Cultivated Nonsense

I’ve been thinking about getting back to long form blogging more as something about twitter isn’t nearly as satisfying. So I figured I’d post up some thoughts about my new phone, a Palm Pre Plus.

The first question I get usually is “why didn’t you get an iPhone or an Android phone?” I’ve gotta say that both platforms were tempting for various reasons (mostly because they have a gazillion apps available for them). I have 2 major problems with iPhone, one practical and one philosophical. The practical issue is that it would require me to get a voice plan that’s $10 more per month than the old one that I’m clinging to for dear life.  The philosophical issue is that I’m really not happy with the way Apple handles application approvals. It’s very black-box-y and they’re just not open enough for my tastes. As somebody who’s looking to maybe get into the app development game a little down the line it’s not a very attractive ecosystem.

Android has the apps and the open development philosophy but after playing around with some Android phones I found the way the OS operated to be pretty clunky. Seemed way more complicated to do things than it should be. And honestly, AT&T’s android offerings right now are a little lackluster. Getting better, sure, but not as good as Verizon.

Card View

After something a month or so ago made me check out the pre again after largely ignoring it for so long, I found I REALLY liked what I saw. And so after agonizing a bit on if I was going to go Android or not, I settled on the path less chosen and went with the pre.

One week in, I’m not regretting my purchase one bit. WebOS is my favorite mobile operating system hands down. I don’t know if I can describe it any other way aside from intuitive. I pretty much didn’t have to spend any time figuring out how to work it as everything worked exactly like I had expected it to. The multi-tasking is just natural. You do a single swipe up from the gesture area at the bottom of the screen and the app you’re in shrinks to what looks like a playing card. All the running apps are displayed and you can swipe through them and pick which one you want which then gets zoomed in to full screen again.

The built in apps are nice as well. The web browser works well and supports a lot of the same gestures as the iPhone has standardized as far as things like pinch to zoom. It’s nice being able to support full websites but it also handles the mobile versions of sites that were designed with touch screen interfaces in mind.

Speaking of the web, Universal Search rocks as well. Any time you’re in the card view or there’s no app open you can just start typing and it’ll search through contacts and such on your phone, or you can chose to send your search query to google, wikipedia, twitter or google maps.

Speaking of typing…a word about the keyboard. It’s a slide out keyboard that I’m enjoying a lot. Good feel to it and I’m getting pretty quick. I dislike virtual on screen keyboards because I find my accuracy is really awful with them, so I’m happy with the inclusion of a full keyboard.

WebOS Notifications

Also, the way WebOS handles notifications is awesome. Almost nothing will interrupt you if you’re using the phone. When you get a new e-mail or new tweets come in or whatever, an alert pops up at the bottom of the screen which then quickly minimizes into a little notification area displaying a queue of all notifications that you can scroll through. It’s very slick (as you can see from my shamelessly stolen image on the right)

Aside from the built in apps, there is actually a surprising amount of activity going on in the WebOS app development landscape. I think people tend to assume that it’s rep for not having apps (because the SDK was really late in coming to be fair) is the same as it was a year ago when the phone was released. And they’ve just ignored it since…but the apps are there for pretty much anything you’d like to do. The signal to noise ratio is also a lot better. Less fart apps and sound boards and more apps that actually do stuff.

The development process is actually really easy as well. The phone is extremely open. No need to jailbrake or root the device. All you basically need to do is flip a switch in the OS to put it into developer mode, hook it up to your computer and using WebOS Quick Install, put an app called Preware on there and off you go (flipping the switch back off for security purposes). There’s a vibrant homebrew community which not only does applications (many of which end up in the official app store as time goes on) but there’s also a ton of patches for various OS components. You can tweak out the OS and how the built in apps function and even replace the OS kernal with one that can overclock if you desire (I haven’t quite gone that far).

There are a couple downsides though…first of all, yes. The hardware is over a year old at this point and it shows. The processor is a smidge slow (but not too bad), the camera is only 3 megapixels which also isn’t a huge deal for me because, MP doesn’t equal quality in any way. Also the game selection is a little hairy until AT&T gets around to approving the 1.4.5 update which will unlock a ton of game possibilities including ports from the iPhone. I am also having a smidgen of trouble getting the mail application to sync read item status with my work exchange account if I read something on my work laptop in outlook. But that’s mostly just annoying and not a huge problem.

But I think, these days, hardware is way overvalued. Sure it doesn’t stand up to the Verizon Droid phones in the specs department, but as a full package, the Pre, to me, is much more complete and unified.

So yeah. I’m happy.