I’ve now actually touched a Palm Pre. I was walking through Best Buy and, for the first time, they had a functioning model on the floor — not the plastic brick placeholder they usually have around. I stood there poking around at it for about 20 minutes and walked away with a few quick impressions.
1. You never quite know where you are.
There’s no doubt that the interface is quite slick. It feels peppy and rich and — believe it or not — it’s more gooey than the iPhone interface. Maybe that’s just me not being used to it, but I really did want to lick this thing; it’s that much like candy. That said, even after 20 minutes, you never quite know where you are on the thing. Was I in an app? Was I cycling through processes? Where did the calendar go? It seems like there was just so much going on at any one time, that I was never able to focus on where I was, what I was trying to do. In this respect, this is a de-evolution from the Palm OS that I had grown to love with my first Palm III.
2. Cheap.
The thing squeeked in my hand. Every time I slid the keyboard out, I got that cringe-inducing plastic squelch. Maybe it’s designed for smaller, more delicate paws, but I couldn’t help feeling like it was going to fall apart on me. I imagine this is the feeling with many of these sliding-keyboard jobs, and I don’t have experience with many, but this one just felt cheap.
3. Fixed Keyboards.
The last two+ years with my iPhone have broken me from the physical keyboard thing. It took some time, and I don’t think I ever really took note of it before the Pre, but it turns out that I hate tiny phone keyboards now. They don’t change when my needs change. They don’t get all wide and wonderful when I turn the phone into landscape orientation. They don’t pop-up little markers telling me which key I just typed. There are just so many don’ts that I suddenly find it hard to believe they included a hard keyboard at all. The keys were just too small to get any work done, and too inflexible for the needs of the applications on the device itself.
4. Polish.
There is an entry video on the Pre that follows this shiny ball of light floating about a landscape, introducing you to all things Pre-wonderful. The video is presented in portrait mode, or “tallscreen”, so it looks normal as you’re looking at the phone for the first time. When you touch the screen, the video controls fade in, allowing you to scrub through the video and control volume and such. The controls appear on the left side of the screen, sideways, as if you were holding the phone in landscape orientation. I was blown away. It’s one of the simplest bits of polish that I’d never really appreciated on the iPhone — when you turn a video from landscape to portrait, the controls change too — that when I found it missing on the Pre, I was stunned.
It’s a beautiful device on the whole, that shows what you can do with a smaller screen and alternative input methods, but as a consumer, there are so many little paper-cut issues that hit me in just 20 minutes, I have to worry that in three hours, or three days, I’d have plum bled out.
This is why it breaks my heart to read this piece from Eric Savitz over at Barrons finding that it looks like others are in the same boat — not buying the Pre. Competition is good. Product evolution is better. But the clock is ticking, and aside from Best Buy, I have still never seen a Palm Pre in use in the wild.
Eller adds that “with the Palm’s fade,” takeover talk is also likely to evaporate. As the world realizes that the WebOS is “good but not mature enough for developers,” he adds, “Palm’s strategic value to potential acquirers diminishes.”
link: Palm: Pre Sales To Whiff Targets? – Tech Trader Daily – Barrons.com