Finally I got myself a Palm prē after this Toshiba TG01 dissapointment, and well, what shall I say? It’s yet another dissapointment? Well, that would be the truth, almost. The prē is a package of promises, but Palm didn’t manage to fullfill them. My complaints are those that you’ve probably heard a couple times. Quality issues for example. The sliders bottom is sharp enough to cut cheese, which is really bad because it makes using the tiny keyboard even more unpleasent. And the slider itself could be more snappy – as there is no soft keyboard, you have to slide the phone open whenever you feel urged to type something. It’s annoying. HTCs Android first timer (for those of you that forgot it: The first two iterations of Android (1.0 and 1.1) didn’t have a software keyboard as well) did much better. And this isn’t one of the first prē’s – it’s a shame Palm didn’t manage to address these issues yet – rumors have it that they managed to do better with the Prē Plus – but still: Without HP Palm would have failed, and this mismanagement regarding the quality issues might have very well killed Palm.
Let’s skip hardware without mentionning the good points (lovely form factor), and move on to software. WebOS is a nice platform, no doubt about that. But it isn’t that mature yet, if you ask me. And there are some things, that do annoy me. Example? Take the lack of something like APNdroid, which is so nice for Android, not just to save money (you can’t use the Prē without a data contract), but as well to prolong battery life. Take the mail client, which annoyed me by not threading mails. I am really locked into Android apparently – and if there is one more device of the current smartphones out there that I would try, it was probably be the Motorola Milestone.