Peter Fisher's – Phyn3t

Last night I arrived at a Sprint store at around 3am to wait for the Palm Pre. By 8am when they opened the line went from 4 of us to about 7. They only had 7 phones but some people had pre-oredered theirs… (How idk)… Anyway I got my device it was a very smooth proccess the employees were quick and it didn’t take to long. Not like the trouble I had trying to get an iPhone 3G(which was ATT fault not apples).

So I got home and playe with the device for a bit befoer I went to bed and something extremly annoying I found was that there were atleast TEN dead pixels around the screen mostly in groups AND at the bottom right there are two large imprints were the screen it seems got hit hard and now there is a discoloration which totally sucks because I’m going to have to hopefully get an exchange but I have to wait till they get more devices… I will report back later on how that goes, hopefully it goes smooth but we will see.

So on to the review of the phone. The phone itself is very nice, a lot smaller though than the iPhone which can be a good thing and a bad thing. It was said that it feels kinda plasky and cheap but I have to say otherwise compared to the G1 it feels very nice and hard. The G1 felt very  crappy and the worst thing of all with the G1 is that it creecked… Also the power button on the pre is extermly annoying its very small and hard to press at times. Also there is a side charging bay that’s extermly annoying each time you want to charge your phone you have to open it. Also it makes using the phone while charging very annoying since it comes out of the side unlike the iPhone where the charging port is at the bottom. But this leads to the TOUCHSTONE!

The touch stone is very nice, I didn’t think it would work as well as it does. First the “stone” itself sticks very well to what ever surface you stick it to. There is no adhesive it just has some type of suction at the bottom. Secondly the Pre itself sticks VERY well. It doesn’t move around at all. It feels very firm on the touch stone and you can type on it without any trouble. One thing that was very annoying with it is that it doens’t come with a actual cable to plug into the wall… You are supose to use the one you got with the Pre. Also if you work and want your touch stone at both work and home you can purchase a double kit from Palm: http://store.palm.com/product/index.jsp?productId=3584154 Also if you want a good deal you can purchase JUST the touchstone from PreCentral: http://store.precentral.net/palm-touchstone-charging-dock/6A39A5015.htm .

WebOS itself is very good, I was able to do a lot of work on it since you can have cards running in the background. And I switch a lot between my email and the browser so it was VERY nice to not have to wait for the browser to load each time I checked an email and vic verca. But WebOS is slow at loading an application for the first time. Currently there is no application out, but hopefully this will change soon with the release of the SDK. But one thing I hope that we see is the creativity we see in the applications for the iPhone that’s one reason why I didn’t want to leave the iPhone and still don’t really want to is the great creative application out for it!

One last thing to note is that the Pre can have more than ONE exchange account! Woot! But the mail application really sucks =( its slow and lags a lot. Hopefully this is improved with the next update.

If you have a Palm Pre and you are trying to add an Exchange account / EAS and you are getting the error: “SSL certificate error. Is the date and time correct?” and your CA cert provider is cacert.org you need to install their root cert because Palm forgot to add them to the devices trusted list. You can download it here:

http://www.cacert.org/certs/root.der