Posts Palm Pre... day one
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Palm Pre... day one

So I stood in line for a palm pre… two actually. My current plan has the 1500 family with unlimited data plan already, and the phones my wife and I use contract was ready for new phones, so we were good to go for new phones.

Decided to go to Sprint store rather then risk BestBuy not having enough. Good choice as it turns out. 150 in stock at Sprint, and like 2 at BestBuy. With over 200 people that I know about showing up at the small store I went to, it must have been good for Sprint to see that volume move. (Though now I have to deal with the mail-in rebate, which is lame)

Palm pre itself is fairly easy to use. Comments made about the sharp edge when opening the pre is no joke, but easy to deal with. The OS is interesting and while learning the ins-and-outs of it, I think I now get the ‘palm’ and ‘sprint’ business plan with them trying to recover.

First palm… this is a good phone, and I can see why some say its an attempt at going after the iPhone. But really what palm is doing is what Google should have done with their G-Phone… it integrates with websites easily. All my mail accounts (yahoo, google, corporate which is basically google for me) are available. All my contacts (not yahoo for some reason, but that’s fine with me) are there, faceboook integrates easily, etc. WiFi makes it fast at home and (likely) at work on Monday. Really, this is a better google-phone. They didn’t really try to one-up the iPhone by ofering what it has and more. (iPhone is just an extension of the Apple hardware suite. Google-phone is an extension of the Google/web suite) Which makes me think that Palm wants to be bought by Google. If anything, this phone proves it. (Yeah, its not android, but there is no reason the ‘software/website’ integration that webOS makes easy couldn’t be done in Android. Though I can’t wait to see the Mojo API and start making my own webOS apps.)

Now Sprint. The service they give now is better, and starting with the palm pre gives people less reason to go to AT&T or T-Mobile… so this reduces the stream of people leaving. But what I noticed is that the plans are much cheaper on Sprint compared to AT&T and T-Mobile. I had a 20% discount on Sprint from working at Thomson. When I left, I was able to keep that discount, so I never left Sprint. Now with a CostCo membership, you can get a 23% discount. Anyone can get that. What the palm pre release on Sprint does is get Sprint’s name out there again… which will also make their discounts more known. Palm will be releasing on other providers by 2010, so Sprint’s discounts will make them more palatable now.

After a few more days, I’ll post about using the phone itself. Right now, webkit works like it does everywhere else. The fact that speed-dial is replaced by universal search will take some getting used to. (Or figuring out how to set speed-dial) Tweed (3rd party twitter app) is ‘okay’ on the phone, and the New York Times app is a good start. Of course, the task list I’ve already started using… and I await the day that it syncs to Google tasks. (Oh man, that would be awesome!)

More later…

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