Palm Pre Plus Review

Introduction:

When we fist reviewed Sprint’s Palm Pre last year, we were impressed with its overall design and usability, as it featured Palm’s new webOS interface. Now it is Verizon’s turn with the Palm Pre Plus, where the “Plus” basically means it has twice the internal memory for user storage and 512MB of RAM for better multitasking. But other than that, the device remains mostly unchanged. The issue for Palm has to do with timing, as the world of Android has started a large following on Verizon, due to the Motorola DROID and HTC DROID ERIS. Because of this, the Pre Plus isn’t as hot of a device as it would have been last year. This by no means takes away from its features and software, but it will simply have a challenging time breaking into the smartphone crowd, where Windows Mobile and Android currently dominate.
Included in the retail package is the Palm Pre Plus phone, 1150mAh battery, wall charger with detachable microUSB cable, 3.5mm earbuds, carrying pouch, and user guide.

Design:

The Palm Pre Plus is very comfortable to hold in your hand, as its corners are smooth and curved, unlike the rectangle shape of the Motorola DROID with its more square-cut corners. The overall plastic construction of the Pre Plus is smooth and pleasing to the touch, with the soft-touch coating on the back that we’re always glad to see, though the heavier metal construction of the Motorola DROID feels more durable, almost like it could withstand a beating.




You can compare the Palm Pre Plus with many other phones using our Size Visualization Tool.

The front display remains at 3.1-inch diagonal with 320x480 resolution and 16.7 million color support. Images look good with bright and saturated colors, even in direct sunlight. We like that the display blends in well with the surrounding black bezel, instead of looking like a separate piece. Using the capacitive touch-sensitive display on the Palm Pre Plus is a joy, as it supports multitouch in several apps (such as the web browser and photo viewer) and has a gesture-based area located at the bottom. All of this works well together, including the small wave-effect light that flows with your finger’s movement.



The 4-row QWERTY keyboard is by no means the best keyboard that we’ve used on a phone, nor is it the worst. The buttons are large enough to use with your finger-tips or nails, but people with larger hands will have the most difficulty getting used to it. The buttons are raised from the surrounding plastic with a rubbery feel to them, but don’t provide much feedback when pressed. After a day of use though, we did become better at using the keyboard and had fewer mistakes. As a whole, we can say the QWERTY keyboard is more than usable, considering the compact dimensions of the Palm Pre Plus.



Along the side of the device are the volume rocker, power/lock button, 3.5mm headset jack, microUSB port, and a sliding lever that acts to silence the phone’s ringer and alerts. Located on the back is the 3MP camera with LED flash and speaker. The battery cover includes the ability to work with the optional touchstone charging dock (sold separately). There is also 16GB of internal memory available to the user, which is twice the amount of the original Pam Pre.

Software and Features:

The Palm Pre Plus for Verizon comes with webOS 1.3.5.1 installed, which has similar functionality of the Palm Pre on Sprint, expect for a few minor differences. Launching apps, such as email, messaging, phonebook, calendar, and connectivity are all the same, so we won’t go into great detail here. Needless to say, they all work well, as it integrates your personal contacts with ones from Google Talk, AIM, and Facebook. Since the Pre Plus has twice the RAM of the original Pre, we were able to have over 30 cards open on the homescreen without any noticeable lag, though the initial time it takes to open programs could be a little bit better.




The WebKit-based browser is fast and does well at rendering pages, though we did notice that when viewing some sites, the text size is not always consistent, as some would be larger than others. We’re also glad that pinch-and-zoom is supported, which is something we miss on the Motorola DROID’s stock Android browser. Naturally Flash content isn’t supported yet, but we hope that Flash 10.1 won’t be too far off. Other than that, there are only two complaints we have about the web experience on the Pre Plus. The first has to do with the fact when using the browser in landscape mode; you must continually flip the phone back to portrait mode to enter in a URL. A simple on-screen keyboard would eliminate this. The second has to do with the HVGA display, as text and images aren’t as crisp as they would be on a WVGA display. When using Verizon’s EVDO Rev A network, we were able to completely load PhoneArena.com in 32 seconds, while the 1MB test from dslreports.com/mspeed showed 800kbps download speed. We then connected the Pre Plus to our home broadband Wi-Fi network and PhoneArena.com was able to load in only 18 seconds, while dslreports showed a 1400kbps download speed.



While we’re on the topic of Wi-Fi, the Palm Pre Plus can be used as a 3G Mobile Hotspot, similar to a MiFi, though this will cost you $40 per month with a 5GB data cap. You can connect up to 5 devices simultaneously to the Pre Plus using Wi-Fi, which then is connected to Verizon’s EVDO Rev A network. For this we used the HP Mini 311 netbook, which is also sold by Verizon. During the first test we connected the netbook directly to Verizon’s EVDO Rev A network using its own built-in network card and got 1.78mbps download/0.53mbps upload with 180ms ping from Speedtest.net. Then we performed the test again, but this time with the netbook connected via Wi-Fi to the Palm Pre Plus (which is then connected to Verizon’s network) and got 1.83mbps download/0.31mbps upload, but the ping time was up to 350ms. So as you can see, there really isn’t a noticeable speed difference here, but latency times are almost double. Honestly, we really can’t see many people using the Pre Plus as a mobile MiFi, mostly because of the extra $40/month fee associated with it.

The standard Google Maps app is included, which you can use for aerial satellite views and for plotting driving directions, but it lacks the advanced turn-by-turn directions with voice prompts that we saw on the Motorola DROID. For this, Verizon has included their VZ Navigator program, which costs $10 per month, if you choose to activate it. The program is easy to use and does have the familiar GPS guided turn-by-turn directions, as well as being able to perform local searches for gas stations, supermarkets, movie theaters, etc. Overall, VZ Navigator has its place, but still can’t compete to the more advanced (and free) Google Maps Navigation program. We hope that Google ports this over to webOS once it’s out of Beta.



Other included apps on the Pre Plus are the Doc Viewer (for opening Word, Excel and PowerPoint files), PDF viewer, photo viewer (which supports pinch-and-zoom), music player, and video player. The music playback quality is good, though not as loud as what we heard with the DROID.  The highest-quality video that it could play was a 640x272 resolution MP4 file with H.264 encoding, which is a decent performance. Other H.264 videos with higher-resolutions, such as 720x306 however, could not play at all and would give an error message. We would like to see more formats supported on the Pre Plus, such as DivX and XviD.





The App Catalog is continually growing, and with the addition of 3D games it offers some entertaining choices, but still can’t compare to the App Store or Android Market just yet.





The camera interface is simple to use, as it only has three on-screen icons for flash (off/auto/on), shutter, and gallery, though we wouldn’t mind some advanced options like white balance and ISO. When pressing the shutter icon, it only takes about 2 seconds to capture and save the image, which is reasonable since it doesn’t have to spend time focusing. The images we took outside with the 3MP camera were acceptable; through they were soft and lacked sharp-crisp edges, while color rendering was also a bit off. Images taken inside were also what we’ve come to expect from most other phones, with more grain and noise showing in lower-light conditions. The flash was also pretty useless. Video recording is also missing, though it is to be included with webOS 1.4, along with some editing options.

Performance:

Call quality was good with voices on our end sounding clear, though they weren’t as natural sounding as when using the Motorola DROID. We made back-to-back calls on both devices, and felt the voice quality on our end with the DROID was slightly better. People that we called, however, said that we sounded nearly identical on their end when we used both phones. Signal Reception on the Palm Pre Plus was a bit disconcerting. While on phone calls we would only have 2 out of 5 bars showing in strong signal areas, but when we used the web or data service, we would have 5 bars of EV showing. Regardless, we didn’t drop any calls during our testing around south Florida.

The 1150mAh battery is rated to provide up to 5.5 hours of talk time or 14.5 days of standby time. This is kind of funny, as we’ve never encountered a smartphone that can last 2 weeks in standby. During our testing we were able to get 5 hours of continuous talk time on a full charge; with no apps or data services running in the background. However, under mixed usage, which includes some talk, web browsing, messaging and email, expect to charge the device each night.

Conclusion:

The Palm Pre Plus has an attractive and ergonomic design. The webOS software is its greatest benefit, as it is easy enough for practically anyone to use, especially those who have never considered using a smartphone before. But with little changes in the software since last year, Palm will have to play catch-up with the iPhone and Android-based phones, which currently have more robust operating systems and with thousands of more apps that can be downloaded. Only time will tell how things will play out between webOS 1.4, Android 2.1, and iPhone OS 4.0.

Regarding our ratings below: When the Palm Pre for Sprint came out last year, we gave it high marks because it was unique and was one of the easiest smartphones to use on the market. Since then, more competing devices have come out, and the Pre Plus is not as “cutting-edge” as it would have been last year. We base our ratings on the current Palm Pre Plus, as well as how it compares to other current devices.

Palm Pre Plus Video Review: