We’ve been using the Palm Pre for the past week or so and love the multi-tasking ability and even love flicking away the applications when I’m finished with them – kinda a power trip against me and the Pre. With that said… have you registered for our Palm Pre giveaway yet? Put your name in to win here!
Palm created the Pre from the ground up and from what we hear this is the first of many devices to sport their new webOS platform. It’s very intuitive and simple to use. Apart from looking good, the Pre also has something called “Palm Synergy”. Basically this joins all your Microsoft Outlook, Google and Facebook calendars and contacts together.
It’s actually a great idea for those who have and use all those services. Pretty pointless if you don’t use Facebook or Google though. I can see it being very beneficial for your Outlook and syncing your work contacts here. But let’s say you hook up your Facebook, depending on how many “friends” you have will determine how long the syncing will take. For me there is about 300 plus friends and took less than a minute. However, now scrolling through my contacts I realize that some of my so-called Facebook friends are now in my contacts. The downside is that I cannot remember speaking or connecting with some of them over the past 10 years. I just became “friends” on Facebook, not in my day-to-day life. When I went to try to delete a Facebook contact I got a message that “Facebook profiles cannot be deleted”. Hopefully I’ll find a way to organize (delete) this correctly.
What’s good about the contacts is that I can use the Universal Search to quickly locate the person/group I want. This will save me a bit of time rather than scrolling through the massive sea of people.
The Calendar does an incredible job of displaying my appointments and syncing. In the video we show how quick it updates when a new appointment is set, basically automatically. Also, Palm makes sure that your day can be viewed at one glance and created this “crunching” aspect for your free time (shows how many minutes and hours you have available until your next appointment). In addition, this pulls info from the web from your Outlook, Facebook and Google calendars and can be colour co-ordinated so you can keep track between personal and professional.
For your e-mails, this renders full HTML e-mails and uses the entire 3.1 inch screen. Simple to use and simple to set up. Along with the contacts and calendar, the e-mail can also be set-up to get your Outlook, Gmail and any other e-mail accounts you have. Pretty standard but typing on the Pre will need some getting used to. Since the keyboard is similar to the Centro or Treo Pro you’ll find the keypad really close together and the keys rubbery. It will be a bit of a challenge for those with bigger fingers/thumbs as you’ll literally have to work your way through the keyboard letter by letter, number by number.
Depending on how many accounts you have set up, the Pre does a bang up job at separating them in the e-mail menu section. It lets you know how many messages you have in total for each account and then combines the total messages also. In addition, when a new e-mail comes in (similar to the calendar) a notification shows at the bottom with the sender, time and header info. If you want to read the e-mail simply tap on the notification, or to remove simply swipe it away to the right.
Check the video out here:
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