Events view, Year view in the calendar view would be there. What the heck.
Also something I found odd is that my Treo 755p can take pictures or record video but the Pre can’t record video???.
Oh well
Great list. Agree with basically everything. Sorry you’re having spam problems.
As for battery issues, I had the same issues and went through steps to try to figure out what’s going on.
It’s doing fine now, but you can check the thread here:
http://friendfeed.com/palm-pre/9ec3cb57/palm-pre-overheating-and-battery-dies-in-3-hours
For #9 (cutting & pasting). There is a keyboard shortcut for that. After selecting text, tap-and-hold on either side of the button in the gesture area, and then select your shortcut button (“C” for copy, “V” for cut, “P” for paste).
I’m an idiot. You already updated :-/
I completely agree with all your recommendations. My suggestions are just in addition to yours.
1. Fix the MS Exchange issues.
2. The Mail app seems dark. What’s with the grey background?
3. I thought this was supposed to be the phone that Roger McNamee said would be able to predict your needs throughout the day based on your location and other information stored on the phone. Like emailing ahead to let meeting attendees know you’re running late. Where are those cool features? Not this rev, I guess.
4. Center button should also work as a notification “light” for new mail/messages.
5. When inside an app, you should be able to swipe up from the gesture area only once to bring up the launcher. Right now, once only moves you out of your app and into the card view. It feels like an extra step to me.
6. In fact – get rid of the launcher button on the app deck entirely. That space could be used for something useful since #5 would let you bring up the launcher from any screen at any time with just a single swipe.
7. Inside the Calendar app, you should be able to launch Google Maps directly from the “Event Location” line when creating a new event. This should allow you to do a search for the address or business you’re looking for, and then import the address directly to back into the event being edited.
8. There should be a “Drive To” option in the calendar (like on the Blackberry) that launches Sprint Navigation and automatically inserts the address where you’re going.
9. In the Mail app, you should be able to mark single or multiple emails as “read” instead of being forced to open every… friggin’… single… one.
10. And finally, wouldn’t a Touchstone car charger be great?
#5. u can get to the launcher from inside an app with one stroke, its called the app wave. u should try it. slow swipe from the gesture area up and hold, keep finger on screen, move to the launcher app let go. vuola! it sounds like alot but it really is one motion. try it!
@ Andre
I know about wave and it does work great, but that’s not what I meant about “swiping only once”. What I meant was that it’s not necessary for Palm to even have a Launcher button at all. That space could be used for another app if the swipe up (not hold-and-swipe up) gesture was dedicated to pulling up the Launcher.
As it is now there are extra steps inolved when you swipe up that just aren’t necessary. You swipe up while in an app and it takes you to the card view; yet that’s what the center button is for. When in card view you have a dedicated button to launch the Launcher; yet swiping up in card view from the gesture are does the same thing. I’m saying they should consolidate these actions and make the swipe up gesture the only way to bring up the Launcher.
Battery life. I have had the phone for 3 days. Day 1, went from 100% at 9am to dead at 6:45pm. Day 2, same deal. Day 3, after reading some forums on how to get the most out of the battery ( aka. dont use aim and remove gmail contacts, turn off gps) my phone made it 9pm. Used the phone for a total of about 30 min (text, aim for 5 min, few email checks).
I will find something else to complain about when my phone stays active long enough for me to use it.
Really hope they fix this through software update.
So, I finally got my CEO’s Pre from Sprint today, and I’m not gonna lie… it was an absolute JOY to use, and I’m very, VERY impressed.
I can definitely see some of the problems people have listed in terms of some usability issues, but all-in-all I think it’s a really great device, and if the Touch Pro 2 or Diamond 2 don’t really impress I will be acquiring a Pre.
Great to hear to you got to play with a Pre. Do you see why I’m calling it more of a version 1.5 than a 1.0? They got a bunch right out of the gate, but there’s plenty of little niggles.
OK, I’m not one of these “buy a new phone as soon as the contract’s up” guys, and the Pre is my first smartphone. I’ve really made the most of my feature phones, though, and my last one was getting some heavy use with apps like Opera Mini over the 5 years that I had it. I did have a Zaurus some years ago and have done some web development with an iPod Touch. So maybe some of my complaints will be applicable to smartphones in general, not just the Pre. Sorry for the length.
1. I get hundreds of non-spam emails a day and hundreds of spams, which my laptop mail client handles with filters and spamassassin. I have over 8GB of archived mail at this point, and that’s not counting the archives from my old shell accounts that may still be backed up on tape. I have had full-text search on it since before Gmail came to be, and my email archives (and IM, and IRC, and SMS) are basically my own personal knowledge base. Given that, the Pre is likely never going to be my email client at all, but I hooked it up to my seldom-used Gmail account, only to discover there’s no way to mark something as spam when I delete it. So I won’t even be using it to access my gmail account; I’ll be using gmail’s web interface. As an email client, the Pre is all but useless to me.
2. Opens PDFs great…. as long as you hooked the Pre up to your PC through a USB cable and copied the PDFs over to it. Trying to get a technical reference or white paper off the web? No PDF for you. Huge disappointment there.
3. Can’t change the text message ringer, or even turn it off without turning everything else off. I think the homebrew community will have an answer for this in the next few days.
4. Can’t select text except in input boxes. Already I have had to retype things from web pages in an SMS to someone.
5. Divs that would appear with scrollbars on a desktop browser appear truncated in the Pre’s browser; you just can’t read the overflowed text. If I had a “disable styles” or “mobile view” button or something like that it would be okay.
6. If there’s a way to rename bookmarks added to the launcher rather than deleting and recreating them, I haven’t found it.
7. I’d like to be able to drag the text cursor rather than having to tap to position it, which tends to cause missent messages when I’m trying to move to the end of the line. Alternatively, cursor keys (maybe hold the gesture area and use HJKL like in vi? Those would work for me but probably not someone who’s started using computers in the last 20 years) would be a nice addition.
8. Considering that it’s locked up hard on me 6 or 7 times in the last week (twice deliberately when I was testing whether a bug was reproducible) I’d really like some kind of key combination to force a reboot without having to pop the back off and pull the battery. My guess is, without it being in the hardware, that’s never going to happen.
9. The keyboard’s kind of small but I think it’s bigger than my old Zaurus. I’d have liked it to slide out in landscape mode rather than portrait, but I knew what I was getting into when I saw it was being mad eby Palm. What does bug me is the lack of little touch typing nubs on anything but the F key, making it hard to text without looking at the Pre. The whole idea behind getting a device with a physical keyboard was so I could type TMs without looking at it.
10. Can’t back up data to my PC. I signed up for Google Calendar just so I could sync to it, and I guess I can sync my phone numbers to gmail or something, But it seems I can’t back up text messages anywhere, which I could with my old phone. I don’t know how many TMs I’ll be able to get before they start disappearing and I don’t want to have to resort to taking a screenshot and using OCR. Hopefully the homebrewers will find a way around this soon too (maybe they already have, the predev wiki has been going crazy today.)
Runners-up:
11. The calendar won’t let me set an alert to go off at the time of the event, nor can I set it 4 hours in advance (useful for after-work activities) or 8 or 10 hours (useful for reminding myself of morning meetings.) I had a lot of reminders of those durations on my old phone, and I think they all got reset to 10 minutes after the Bitpim to Google Calendar to Pre migration.
12. No voice recorder, no tethering, no video capture. I don’t know why I expected my $300 Pre to do these things that my 5-year-old freebie feature phone could do, but I did. Serves me right for making assumptions rather than combing through press releases. Hopefully homebrew will take care of number 2 and software updates will take care of numbers 1 and 3 without killing 2. I’ll probably write my own voice recorder app if no one else does or if they provide one that won’t save to the USB-accessible partition.
I really do like this phone, am already liking it more now that people are rooting it, and will probably love it once I’m writing my own apps for it. 5 days in, though, I’m still definitely only at “like”.
great review. i hope u do start writing apps for this device. if u do could u plz email me and let me know what u got going on. jofoto612@yahoo.com
Cursor – Tap it in a place, then hold down the orange key, now you can drag your finger anywhere on the screen and the cursor will move.
Renaming bookmarks – Open the browser, go to the menu in the upper left corner > bookmarks > on that page, tap the “i” and then you can change the name of the bookmark.
Thanks, HSK, but I wasn’t talking about renaming bookmarks; I found that pretty quickly. I’m talking about launcher icons that represent web pages, as in where you go to a web page, enter the menus and select “Add to launcher”. I did this to put a link to Weather Underground’s iPhone site to my launcher in lieu of the extremely annoying and crash-inducing Accuweather app. You can edit the title in the resulting dialog, but once it’s added to the launcher I haven’t found a way to change it, just delete it (with orange-tap.)
Just tried the orange-tap-drag thing to move the cursor, and it seems to work, so thanks for that.
Got it – sorry I misunderstood.
I’m still on my Q, holding out for the right next smartphone. I thought Pre was it but after getting hands on one I am dumbfounded… one of my biggest gripes with the Q was the feeble calendar app – I sync with my comapny exchange account. It consistently frustrates me that I can’t 1) reply or reply-all to the organizer/attendees of a calendar event (meeting) or 2) that I couldn’t look up people in my corporate directory. I’d have thought for certain that the Pre had delivered on those counts… am I just not seeing them?
No, it is not there, yet. Others may be able to further clarify, but it appears that Palm implemented the same Exchange that Apple did on the iPhone. Core functionality, but not full support like WM Professional (and as you know, not even on the Q’s WM Standard).
you can absolutely lookup people in the corp dir. I do it all the time.. I can actually lookup people from all three corporate directories that I have EAS connections to..
Ok what I now see is that in the context of a meeting you can access individual attendees that, if they are in your contact list, you can click on their email address and send a mail. BUT, no reply all and, it appears to be dependent on them either being in your contacts, or you can add them. But I don’t necessarily want everyone I send an email to in my contacts… curious to know if anyone thinks there’s a way to access the corp exchange directory.
gonna claim lame here… i don’t see how i get to my corp directory. please help?
I may have miss spoke, you are correct in that I’m not seeing the corp directory, just my personal contacts on the various exchange servers.
sorry about that!
(I hope they fix it!)
Thanks tk. I lost access to the test unit loaner Pre I was trying out.. too bad about corp directory but nice to know there IS a way to replyall. I think maybe the version I had didn’t have the latest software – and I couldn’t get it to take an OTR update. Most likely a pre-production artifact.
I’m not understanding what you mean by a basic Exchange sync.. 1st off, you can add Multiple EAS accounts, what other phone does that? Calendar items show all my meeting participants, I can drill down and see all their contact info etc.. I can hit the mail button in the event and it automatically puts all the participants into an email message.. ready to be sent.. I think the exchange piece of this is absolutely fantastic. (anything can be improved, but I am very happy with the initial iteration)
Yes I would like to see Categories for Tasks and Contacts, but being able to do multiple exchange EAS connections is absolutely priceless for me.
“I can hit the mail button in the event ”
WOW that’s what I’m looking for… where is that??? Maybe this version I’m using doesn’t have the latest software… it is a model that was used in testng prior to release.
so when you open a meeting, is shows you the # of participants plus the meeting org. just click on that, then it comes up with a list of all participants.. then you click on the Mail icon in the lower left hand corner of the screen.
another thing about Pre & Google calendar, they don’t sync repeated apointments, specialy custom repeated appts
How do you delete some of the apps that comes with it. Too many useless icons. Nascar???? come on man….
I actually like the NASCAR app, but I’ll share one method with you that may delete it anyway.
Open Launcher.
Tap Launcher and choose List Apps in the dropdown menu.
You’ll see all of the apps installed; third party first, then built-in apps.
Tap any app and if it can be deleted, you’ll have an option to delete.
Now the first time I did this, I couldn’t get the Delete to show for NASCAR, so Palm may be trying to keep those apps on there.
However: tap a third-party app first to see the Delete option. Tap Done instead.
Now go to the native app you want to delete.
I saw a Delete for NASCAR once I did that. I’m not deleting it though, so it could be a dead button. I’ll let you try since you don’t want the app and I do.
There’s room for a gesture or two for Palm to add things:
http://prepoint.wordpress.com/2009/02/23/the-gesture-area-whats-possible/
Perhaps tapping with two fingers to jump back to top? Heck, could even be a double-tap with one finger.
Threads like this are very interesting and helpful for people who have no yet been able to really molest a Pre (like me!).
While I see the signifigance in most of your choices I think my biggest gripes are a little different. I should point out that I am coming from Windows Mobile on a Touch Diamond (and many many WinMo phones before that) because I think that previous phones do make a difference in what you expect.
1. Notifications – I agree that dynamic updating would be a great improvement, but I don’t see the need as much. For me, the annoyance is that there is no indication you have notifications when the screen is off. I am coming from HTC’s Touch line of phones so I have the habit of glancing at my phone from time to time to see if it’s lighting up and thereby if I have notifications. The Touch Diamond went so far as too have different patterns of light for different notifications, but with the Pre I’d be happy just to have a basic blink every few seconds or a pulsing or something. With the 3 lights however I don’t imagine coding individual notification lights would be difficult.
2. Browser – All of your issues with the browser are very noteworthy, but again I think, at least in terms of my needs, my problem with the browser is much smaller/easier to fix, and again perhaps from being spoiled by Windows Mobile. What I would like from the browser ASAP is a context menu for links and in page items. Maybe from holding the link or object, or holding the gesture area then tapping on it. The list should have basic options like “Open link in a new card” and “Save image” etc. Not being able to save images or files is obnoxious to me.
3. Applications – Of the rest of your issues, I really only share the last, but I’ll put that next. My third, and perhaps largest, issue, is with the lack of certain applications. For example Facebook. This is THE Facebook phone, so why do I not have a capable native Application that lets me comment on statuses, upload pics and video (more on video in a sec) and whatnot? Windows Mobile, iPhone, Blackberry, even Palm OS all have a native app… but not the signature “Facebook phone.” TO me this is just silly. The same goes for Myspace. I remember them mentioning an app for Myspace, but have yet to see it, and it’s less of an issue as the browser version is very capapble on the Pre. Along similar lines is the lack of DocsToGo… we have a viewer that mentions a full version that can edit Office files… but it doesn’t exist yet. For me, being able to edit lesson plans on the fly is really important. Why they wouldn’t have this ready for launch is beyond me. Also… a couple games would be nice.
4. E-Mail – E-mail on the Pre is, in my opinion, kind of busted. Hotmail and the PRe equals zero battery life (even when Hotmail is set on manual sync… it still syncs…) for me the phone would die in an hour or two when I had my Hotmail account on it. I deleted it and forwarded my Hotmail email to a Gmail account, which is set on the device to get messages as they arrive, and the phone lasts all day. Is this Palm, or Microsoft? Either way, it has to be fixed. Secondly is the lack of being able to mark messages. This is huge, and illogical why it wasn’t included. Like you said, more for moving then deleting.
5. Video – I’m praying that Palm updates the firmware to allow video recording, and we don’t have to wait for another device like what Apple did. While I honestly didn’t use the video recording on my Diamond very much, it’s still useful. The couple times I did use it (a fashion show, a concert, etc.) it was great to have. It’s also a “me too” feature that will be important for Pre to stay competitive.
6. Launcher/Gesture = They need to let you delete the launcher button from the list. It’s irritating. When I could swipe up, why would I want a launcher button there? FOr me personally, I’d much much rather have that as an extra slot for a program I use frequently like Tweed (for Twitter.) Along these same lazy lines is the fact that while we have a back gesture, the “Forward” gesture doesn’t do anything. How about let us map it to whatever we want?
7. CUstomization – How about letting me change my messaging tone? Or general color schemes? These things aren’t huge, but would be great to have.
I know that’s only 7, but those are my big ones.
Overall, I love the Pre, it’s definitely my favorite phone I’ve had in awhile. I just hope that all the problems I have with it (above) get addressed soon.
In the Dialer log, which shows the time that a call (in, out, or missed) took place, I’d also like to see the length of the call. My Blackberry Pearl did it, and this Pre is (or should be) leaps and bounds better than that.
That, plus the previously mentioned “no categories in the Contacts”, are things I’d like to see.
Homebrewers have already come up with a patch to show elapsed time in call logs. That’s the good news. The bad news is, it was something that Sprint apparently had Palm disable intentionally, so it seems unlikely that they’ll ever let you show elapsed time officially.
I have one complaint about the Pre and that’s distribution. I went to BestBuy this weekend to pic one up and they didn’t have any in stock and the sales person pulled out a waiting list which totaled 30 ppl. She also said on launch day they only had 3 Pre’s pulse the store demo. WTF…
1 – mail search
2- multiple select in mail (mark as read, delete, move)
3- sort in mail – sort be sender, date, etc.
4- further enhanced synergy – you should be able to look up all IM , sms, and mail history from within contacts. Basically any communication to this person should be indexed and searchable.
5- get rid of launcher in quick launch
6- allow keyboard birghtness to be a setting
7- add more gestures to the gesture area.
8- more keyboard navigation shortcuts.
9 – camera – add video and tap area to focus.
10- toggle gps and brightness in the right hand menu list.
Thank you. I totally agree with your entire list. I tried explaining why I wanted to get rid of launcher in my own list, but I really should have just kept it as simple as you put it.
MY guess is that the guy who makes treobutler will be making one for this phone, and he’s probably the only person paying attention and will get it right. We can’t really count on Palm execs. to pay attention to what their customers want. I’m thinking all of these features will be in the Palm OS Butler.
How do you foward a message???????
Inside the mail app, when you’re viewing a message, you click the “forward” button.
how do you forward a text message????? any other phone u just hit forward. someone sends u a good joke, pic, text, video and you CANT forward it????? my old motorola star tac did that!!!!
I am trying to figure out the same thing! I also need ringtones and this phone will not download any with out a computer! It irritates me
A video recorder update would be nice (or would that have to be a hardware update?), and is there any way to add another page to launcher? And Tyler, I’m not sure if someone already answered but you can bring up the launcher page just by an upward swipe from the gesture area (not the wave thing), but we should be able to change/delete the launcher button because of that. Remember though, it’s this phone’s first month and there WILL be many updates/fixes to come.
Also, if you’re surfing the web and want to click on a link but have it appear in a different card (so you don’t have to navigate from your current website) this doesn’t seem to be possible. It seems like they would have thought more on palm browsing likening it to the tab browsing everyone is already used to on their laptop. Don’t get me started on the battery. I’m getting the extended one as soon as Seido has it ready.
Pressing orange+space while tapping the link to open it in a new card works fine on my 1.0.3 Pre, Dominion. What did you do, update your firmware or something?
I also think the location thing should turn on/off the wifi if they see if you’re in a wifi zone (like starbucks, etc.) or you can save what spots you have wifi and it will automatically turn it on. That might be a little better for the battery (just an opinion).
Also notifications need to be fixed, for example when I’m in the music app there shouldn’t be a notification for that. Same with Pandora. Does anyone own the touchstone charger? I heard that when it charges the blackscreen doesn’t turn on. Is that true? That would be really annoying at night.
No, the screen does not turn off completely – the clock is at the top and the lock button is on the screen and it dims. It is not real bright, but I don’t have it beside my bed either!
Well that’s good news I guess. I just ordered one and I’m not planning on placing it right next to my bed.
It needs an update that turns it into an iPhone.
Couple of questions. Anyone figured how to get an outlook appointment that comes in an e mail to import into the Pre calendar? i get the e-mail but tries to retrieve the message with no success. it seems the only choice for the charger is Sprint Stores or wait until next month for retailers?
My biggest quibble is the text messaging log which dOES NOT SHOW A TIME STAMP for each text like my treo did. They are grouped together or under “last week”. Also cant customize sound for texts!
You can download Pimp My Sounds just by sending yourself an email. Here’s the info… http://www.prethinking.com/home/2009/6/23/first-usable-homebrew-app-install-on-palm-pre-without-root-a.html
P.S. when you click the link it seems like nothing happened (or at least it did for me) but the app apperas in the launcher. Hope that helped!
Well got a call from BestBuy today. The sale person told me that Palm has decided not to send them any Pre’s if the ppl on the waiting list don’t pre-order.
After reading all the complaints about features that are available on Treo’s not being available on the Pre makes me start to think twice about buy.
Why would Palm purposely omit features that are expected?
Try RadioShack. That’s where I got mine thanks to someone who didn’t come in to pick theirs up (that sucker! haha). Other than that Sprint and I think they are starting to sell them over the phone.
How about bluetooth that is compatible w/ CARS!!!!!!!!!!!!! I couldn’t believe it didn’t link up to my Acura TL
BMW,Lexus,Acura have all had problems with the Pre. I have a 2006 Acura TL and the Pre doesn’t work with the Bluetooth. But my Treo 650,755 and my girls Rumor LG worked just fine. If Palm doesn’t fix this problem, Im getting an iphone
The ability to handle a proxy config file settable by access point is a must have
Last weeks update was lame. I think the short answer to all the things we’d like to see changed is…go back and look at the successful Palm phones of the past and carry forward more of their features and attributes. It seems to me many of the simple shortcuts and customizable features have been lost. Example: in calendar just typing would initiate a new untimed event, now you have to drop down the menu, select new, then select all day event, I’m sure everyone has their own examples . The Pre is intuitive but left behind many of the great things they developed as far as user friendly steps and ease of changing settings. Are you out there Palm people? Can you hear us?
Seriously. The calendar needs a search function too. I can’t believe you can’t search calendar, email, other fields of the contacts. What really gets me is that all of this could be fixed simply by an software update and it hasn’t happened yet. If you have a 1000 emails, how are you supposed to find “that one” you need. And if you forget when your dentist appointment is which is 6 months from now some time, what are you supposed to do, stop what you’re doing and call your dentist office so you can have them do the search function in their calendar…yeah, that’s efficient. Thanks Palm, for the agony.
Loving the Pre but have to agree that Palm has taken a huge step backwards in a productivity enhancement device. The Pre is pretty/sexy but lacks many essentials to making it a useful device to increase my productivity.
Calendar is main complaint. It’s not really usable. It takes minutes most of time to just open and show my events. I’m using Google Calendar. I wish it just synced and had a local copy on the Pre which it could modify quickly.
It’s as if they couldn’t decide between a youthful music picture device or business and tried for both but left out the middle functionality.
I love it too but i wish palm was more communicative on whats doable, what’s not, if and when…
Interesting site:
http://pre.uservoice.com/pages/21043-palm-pre-feature-requests/filter/top
I would like more personal display edits, emoticons OFF in txt, windows live not google talk like wtf, less laggy&buggy youtube & internet use plus switching between apps, easier typo fixes (its annoying deleting it all since you can’t hit the exact spot, easier phone call use, it pisses me off trying to call a # cuz contacts doesn’t open, better notifications (if I’m texting someone it’ll show me on the bottom when I obviously know & it doesn’t go away, photo edit white brightness ect/vid, radio local&satellite, more options on EVERYTHING becuse this phone gives me basically none, & easier copy/paste. Sent from pre.
There needs to be better seach function for the contacts. On the older model treo you could search the “notes” section of all contacts and come up with the list. This is great for those who leave key words in the notes section to be found quickly (with over 1000 contacts, I can’t remember everything). I hope Palm pulls their head out of the sand quick.
Here is Palm’s CEO’s email address if anyone wants to give him a few suggestions:
jon.rubinstein@palm.com
missing features..
1. when in conference mode, cannot go back into single call .. that is, you cannot separate phone calls after answering a second call on call waiting ..
2. there is no exact time of received messages .. only shows “2 weeks ago”
Ok really I hate the noise it makes for a text alert.. This really needs to change.. And the IM not being set up for windows live or my yahoo im.. Am I missing something here?? And I would like the option to select the text message to start at the top with out scrolling the entire message history.
I wish the phone had visual voice mail,video, voice search, spell check, and I agree that after you see an alert at the bottom of the screen and you swipe it away it needs to stay away. I would also like to be able to tap something on the face of the phone to call the last numbered dialed, instead on having to open the phone, open the call log, then hit the last number I need to call again. I feel the the Pre is close to greatness, I want to love the phone and once these things are fixed I will.
Any suggestions?
Here is my list:
- Undo (gesture + Z)
- Mini calendar for selecting dates instead of the silly scroll. When I need to make something for the second Tuesday, it’s hard to determine that using a scroll interface.
- Recurring tasks
- Task sorting by date
- Agenda view for appointments and tasks due in the next X days.
- Day’s tasks due showing at the bottom of the calendar day view, configurable of course to show or not according to preference.
- Ringtone selection based on call type – general known, unknown/private call. Like the Sprint Samsung A900.
- Voice command dialing. I cannot believe that this is not available.
- Voice memo recording
- Ability to add a caption or update when uploading photo to Facebook
- Ability to send a contact card (if it’s out there, I can’t find how to do it)
- Text copy feature in non-editable text, like web pages, other Twitter updates, etc.
It’s sad b/c a lot of what you listed was on my Palm 755P (agenda view, voice dialing, voice memos, sending contact cards & i ‘m pretty sure you could copy paste anything). I’m baffled at the fact that they didn’t bring over the feature we palm users like.
I agree completely. It is missing all the basic functions of the Treo (I specifically had a 755p). Everything from Text Forwarding, having to type in WORDS for emoticons, no video recorder, doesnt sync in address books from email accounts, cant change text tones, the Edit option is difficult to use, etc…I could go on for days. I am returning my phone tomorrow and going back to my rusty trusty user friendly Treo 755p, that is until Pre makes these necessary updates. The best feature on the Pre is the “card” options and its easy to navigate through. Using multiple apps without losing “your spot” is quite convenient. However, it isnt as convenient when the multiple apps you would like to utilize arent available. I’ve made my positive and negatives list and as of now the negatives far outweigh the positives!
Still no shortcuts to scroll to the top of the page while browsing? I see this as important… wondering if anyone has figured it out yet…
also, no audio recording? Voice notes? will there be an update for this as well?
Thanks
I just would like to beable to download ringtones with out a computer or foreward text messages
Got to say its a very enjoyable device to use.. but I agree with many of the points raised.
Top on my list would be:
1 The Return key on SMS! I love that hitting return sends the message, makes communicating very snappy. but. There is no way to literally hit “return” – i.e. drop a line, I use this to separate items on lists + a dozen other situations its useful, and unless I’m being really dumb there is no “shift+return” or “orange key+return” which brings this, it just sends the damn text! Even a “return character” on the sym button would be acceptable.
2 as many have mentioned – the ability to copy text away from webpages. The card view is a massive plus for the Pre, allowing you to flick between web and email/calendar etc.. the pre just seems to miss that last trick that would truly link your cards – the ability to send info across them!
3 Undo! “Oh no I made a mistake deleting a character on someone’s tel number… nothing I can do to get it back! Hold on I’ll call them.. Oh.. Damn!”
buying this phone seems to be disappointing me more and more each day. My buddy has an iphone and watching him have fun with it makes me nuts. Every time I find something I would like to add from a third party sight, the palm seems to be the only phone that isn’t on the compatability list! From ringtones to games there seems be be nothing outthere for the pre that is just for fun. Am I wrong?