Crazy Hawt

The Palm Pre was released with the ability to sync with iTunes. It did so by pretending to be an iPod. Apple released iTunes 8.2.1, and the Palm Pre could no longer sync with it. Last night, Palm released a WebOS 1.1 update. Now iTunes syncing is back.

Okay so I really don’t want to delve into what is morally or legally right here. I don’t really care. I just don’t understand what Palm is trying to do.

iTunes now sells only DRM-free music. Therefore, any of the music in iTunes can be put on any device. Furthermore, the MP3 / AAC files are organized neatly into a folder structure and they have tags integrated in all the files with track information. Why doesn’t Palm just do what Nokia did and create a little media sync application. Let the user use iTunes, but let them sync their music in a completely legal, non-workaroundy way. This would let users put their music on the device, would keep Apple from filing any lawsuits (and with all those former iPod engineers on the Palm team now, I don’t think that’s far-fetched), and everyone would be happy. Just my 2 cents.

The hype is over. The Palm Pre has been released, and I did my first impressions of the phone a few days back. Surely nobody will argue that WebOS is great, that the screen is beautiful, and that this is the first real competitor to the iPhone yet, but how does it actually hold up in daily usage? My girlfriend has been on the road for the past couple days, and she’s not completely impressed with what she sees…

Battery Life

Simply put, the battery life appears to be awful. After a full day of occasionally checking email, making a couple calls, and surfing the web a bit, the Pre was at 8% battery at 9PM. Perhaps this can be improved with software, but this experience happened two days in a row. Reports on the internet are that this battery could be WORSE than that of the T-Mobile G1.

Dialing 911

She has dialed 911 twice by accident. In one case, the cops actually called her back to see if there was an emergency. How did this happen? Well if you lock the phone with a pass code, and accidentally double tap the emergency call button, it dials straight out. The emergency call button is right next to the zero and sometimes the clicks don’t register perfectly, hence the double tap out of frustration, hence the call to 911.

Sluggishness / Responsiveness

We loaded 3 gigs of music on the Pre’s internal memory, and she feels like it’s a bit more sluggish ever since we did that. Has anyone else noticed this? She’s not doing any heavy multitasking. She gets rid of all the application cards. It just seems like it has slowed down since the music load. Also, sometimes the screen taps don’t register quite right. The water droplet effect is helpful, but it doesn’t happen until AFTER you clicked, when it is too late.

Anyone else out there have other negative first impressions? She has 30 days to take it back and her old Centro still sitting on her desk…

Today’s the big day! Palm unleashed the Pre upon the world. Read on to find impressions of launch day and the device!

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