Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Can a phone change your life?

To answer my own question, probably not. I did however get a Palm Pre when they came out (just over a month ago), and so far I like it. I was replacing a craptastic LG flip phone, so my smartphone expectations were rather low.

Here's what I like:
  • Real web browser! (Usable on EVDO, but much better on Wi-Fi.)
  • Camera that takes decent pictures.
  • Some usable PDA functionality.
  • Notifications add to the experience of using the phone instead of just being obnoxious.
  • The "Sprint Navigation" app means I don't need to fight Kara for the TomTom. :-) (It's not as good as the TomTom, but it works well enough.)
  • And, of course, bonus geek points for running Linux under the hood.
I don't know that I have any "issues" with the Pre, but I do have a short wish list...
  • My old phone would let me forward text messages and send messages to multiple recipients. I miss that. Supposedly it's coming in a future update.
  • The Clock app on the Pre is infinitely better than the one on my old phone, but my old phone would let me set a "quick alarm" for 1 minute, 10 minutes, 30 minutes, or 1 hour in the future. That was handy, if not nearly granular enough. A quick way to set alarms as an offset from now would be handy for a lot of reasons though.
  • Admittedly, I'd kill for a terminal. :-) (And on that note, I may have to try out WebShell.) In general, I do have a little iPhone/Android app envy, but that should get better with time...
I can't say I'm completely thrilled with putting my information out "in the cloud", but Google already knows so much about me it is disturbing, so what the hell...

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