What I hate about my favorite phone

This is a personal post!

Sebastian and I had been searching for smartphones since the summer of 2009. Before that we had  iPod Touches because of a project we were working on and our regular cellphone. We looked into the iPhone, G1, HTC, etc… but just didn’t want to buy something from one of the big corporations. So what did we choose? After having fiddled around with WebOS SDK to get some minor development done we decided to grab a phone from the company that almost got forgotten – PALM a start up just like Komola .

You can say what you want about the Palm Pre, we thought it looked nice and the software was different. Having it the first 3 days was REALLY HARD I must say I hated it. It was slow, dropped calls, rebooted randomly and the battery died in the middle of the day. With the first three updates reboots and dropped calls disappeared and the speed of the phone constantly got better. Even the battery now lasts through the whole day (5% left at the end) but the things that really bother me have been details that have never been addressed, which are easier to fix than integrating a video recorder into the phone – although I will probably love this feature once I get my hands on WebOS 1.4.

So what are the details I am missing? I’ll go through by application

Clock

This is first because it was the reason I wrote this blog post after all. The clock app is great at showing what time it is:

but as soon as you want to get woken by your phone you might consider going back to a designated alarm clock, where you can specify on what days the alarm is supposed to wake you. The limited options don’t fit  my life… I have to wake up at different times every other day so I have to manually tap both buttons every night – so that I don’t get woken early or too late. If Mr. Rubinstein wouldn’t have been ignorant about the competition, they might have brought out a thought through Clock app – apple did this really well!

Photos

There is one reason I want to go to this application and that is to show pictures, which I toke – not show off album art! The application would probably load a lot faster if it would just show the Photo roll as default and if I want to check out all the other pictures let me swipe back.

Kamera

Please make it possible to take pictures by pressing volume up or the whole screen it’s to hard to touch the button when taking a picture of yourself.

Contacts

The contacts app is actually pretty cool especially that it collects all the user info.. even facebook.. but when searching for a contact there is no way of accessing that persons facebook profile. Instead I have to go to the mobile facebook page and search for the name I just typed into contacts. Implementing a “Go to Facebook Profile” would be great

Google Maps

When in another city the maps app is crucial and when you are driving there you need information like directions. Via GPS you know my exact location so why not show me decent directions? If I drive off the route you could automatically recalculate the route and hide information I don’t need anymore when I followed the instructions correctly. But the major question is why there is a Menu button in the bottom right if the menu drop down (the thing saying Google Maps in the upper left corner) is empty? The preloaded apps should in my opinion be built in some standard fashion.

Web

The browser is truely great on this device except their implementations of bookmarks. For my convinience instead of showing me a custom chosen favicon like the apple OS Mobile you have to select a part of the website you want to see… Why would you do that and then have special rules for preloaded sites?

Calendar

The calendar sucks in general.. I use calendar.google.com… Please fix the calendar! Give me list view… do something!

Messaging

Great idea to implement a native chat client and have text messaging in the same application I love that but I want to include returns in my messages Shift and Return should make a new line. The other question about the native chat client why is there no MSN or ICQ? (These are both the most popular in germany next to skype which isn’t implemented for obvious reasons)

Backup

I love that the phone backs itself up – even better it does this wirelessly! But why can’t I restrict it to only do backups when it’s connected to power between 2 and 4 am? And why are the connections between contacts not saved? I would like a more thorough backup.

General

I would love my phone to always be ready for me and the apps on it to be uptodate – also the reason why I use Google Chrome – why can’t everything be updates automatically for me? Or tell me when updates are available (without me having to go to Updates manually).

A long while I had my Pre with Preware and had patches installed so that the notification LED would start pulsing as soon as I got mail – best feature why hasn’t it been implemented for public?

Also please let me get out of USB Drive mode without unplugging the device..

I love this Phone…

but it’s got its problems, which I hope get adressed
-Thomas