Palm Pre Review

Software:

What has propelled iPhone sales into the stratosphere is the App Store, and any modern smartphone must have an answer. Palm gives users the App Catalog, an elegant solution that allows for easy searching, previewing and downloading of apps. A huge bonus that the App Catalog has over the App Store is that every app is free for now, and Palm has said that in the future every app will have a trial version. At launch there were only about a dozen apps, but that number has already doubled and as Palm opens up the Mojo SDK that number will only grow.


Some of the more useful apps we’ve mentioned in the review already (or will shortly) but we have to give a shoutout to AccuWeather, Sporting News Pro Baseball, Tweed, Flixster, FlightView, Express Stocks and many others. Classic is a Palm OS emulator that will allow users to run their old Palm apps on the Pre.

Thus far apps are very high quality, just as Palm wanted it. We’re sure that as it gets opened up more we’ll see plenty of the pointless applications that now overrun the App Store, but instead of wasting $0.99 to make a few fart sounds, the App Catalogue will allow you get your likely fill with a preview before you purchase.

The most important of the included software is the Google Maps we all know and love, complete with GPS capabilities. Sprint Navigation is also on board to provide audible turn by turn directions. Another important one is Docs to Go, which allows the user to read but not edit Office documents. Others include a .pdf viewer and Sprint’s NASCAR mobile app. Standard system tools such as a calculator and clock (for those who upgrade their firmware) are present as well.



Multimedia:

There is no Sprint Music Store support in the Pre, which kind of surprised us. In its place is the Amazon MP3 store, a very worthy replacement. Amazon, with two major mobile operating systems now on board, seems to be making a big push into the mobile space. The user can download tracks OTA, but only over Wi-Fi, which is also surprising to us. The only reason we could come up with is that Music Store tracks are highly compressed, whereas Amazon gives you real, and larger, mp3 files. Still, especially over Sprint’s impressive 3G network a 3-5MB file isn’t very big. Users can queue downloads using cellular data and the Pre will download them automatically when it connects to Wi-Fi.



The music player itself is very polished, though fairly cliché. You can sort by Artist, Album, Song, Genre, or Playlist. It is very reminiscent of the iPod and BlackBerry interface function-wise, but with its own visual uniqueness. The player can of course be sent to the background, and from the notification area the user can control playback.



Video playback is very similar to touchscreen interfaces we’ve seen in the past. Tapping the screen will toggle on-screen controls, otherwise the video plays at full screen. 640 pixels wide video clips in both H.264 and MPEG4 part2 format played flawlessly, delivering very good image quality. There is a YouTube app that brings the entire YouTube universe to the Pre. The interface is not as clean as the HTC program, or even the iPhone/iPod Touch interface, but it’s still easy enough to search for and view videos.

Pandora is an amazing app, bringing streaming internet radio to the Pre. Much like the music player, it can be sent to the background and controlled via the notification area, to an extent. The user can rate the song, and pause it, but not skip forward to the next track, but a thumbs down rating is in effect a track forward button. Pandora may indeed prove to both a landmark and measuring stick app for the Pre; not only is it awesome, but the developers made a point to note that it took them six weeks to develop their iPhone app. It took them four days to develop for the Pre.

Palm surprised us all by announcing iTunes syncing for the Pre, though it doesn’t support earlier DRM iTunes content. The user can not only sync music, video and pictures with iTunes, but can purchase and download songs via the service as well. When in this Media Sync mode the Pre shows up as an iPod to iTunes. The Pre also has a Mass Storage mode, and when plugged in it allows the user to simply drag and drop files to and from the phone to your PC or Mac. It took us a 1:30 minute to transfer 117MB of files, which is rather good speed.





The 3.2 megapixel camera is complimented by an LED flash. Unfortunately, like the iPhone and Android before it, the Pre does not offer video recording out of the box. Like Android before it, we expect to see an app that enables this very soon. The camera results were pretty good, all things considered. The camera interface is as simple as can be, the user simply has a flash option (Auto, On, Off,) the album icon and the shutter button. The picture album is simple; gestures like pinch, double tap and flick are in effect and it works just as you’d expect.