James's Weblog

After four years, I’ve finally said goodbye to my trusty but beaten-up Treo 650. I started noticing screws missing from it about a month ago, and a couple of weeks ago I lost the antenna, which fell off somewhere without my noticing.

The chipped paint and smudged icons on the buttons? That’s the result of 3½ years of sharing a pocket with my keys. That weird cloud in the center of the screen? It’s dust that seeped in and collected there. That hole in the back cover? I drilled that so that I could easily access the reset button with the stylus. (I admit that it might have contributed to the dust problem.)

I actually could have tried transferring my number to my dad’s old Treo 650, but I decided it wasn’t worth the hassle. No more reception was the push I needed to buy the new Palm Pre. (Sorry, iPhone, but I’m a (wanna-be) keyboard snob.) This also marks the end of nine years of using Palm OS.

The Palm Pre is nice. There are a few significant things and a lot of little things that I miss from the Treo 650, but having a modern web browser makes up for all the deficiencies. When I think about it, I realize that I was pretty satisfied with everything about the Treo except for its anemic and ancient browser.

The good:

• The web browser is great. It’s WebKit-based, just like the iPhone, and it even claims to be Safari in its user-agent string.
• The screen is beautiful. Too bad it’s plastic and not glass, though. It also collects fingerprints easily.
• Having Wi-Fi is great. I have an unlimited data plan, but Wi-Fi lets me surf the web despite the spotty cell phone reception I get at my house.
• The Exchange support seems to work well. I can access my work email without hassle, and it syncs with my Outlook calendar. (Maybe this means I no longer need to use Outlook at work…)
• It’s so much smaller than my old Treo that my pants pocket feels empty with it inside.
• The camera is much better. The picture quality is still not very good—it’s still a cell phone camera, after all—but the Treo 650’s camera was barely passable. The LED flash and the mirrored back surface for self-portraits are also nice touches.
• The built-in GPS is nice, and it’s really fast. It’s slightly disturbing that Google Maps’ satellite view can locate me inside my house with reasonable accuracy.
• Palm actually seems to be releasing OS updates for the Pre. With their old Palm OS systems, Palm rarely updated anything and instead opted to release new versions of the software only with new hardware models. This could be because it’s simply easier for Palm to update software on the Pre, or maybe it’s because webOS is relatively immature. We’ll see if the updates last.

The not-so-good:

• webOS is pretty, but there are very few affordances. It can be unclear which pages are scrollable (and even in which direction). It’s unclear when applications support landscape mode. The mechanism to delete things is inconsistent (the mechanism to delete an application is completely different from the one to delete a bookmark. Deleting email is performed the same way as deleting bookmarks except it has no confirmation.) Maybe that’s unavoidable with the Pre’s dependence on gestures; I don’t know of any good affordances for them, but I think the space deserves more exploration and experimentation.
• What affordances it does have are sometimes inconsistent. For example, when you press a modifier key, the cursor shows a colored dot to indicate this, but this doesn’t happen for the cases where webOS auto-shifts for you (e.g. at the beginning of a new sentence). Some pop-up lists have arrows indicating that they’re scrollable, but others don’t.
• Needs more keyboard shortcuts. Since it has a physical keyboard, it should take better advantage of it.
• Some operations are reversed from the Treo:
  • When auto-shifting happens undesirably, pressing backspace on the Treo would unshift and let you type in a character unmolested. On the Pre, the model is to type the character first, and pressing backspace afterward will replace that character with its lowercase version. (That this backspace-correction happens only with auto-shifted characters and not with explicitly-shifted characters might explain why there’s no affordance for the auto-shift state, but the whole thing feels a bit weird and unpredictable. Maybe it’ll take getting used to, but I think objectively it means that I can’t type a sentence without pausing after the first character to see if it needs correction. I thought the old Palm OS model was more self-consistent and worked fine, and changing it to a new one without any obvious benefit seems frivolous.)
  • The Treo’s symbol key showed symbols related to the character you just typed (e.g. “e” and “é” or “€”) and replaced it. The Pre expects you to press the symbol key first, which list of all symbols. Typing a character then filters the list to show only related symbols. This change seems less egregious.
• Another consequence of the modifier-key model is that the penalty for accidentally pressing a modifier key is higher. On the Treo I could just press backspace to undo the mistake, but the Pre requires two keypresses (either pressing the modifier key two more times to cycle from shift to caps-lock to normal or pressing a character and backspacing over it).
• I miss having the directional pad. Being able to use the Treo without needing to touch the screen was nice. Trying to click on tiny hyperlinks in the web browser can be a bit annoying. The capacitive touchscreen is nice, but I miss being able to use a stylus when I want more precision.
• No stylus means that I no longer have with me a third-party stylus with a built-in ballpoint pen wherever I go. Alas.
• The Treo 650 had a much better keyboard. The Treo’s hard, chiclet-style keys feel better and give more tactile feedback than the rubberized keys of the Pre. Still, I prefer having the rubber keys to a virtual keyboard.
• Searching is inconsistent. The Pre has so-called “universal search”, except it doesn’t actually search through everything on the device. It doesn’t search memos, nor does it search email. The Memos application has its own internal search feature, and there’s no way at all to search email. (Searching email by subject reportedly will be added in the next OS update, however.)
• The “Synergy” feature to combine calendars/contacts from multiple sources sometimes gets in the way. I don’t want all the random people I’ve sent email to or received email from to show up in my address book. I don’t really want people from my AIM buddy list to show up there automatically either, especially not with names like “example123”.
• I miss having the expandability of an SD slot. It was a convenient way to install things on my Treo, and being able to preview photos from a digital camera on a bigger, better screen was useful. To be fair, though, the Treo 650 didn’t support anything larger than a 2 GB SD card, and the Pre has 8 GB of internal flash memory.
• There’s no camcorder application for the Pre. I didn’t use that often on the Treo, but it was nice to have it available, and it was useful on the few occasions where I did need it.
• No LED indicators to show when I have unacknowledged voicemail or email. The Pre does have external LEDs, but they’re not put to good use. (Apparently this also might be fixed in the next OS update.)
• Sprint’s current cell phone plans are way more expensive than their old one. I was paying Sprint about $80/month for my old, two-line family plan with unlimited data on one of the lines. To use the Pre, I needed to switch to a new plan, and the cheapest family plan is $130/month for two lines and assumes you want unlimited data/SMS on both. It turned out to be cheaper for me to get a separate basic plan for my mom, although it still comes out to be a total of $100/month. At least I can get a 20% discount through VMware. And yet somehow the plans are still cheaper than the AT&T iPhone plans.