Since I'm in the US, I had planned on finding a Sprint store and checking out the Palm Pre. Turns out Chandler (or maybe all of Arizona) is more of a Verizon area. There's maybe 6 Verizon stores in the big mall but no Sprint stores (6 stores in 1 mall... WTF?).
So I tracked down a Sprint store and got there when it was open and the guy let me play with the Pre. Even better, the security cable had been pulled off that day so I got to hold it proper, without a cable to get in the way.
My current phone is a Treo 650 so my opinion of the Pre is based in part on how it compares to that phone. The only thing is I didn't actually have my Treo to compare it to (I left it in Australia). D'oh!
The phone is thin. I mean, it's probably not a big deal to someone that's had a newer phone but it seems about half as thick as the Treo. It's shorter when closed but longer when open. It's actually wider than I would have expected given the other dimensions. My wife has a Nokia 5800 and I guess I was expecting something closer to that width. I don't think it's any wider than the Treo but since every other dimension has reduced it feels wide in my hand.
The Pre is also lighter than the Treo. Given how poor the battery life is (so much for the "Palm Pre battery life will knock your socks off!" claims thrown around before release) I would definitely consider an expanded capacity battery because the size/weight trade-off should still result in a phone that's smaller and lighter than my Treo.
Things on the screen were a bit smaller than I had expected. I've seen and played with iPhones and it seems the Pre uses similar pixel-sized items which results in smaller physical-sized items. That doesn't seem to be a major problem but in some cases you need to be a bit more careful with your clicks. The screen itself looked good and responded as well as I'd expect. I would like to see a drawing app or something to see how accurate the screen is at the pixel level. I was disappointed to see the notes app does not allow for cursor movement but I managed to find a text editing control that did and while it wasn't as nice as cursor keys would be, it was at least bearable. Much quicker than the iPhone thanks to avoiding the need to click and hold just to position the cursor. Despite my
reservations, I think text entry will prove to be ok on the Pre even if it isn't as good as the Treo. The biggest problem I could forsee is trying to use tiny fonts for code editing (something I do via SrcEdit on the Treo now).
Speed was what I expected based on the footage I've seen. Disappointingly slow. I mean, this is a 500Mhz device running a glorified web browser and it does not do everything instantaneously. The Treo has a measly 312Mhz older-generation ARM chip, emulates a Dragonball CPU for app code and still manages to do things instantaneously. I know... it's not a direct or fair comparison but in terms of user experience, the reduction in performance is a mark against the Pre. I think by far the biggest problem here is the "new app hang" effect. Start an app and watch your Pre turn into a brick for up to a few seconds. You can't do anything to the phone while it starts an app. This means you _need_ to use multi-tasking because switching apps by starting and stopping them (PalmOS-style) will be slow.
I think the Pre could benefit here from various optimization techniques. Things like starting a new "app environment" in the background to reduce the time it takes to start an app and keeping apps open when you close them (memory permitting) for faster re-launch. Apple's .nib files are instantiated at build time and this memory is serialized to disk. This lets complex UIs be loaded quicker because the cost is just the time to serialize the memory from disk. The Pre could perhaps serialize the whole "app environment" to disk which would allow faster launching. I believe emacs did a similar thing in early versions because the cost of serializing the app from disk into memory was much quicker than the cost of actually starting up the lisp interpreter and executing all the startup code.
And finally the keyboard. I've heard some people say good things. I've heard some people say bad things. I haven't seen a direct comparison to the Treo 650 so I was very nervous about this. I tried an iPhone keyboard and was able to type "the quick brown fox jumped over the slow lazy dog" quickly without making any mistakes and I haven't really played with iPhones at all. I'm happy to report that I had no problems typing that sentence on the Pre either. Maybe I'm good at adapting to keyboards or something? I have big hands too so the keys on all of these phones are extremely small targets for my fingers. Actually, my large hands mean I will have no problems using the phone one handed, even with the keyboard open. I can reach all over the screen and all over the keyboard with my thumb. From experience with my Treo though, I'll most likely drop to 2 hands for typing and use my right thumb for clicking the screen.
The keyboard buttons are less pronounced than the Treo 650's keys. Less height and flatter but still rounded. It's a different feel than the Treo. I felt the keys around the one I was pressing more but it didn't seem to impact on my ability to reliably hit individual keys. The press action was a little softer than the Treo but again, this didn't seem to cause any problems. The keys didn't seem to take up a significantly smaller area but without my Treo to compare to it's hard to be sure.
I was concerned about the lip at the top. I've used sliding phones before and found the top row of keys almost impossible to press due to my big fingers hitting the lip. I'm happy to report that the Pre fared well here. Only 1 keypress I tried resulted in my finger hitting the lip and even then I still managed to press the key accurately. The sloping front of the lip is probably all that saves the phone here. It turns out the biggest problem with the keyboard is the rim on the sides. For some reason I can't fathom, the keyboard is recessed, excessively so at the bottom. However there's a big gap at the bottom so the deep rim there doesn't seem to get in the way. It's the rim on the sides gets in the way. The most obvious example of the problems this causes is entering numbers. I know you can double-click the alt (orange) button to turn on numlock but on my Treo I tend to just hold the button with my left hand hanging off the side (ie. out of the way) and type out numbers with my right hand. On the Pre though, I can't hang my left hand off the side of the phone because of the rim. This makes it a little hard to actually hit all of the number keys while holding the orange key. It might ruin the aesthetics of the phone while closed but I'd actually consider filing away part or all of the rim to make the keyboard more accessible.
Some of the symbol were in new places compared to the Treo. Shouldn't be a big deal once I get the hand of it.
So there's my review of the Pre after spending about 5 minutes with it. Nothing there to turn me off so unless this Eos device shows up and looks better I'd say there's a Pre in my future. Now hurry up and release a GSM model Palm!
By the way, the guy behind the counter said Sprint employees can finally purchase a Pre today. I said, "couldn't you just walk into Best Buy and get one?" and he said no. That's got to have been annoying if you're a Pre-wanting Sprint employee.
