So here it is, the much awaited Palm Pre.   Dr. Phone and Dr. Wreck have been following the handset industry from the days of the so cool Zack Morris brick phone (which we were happy to see once again appear on a recent episode of Jimmy Fallon) to the astronomically popular Motorola Razr, all the way through the Apple iPhone.  Its not even hyperbole to say that at no time ever has one single phone meant more to a company than the Pre does to Palm.  With the Research In Motion branded Blackberry redefining the smart phone by its Pearl, Curve, Bold and Storm entries, and Apple setting the gold standard for all smart phones by its introduction into the market with the iPhone, the Sunnyvale, CA based Palm had become a distant afterthought.  For years the company struggled along rumors of being bought out or broken apart culminating with the stock price reaching an all time low of $1.42 in December of 2008.   But then, with the announcement and demo of the Pre at the January 2009 CES in Las Vegas, the company built back enough momentum to inject energy into the Palm brand.   The phoneWreck team has been waiting anxiously to review the Pre and promises to break down every nook and cranny of this monumental phone.  As always, we will call it like we see it, and promise to pull no punches so enough of this nostalgia already and in the words of the immortal Michael Buffer, “LETS GET READY TO RUMBBBBBLE!!”  Ding. Ding.

Palm Pre Review

We pay homage to the great Clint Eastwood in this review by going through “Il buono, Il brutto, Il cattivo” for those of you who don’t parlarano italiano that means “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly”

This phone was filled with plenty of Goods but also some Bad’s and Ugly’s. At times while reviewing the phone it almost seemed like a phone that didn’t have too much middle ground.

The Goods

Oh where to start?

First lets start with the looks and form factor of the phone.  Image is everything and this phone does not disappoint.  The phone has very sleek curved lines and a glossy look to it.  Mrs. Phone also pointed out that the backside when slid up has a nice little mirror for taking pictures, or doing your hair while talking on the speaker phone and driving!!! (and some of you wonder how we got the name phoneWreck, sigh).  Dr. Phone always likes to judge how good a phone looks by how many double takes he gets when walking into a club while pretending to talk on his brand new phone, and of course Mrs. Phone isn’t around.

Double-Take Rating**: 8 Double Takes Out of 10!!*

* Note this number may vary based on alcohol consumption, lighting, and other factors.

**Scale – Dr. Phone normally gets 0 double takes from 10 women so this is purely the phone and only the phone

Mrs. Phone's favourite phone mirror!

Additionally, as stated in the hardware review, the phone fits into your hand nicely, both its weight and width make it easy to slide into your pocket.

So the thing that was most surprising to the team at phoneWreck was the Touch Screen.

Most other models we have reviewed or torn apart (Omnia, HTC Touch Pro, Krave) use “resistive touch” which means you physically have to press on the screen in order for it to recognize your finger.  Other phones we reviewed like the Storm or iPhone use capacitive sensing algorithms which sense when your finger actually touches the screen and are much easier to use.   Still, as we mentioned in the Storm review we found the touch to be slow, the touch sensitivity not accurate, and no capabilities to press on multiple points in the screen at the same time.  The Palm AMAZED us with its accurate and easy to use multi-touch ability.  Kudos to them for getting it right finally!  We are not saying this is the holy grail of touch screens but is a 10x improvement over Storm/iPhone and 100x over Omnia and resistive touch.

Without showing a video of some of the very cool things you can do with the touch like expanding, condensing photos (or even maps on Google, or web pages) with two finger gesturing, you will not be able to fully grasp how cool this feature is!  Below are charts from the instruction manual on the gesturing just so you have an idea:

Touch-Screen Rating: 9.5 out of 10

Screen Review:

This is a difficult one to review.  The Bold, Storm, iPhone, Pre all have very comparable HVGA (320×480) HVGA 24-bit color screens.  The Pre screen size is at a very decent 3.1 inches and is made by Sony.  The screen looks amazing, and backlight is very bright so the image really shines off of the phone.  Dr. Phone is not a videophile but likes this screen a lot.

Screen Rating: 9 out of 10

Other cool features:

The internal accelerometer senses when you flip the screen to panorama, and 180 degrees so it changes the images in photo, web browser, main screen, etc….   Seeing that the movie Bruno is coming out very soon starring Sacha Baron Cohen, we thought we’d do a little Borat and say VERY NICE!!!

The phone when connected through USB is recognized automatically by iTunes so if this is your method of choice to transfer music (its not ours) you can use this utility.

Cut and Paste!!! (Apple took almost 2 years to release this for iPhone).

3.5mm headphone jack, it sounds cheesy but some phones don’t even support a standard headphone jack but its good to see has one does without doing some proprietary headphone rip-off scheme.

Internet Browser:

The Blackberry browser has been much maligned in reviews, but we chose to use the Blackberry Bold browser since it was easy to configure in WiFi and Over the Air in both Java and non-Java modes. We hear that the Palm browser is based off Webkit which also powers the Safari browser on the iPhone and on PCs.  Aesthetically speaking the Palm browser formatted images much better and pages looked far superior to that of the Bold.  In addition the brilliant touch adds a lot of pros here by being able to scroll much easier and zoom in and out with ease.  The quick refresh and back button are a nice feature and in order to enter in your next address you begin typing on the keyboard and that’s it.   Unlike the iPhone, you get to see the entire screen while you are typing in the next webpage.   Palm has really made a nice browser here.

Lets take a look at the speeds using three of the phoneWreck’s team favorite sites and each companies respective sites.

Browser Loading Benchmarking:

Bold Browser: 4.6.0.167

Pre Browser: 1.0.2

Using WiFi:

Clearly the WiFi browsing on the Palm Pre is not only better looking but faster as well.   Java scripts are running much better on the Palm Pre.

Network Browsing:

Okay so this one we know that the browser on the Pre is faster but we wanted to see how the Sprint EV-DO Rev. A (DORA) network stacked up against the AT&T 3G WCDMA Network:

The above numbers tell an interesting story.  It seems that the Sprint DORA network is slowing down the loading of pages on Pre, but by very little margin over the WiFi which means it is closely matching the internet speed at the phoneWreck lab.  On the other hand the Bold WiFi numbers closely match the numbers of the AT&T 3G network which indicates the browser formatting is probably what is the bottleneck in loading pages, not data acquisition.

This round goes to the Pre without question!!!  The inaugural phoneWreck Kelly Slater internet surfing trophy goes to the Palm Pre.  Surfs up bro.

Internet Surfing Rating: 9.5 out of 10

Camera Review:

Its hard to really compare against some of the super high-end camera phones that are coming out with 8.1 MP cameras but it should be fair to compare against similar type phone like Bold/Storm/iPhone.  The Pre (1520×2032) is capable of higher resolution pictures than the Bold (1200×1600) and is roughly similar to that of the Storm (1536×2048).

Below is a comparison of images between the Bold and Pre:

BlackBerry Bold

Palm Pre

BlackBerry Bold

PalmPre

The above pictures really show the Pre having a more colorful, vibrant and sharper image.  The good thing about the Bold is the fact that it allows you to choose between resolutions, effects, and specific types of flash modes, where as the Pre only gives you control over the flash.   The Pre however makes you feel like you can take pictures as fast as your finger presses the button, which is a great feature and a testament to how fast the image processing is working on the Pre..

Camera Rating:  8.5 out of 10

Operating System Review:

The much talked about webOS!  This operating system is unique and yet probably the closest thing you will see to a PC’s operating system in the sense that it lets you keep as many applications open as the Operating System can handle and as many web browsers as you’d like.  The people at Palm call an open application a “card” for the cool way that it appears on the main screen.  We tried to push the Palm Pre to the limit to see how many cards (applications) we could have open at the same time without slowing down the OS.  We got up 16 (1 YouTube,1 Google Maps, 2 Telephone Prompts, 3 Webpages, 1 video camera mode, 2 camera modes, 1 calculator, 1 notepad, 1 task taker, 1 world clock, 1 calendar, and 1 e-mail) before we quit because the OS still did not slow down.  Very impressive! The ease of switching between the apps is the swipe of a finger left or right, and the ability to close an app is about as simple as swiping your finger up, to fling the app off the screen!!  The webOS is perfect for multitasking is probably the single largest advancement over ANY phone in the market today. Superb job of really understanding how to make an OS easy to use, and to allow users to flip between their favorite applications rather than closing one down and having to open another.   The OS from our time playing with it seemed to be very stable and bug free.

webOS Rating:  10 out of 10!!!!

The Bads

There are so many items on this phone that show that Palm really took their time, with prepared, well thought out features that it was surprising to see so many things that made the phoneWreck team scratch their head.  This phone really appeals to the consumer market and we understand that, but Palm’s core audience has always been the business user as well, which we think they may have turned off with a couple of key features.

The slider button on the top of the phone for muting for instance, is something that is hard to slide especially in the middle of a conference call or in a split instance if you need to talk to someone else.  Why not use a simple push button like the Blackberries.

The speaker, and speaker phone are sub-par.   The Bold really became the phone to beat here, but the Pre doesn’t compete against a Curve, or even and iPhone with its speaker phone.   Not to mention the speaker design on the back looks like its straight out of an 1980’s tape player.

We commend Palm for putting a keyboard on the Pre unlike the iPhone.  The touch screen is so good you could easily get away with using a touch keyboard on the Pre, however it would take away from the ability of viewing the entire screen.  Having said that, the keyboard is way below average comparing it to other keyboards on the market.  Once again Blackberries set the bar high on keyboards, but Palm’s choice to keep their old Centro/Treo keyboard was not a wise move.  The keys feel really slippery, don’t depress much and are very close together.  A nightmare for Dr. Phone who suffers from FFS, and no that’s not a fatal disease, its Fat Finger Syndrome!

Its U.S Open time for Golf so we wanted to type the following sentence in both the Bold and Pre and compare time and errors:

“Unlike Thursday, Friday offered no rain. And by the time the first 78 players had finished the first round, the sun came out and offered up a nice day on a still-saturated course, Tiger Woods who played seven holes of the first round in Thursday’s rain and shot an opening-round 74, tried to downplay the effect of the tee times. But it was clear afterward that those in his predicament got the worst of the situation.”

The above was typed three times on each device and an average was calculated.   The above contains multiple numbers, capitalizations and punctuations which also needed to be correct, as if I was a business user typing an important e-mail to a CEO.

In addition to making over two times the amount of errors Dr. Phone typed almost two times slower.  The keyboard could certainly be easier to use.

Keyboard Rating:  6 out of 10 (we give credit for at least having one)

The Uglys

USB Sideloading

The phoneWreck readers are very intelligent, but we believe everything on the Pre phone should be consistent with its OS and Web Browsing and simple to use.  That’s why we were surprised to plug in the phone to the USB port on our computer (note without iTunes) and see the below:

Luckily, because of Dr. Wreck’s teardown review we now realize the OMAP 3430 is handling the High-Speed USB (hardly fast as you will see).  The average user might go cross-eyed seeing the above.  We expected to plug in the phone and have it look like a thumb drive.  The Bold phone does this and were surprised not to see this easy option on the Pre right away.  Okay so we eventually figured out that we needed to download the “Palm Data Transfer Assistant” to move our music and movie files in “USB Drive” mode.  We think this should have been plug n’ play but we can let that go aside.  The next thing that took us by surprise is that you cannot use the phone while you transfer your movies and music files to the Pre!!!!!  The phone turns off and shows that you are in USB mode.  Neither the Bold, iPhone or Storm do this, why the Pre?!    In addition, we decided to transfer one large 1.4 GB movie file to the Pre and found that it took nearly 12 minutes.   So, before I travel I always transfer at least two movie files onto my Bold so I can play them on my plane ride.  This would take nearly 25 minutes, and 25 minutes which I can’t talk or text to my friends.  Dr. Phone’s 16 year old nephew is texting and talking constantly, he would go nuts if he couldn’t use his phone for 25 minutes, as I practically did..  Here is a side by side comparison of the Pre vs. Bold on Sideloading:

The Bold would take 3 minutes to transfer 2 movies versus 24 minutes for the Pre and You can talk on the phone and transfers files fast at the same time with the Bold, this is the way it supposed to be, a definite oversight on the Pre, especially as a multimedia smart phone!

USB Sideloading Rating: 3 out of 10 (At least it has HSUSB, that’s all we can say)

Mechanical Design

The slider mechanism is not very stable, and looks as if it could be very easily broken.  When we were first trying to get our hands on the Pre we went by several Sprint stores who had to remove the Pre displays because people and we quote “Slid the phone too much and  broke the slider.”  This is a very expensive phone, it is almost inexcusable to not have a tight sliding mechanism like the T-Mobile G1, or the Sony Xperia.  The USB mini A/B port cover also fell off Dr. Phone’s Pre after using it three times.  Mechanical design must be more robust!!

Durability Rating (as mentioned in Review Part 2):  5 out of 10

Battery Charging

Battery charging from a dead battery situation is a nightmare.  I pity anyone who is on an important call and their battery goes 100% dead because it took us almost 10-15 minutes to get this thing back from a dead battery using the wall charger.  It charges relatively quickly when the battery is not dead, and standby battery life is not to shabby at all, but the dead battery situation is a catastrophe.

Battery Charger Rating: 4 out of 10

Summary:

The phoneWreck team prides themselves on testing every phone to their limits and not giving “soft reviews” We really took this thing to the limit and we believe it actually lives up to its hype which is a hard thing to do!  This phone took several major steps forward both with the brilliant touch screen and the amazing webOS.  There was some drawbacks that like we said made us scratch our head, like the keyboard, speaker phone, USB sideloading, and mechanical design.  You’d think for a phone that holds the companies fate in their hands they would try their best to get everything perfect and not make simple correctable errors.   They spent so much time on the OS, and other features why not go out of the way to build in a nice keyboard, better audio codecs, faster USB, robust mechnical design and battery charging. Some of these items could turn off one of Palm’s core demographics – business users. We absolutely don’t want to let these negatives get in the way of an absolutely revolutionary phone.   Our numerous positives far outweigh the negatives. If you get the chance to get one on the Sprint Network please do it!! You won’t regret any dime you spent and you will love this phone.  Great work Palm, and we think your company will be fine!

Thanks for reading the review, we appreciate your support everyone, please feel free to  leave a comment.

Keep on Wrecking phone lovers!!!

Overall Rating:  9 “Pre cards” out of 10

Make sure to check out the other Palm Pre Reviews! Also, subscribe to our RSS and follow Dr.Wreck’s twitter!

We apologize for the hiatus on posts, but we’ve been running into a few technical difficulties.  Needless to say, we’re hopefully back in full force, with another analytical post!

In State of the Industry we take a step back from the typical archaic product cycles of the mobile industry and focus our attention on one particular aspect of the industry.  In this episode, we target the media aspect.  Pictures, music, videos, movies, the whole shebang.  We discuss the entertainment focus versus the enterprise focus, and we discuss consumer needs versus the technical limitations.  We discuss what to look for in the future, and we discuss it in style.

More mindful media madness momentarily.

Previous State of Media

Media has become an essential (and obvious) part of the handset market.  It is becoming rare that a cellphone doesn’t have some sort of music playback functionality, and even more rare to come without a camera.  Back in the day, cellphones were split between a barebones phone, media-centric phones, and enterprise phones.  BlackBerry devices came out with specific lines (i.e. 8800) to address the sans-camera enterprise market.  Heck, back then, it was scary if someone walked into a bathroom with a cellphone equipped with a camera.

[Image Courtesy: CrackBerry]

During those times, the differences between functionality from handset maker to handset maker was quite drastic.  RIM held onto its enterprise market with the fastest, most secure, and most reliable e-mail service.  Palm fought back with its strengths in 3rd-party applications.  HTC and Windows Mobile tried to bring “mobile computing” in the truest sense of the word, to the smartphone industry.  In the midst of the enterprise battles, came Motorola, Sony Ericsson, LG and Samsung, battling on the low-end and music forefront.  And with a cellphone for nearly every demographic, Nokia came out with guns and cannons blazing.

Current State of Media

With a sigh of annoyance, the overused and unfortunate word “convergence” comes into play.  The Engineers reading this have probably skipped to the more technical sections by now, but it must be stated.  The North American market (for the most part) has converged to handling everything without a sweat.  In fact, the arguments of yesteryear about music playback versus e-mail, have turned into virtual keyboard versus physical keyboard versus hybrid attempts.  As such, functionality arguments have turned into a focus on usability and enhancing the user-experience.  With statistics like these, it’s difficult to argue that this is the case.

With media being integrated and assumed, the spotlight turns to implementation.  It’s arguable, with iTunes being so well integrated and a history of industry-changing music players, that the iPhone presents itself as one of the best phones for music and general media capabilities.  RIM with no less of a media player, also recently announced its intentions to play in the music space.  HTC/T-Mobile/Google ventured in with Amazon MP3 integration, and it can only be assumed that Palm has something up its sleeves.  With contenders like these, it’s no wonder the PMP market has really died.  Luckily for us gadget freaks, companies like Cowon continue to impress with amazing audio-centric players like the S9.

Of course, music represents only a portion of the media umbrella.  Video playback is a whole different ball game.  Technical challenges arise such as codec and format support, processor and RAM resource use, ability to push more pixels, and network and handshaking challenges for streaming video.  Of course, the computing power required for graphical-intensive applications is starting to become available with platforms such as NVIDIA’s Tegra platform and Qualcomm’s possible-vaporware, Snapdragon.  Traditionally, many of the companies, such as RIM, have opted for single processors solutions, but its possible that this is no longer working.  With many of the core functions like GPS, audio, and graphical support being integrated into single processor solutions, these do-it-all processors could struggle depending on how capable the devices need to be at multi-tasking.  Perhaps video computing still requires a discrete solutions, such as is currently the case with higher-end laptops.  Companies like Apple have opted for graphical accelerators from Imagination Technologies, while other devices like Nokia’s N-Series and the upcoming Palm Pre use Texas Instrument’s OMAP platform.

Playing video is just one of the current problems.  Storage has always lent itself to problems.  If high-definition videos come into play, say, with Tegra’s platform, it’s very possible that a traditional microSD card or internal storage will pose limitations.  Transferring high-density files like these are another problem.  Currently, sideloading and syncing with phones are quite slow (with the exception of most BlackBerry devices).  Solutions are available, such as Cypress’s USB controllers, but perhaps companies need to take a stab at USB 3.0 integration in the near future.  Assuming there are controllers and memory types to handle the bandwidth, with USB 3.0, it’s possible that transferring files will not pose a problem for another decade — but these companies really need to get on that.

Finally, the last aspect, pictures.  Pictures are really a bore to talk about, but what is interesting is the camera integration in handsets.  LG, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson have really stepped up recently.  Phones like the Samsung Pixon, LG’s many 8MP entries, and even Sony Ericsson’s Cyber-shots, now have face-detection technology, image stabilization, and some pretty impressive functions.  However, one of the main hassles with cameraphones is its inefficiency.  They’re slow to access, slow to snap, and a hassle to view.  Night shots are grainy, continuous shots are slow, and shooting video in HD is a whole other story.  In essence, the hindrances here lie in processing power and lens technology.  Phones with slimmer form factors don’t have the space for processors like Canon’s DIGIC III, let alone optical zooming capabilities.  Integrated solutions are becoming the fad with manufacturers nowadays, so perhaps there is really no space for an amazing cameraphone.  We do hope that they continue to search for a solution though.

Important Side Notes

North America is an awkward market, and we do believe it’s suffering because of its uniqueness.  Europe and Japan love to integrate network-intensive features like DVB-Tuners, live TV, video conferencing, etc.  Fortunately for the sake of carriers here, this isn’t the case.  The geographical sparseness in the States, not to mention Canada, presents itself with the technical problem of putting up enough towers.  Perhaps the 35% market share of the global music industry attests to what we North Americans look for.

Gaming is another industry that’s really booming, even in the midst of the economic conditions.  Perhaps companies need to take another look at solutions like, well, a PSP Phone.  One of the interesting stories is how touch sensing capabilities got hold of the gaming industry with consoles like the DS.  This inherently, went to the advantage of Apple, as the iPhone now proves to be one of the strongest contenders for mobile gaming.

Conclusion

Handsets have really become a “console” for media entertainment.  Akin to the DS and PSP of gaming consoles, what was previously left for the living room, has now been made available for users, wherever they are.  Functionality and to a degree, usability, has already reached a plateau of “innovative use”.  For now, the difference lies in implementation, content distribution (preferably DRM-less, although that’s a separate topic in and of itself), and the upcoming computing/processing battle for graphical power.

In fact, much of what is happening in the handset market, mimics the gaming market.  The gaming industry went through a battle of controls, processing and graphical power, content distribution, and innovation.  Perhaps in a different order, and perhaps with different companies, but hey, no model is perfect.