More thoughts on the Pre

After a week or so with the Palm Pre:

* The UI rocks. Still. Sure, it starts out with a clean ripoff of the iPhone’s UI… but I honestly believe it takes the iPhone UI to the next level. By adding a few more gestures, it goes from being a point-and-click interface to a consistent gestural vocabulary which requires fewer steps to get things done. For instance, flicking list items to the right to remove them quickly becomes second nature, and works everywhere you expect it to work.

* A lot of the apps are still relatively feature-poor compared to their counterparts on my Treo – but the features which are there Just Work.

* Battery life sucks. There’s no other word for it. I can’t even get a full day out of it. I’m still learning what tweaks do the most towards prolonging battery life. Hopefully future OS releases will be more miserly with power use.

* Today it scared me by locking up hard after I closed the keyboard. Three-finger salute failed to awaken it, as did removing and replacing the battery. Only after I plugged it into power did it reboot. It did this twice.

* Apparently all the big social sites have mid-level mobile sites for iPhone/Pre-type phones. They differ from the WAP versions in that they use a lot of AJAX. These sites are incredibly annoying because they are sized just right for the screen but the BACK button/gesture doesn’t work. What were they thinking?

* I think I forgot to mention in my first post how nice the screen is. It’s really gorgeous. And the built-in speaker has surrising quality and volume.

* The camera app is EXTREMELY bare-bones (the only controllable variable is the flash setting); but the picture quality is best of any phone I’ve used. Between the fact that it’s more convenient to use and the fact that the photos are actually decent quality, I’m taking more photos with my phone than I have in a long time.,

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