Today I will wrap up my thoughts after my first two months with the Palm Pre. It is certainly a neat little phone. There are some things that it does better than other phones I have owned, and some things it does worse. Let's get started with the wrap-up.

One of my main gripes is the dock, and I am embarrassed to say that I do not like it because it is not like the iPhone's desktop. Four apps is too few to have available on the desktop. If they would just go to eight, that would be a big help. I like my wallpaper, but if I really need to see it, I can look at the actual photo. I am not sure why Palm seems so wrapped around the axle about keeping your wallpaper visible. That being said, the scrollable, uprising dashboard menu (the primary means of accessing your applications) is functional and pleasant. I just wish that I could have more of my most used apps right on the desktop.

Perhaps the most infuriating thing about the Pre is the wonky behavior sometimes seen when you are trying to clear alerts. It took me several weeks to figure out that, for most alerts that are stacked with multiple instances, you can click on the left-most part of the alert and get presented with a listing of all applicable alerts in that category. In other words, if you have had multiple appointment alerts, tapping the left-most edge of the alert bar will give you a list of all appointment alerts and allow you to clear them all at once. The frustration is that some of these stacked alerts are presented with a separate, smaller square on the left side, while others are just presented as a solid bar. Similarly, when presented with single alerts, sometimes you get a shorter route to clearing it by tapping the left-most side of the alert-bar, and sometimes you do not.

One example of this is in the way that the left-side tap does not work to clear missed phone calls. Tapping the missed phone call alert at the bottom of the screen results in the phone dialing the number back. In order to clear a missed phone call alert, I have to open up the phone app from my desktop, tap the Missed Calls button, and view the list. This sort of defeats the purpose of an alert, which should be presented to show you information that, if sufficient, does not need to be viewed in its entirety. 90% of the time that someone calls me, I just need to know that they called. I do not need to view my Missed Calls log to see what time they called and from where. More importantly, when all of that information is presented in the Master Calls log, which is the first view presented when you tap the Calls Log button, I should not have to drill another level down to the Missed Calls listing just to clear the alert.

The other annoying alert to try and clear is the Alarm Clock. The clock is sufficiently loud, and in fact is one of the few alarms that actually wakes me up by itself. But it seems like every time I try to clear the alarm via the different means, it is questionable as to whether or not the alert icon will actually clear. There are times that I have had to shut the phone down and restart it in order to have the alarm icon clear.

I commented yesterday about how I have jumped onboard the cloud computing train full bore. My vehicle of choice for keeping my smartphones aligned with the same data is Google. I have lost the partnership with my Google account and the Palm Pre at least once so far, and have had to enter the information again. I only sync my Pre with my Google Calendar and my Google Contacts. However, whenever you enter the information for one, the Pre automatically adds synchronization of your associated GMail account, which I do not want on the phone because I do not actually use my GMail for anything other than forwarding work appointments to the phone. As in all things, I do not like having to take an additional step in administering a device because someone assumed they would know how I would want to use it.

On the plus side, multi-tasking on the Pre rocks. One of the things I hated on the iPhone was that if I was going back and forth between apps, I had to wait each time for the app to restart. I have not pushed the Pre to the edge in terms of just popping a bunch of task cards open for the sake of observing performance. I can only say that I have used it in my own normal operations for two months and have yet to have a performance issue due to having too many apps open.

If you do a Google for Palm Pre issues, you will likely come across a few forum posts about the Palm Pre "Phone Offline" issue. This is when, for some reason, the Pre goes to this mode and loses connectivity with the Sprint Network. In some extreme occasions, some customers have been unable to re-establish comms with the network and have had to take their phone into the store after getting no help from tech support. I hope I never get bitten with the more extreme case. Mine has gone to this mode, but monkeying around with cycling it back-and-forth between Airplane Mode on and off eventually cleared it.

My girlfriend lives in a small town in northern Virginia. Her town has 3G. My girlfriend's parents live in a small town in West Virginia. Their town has 3G. I live in a town with a major university, two major corporation facilities, two major hospitals, and a population that is about four times that of the two aforementioned towns...and that is without counting the college's student body. Yet AT&T here does not have 3G. And no one in the store can tell you when it is coming. They claim "soon". Yet, when I called the corporate line (an experiment I ran on numerous occassions before finally deciding to switch to Sprint), where I was attended to as a business customer, the upgrade date for the local AT&T towers was nowhere to be found. One of the reasons that I am on Sprint is because I got tired of waiting. The Pre's 3G performance is superb. I can finally look up online information at more than a snail's pace.

One of the things about computing in the cloud and relying on a third party service to sync my smartphones is that it does not always work. I would say that my occurrence of error is definitely in the single-digit percentile. But I must admit that I have seen appointments that do not sync and do not replicate across both phones. I am not ascribing the fault for all of this to the Pre and docking it points as part of this review. I am simply putting it out there so that others are aware of it. Some of the issue is definitely with Google. I will state, however, that, from my analysis to date, I have evaluated the issues as either having to do with Google or the Pre, never due to the Windows Mobile phone that I also use.

A few anomalies are that appointments do not sync when I forward them to my GMail account unless I have already accepted them on my desktop. The other and more annoying thing is that if I move an appointment in my Google Calendar by editing the start time, the new appointment does not sync with the Pre. I have to make a new appointment to effect that change. I do not have this problem with my WinMo phone; editing appointments in Google Calendar results in replication to the phone. Perhaps the most aggravating glitch is that you can not make a zero-time appointment on the Pre (an appointment that has no duration, ie begins and ends at the same time). I use this method in other calendars to signify go-times for certain events, like my target-time for departing work each day, for instance. Every appointment made in the Pre's calendar app has a minimum duration time of 30 minutes. Again, a poor implementation made by someone who assumed that they knew how I would use the app and has therefore restricted my freedom to employ a reasonable method of use.

The single-most glaring negative against the Palm Pre? The start-up and shutdown times. I am talking "push-the-button-and-walk-away-to-do-something-else" kind of slow. Like watch a movie. Or wash the car. Ok, admittedly it is not that bad, but it is certainly the worst than I have ever seen with any smartphone I have ever owned.

There are only a handful of apps available at this time that are worth anything, at least as far as my needs go. Fandango, AccuWeather, Tweed, and Evernote see daily use when I am carrying the Pre. I also have Speed Brain, SplashID, and NFL loaded, but have yet to use them. One of my marks of approval of the Windows Mobile OS is that I never have to download new apps for my WinMo phones. That seems to me to say that, based on practical, everyday use, the OS is complete, and wants for very little in terms of additions. This is the way I think mobile phone OS' should be. The fact that the iPhone has over 25,000 apps in its App Store is not an indicator of a healthy design, in my opinion. It is an indicator of all of the things that the associated OS was missing when the iPhone initially shipped.

So while I am not happy that there are not new apps pouring into the App Catalog, I guess it is ok since I do not really want to have to add anything to the phone. The one glaring item missing is a document editor, but my understanding is that DataViz is working on bringing their Documents-to-Go app to the Pre later this year.

While I indicated in my part one review that the keyboard was not a show-stopper for me, a major detractor is that Palm expects you to use it. This has the greatest impact on the Contacts app where Contacts are not sortable into major categories, such as Business, Personal, and so forth. Contacts can be assigned a category designation, but there is not way to apply a filter into the Contacts view. Palm expects that when I need to call "Frank", I will start typing his name and the various instances of his name will be presented in the search window, from which I can initiate the phone call. This is fine; except when I am in the car...and need to dial someone with the last name "Zapata". I am then required to scroll through every single one of my contacts (I have 210, by the way) to get to the name.

Further crippling the integration between the Phone and Contacts apps is the fact that there is no mechanism to add favorites, which would at least facilitate a slightly quicker way to get to my most frequently dialed numbers. This is just idiotic.

Another instance of incredibly poor design is the functionality of the Memos app. Memos in the original Palm OS was arguably one of the features that made the original PDA take off like a bottle-rocket. But let me say something for all of the purveyors of smartphone OS'. Please do not bother releasing another operating system that has a Memo or Notes app that can not sync with anything so that I can see and retain my notes on a PC. Both Apple and now Palm have been guilty of this egregious oversight.

Very little of the information I manage on my phones are data-items that I only need access to in one place. And no; including the ability to email the memo does not cut it. That requires me to email it every time I update the memo, download it to a local PC, and then manually delete the old version and replace it with the new. Add to that the added difficulty of then maintaining some form of version control across multiple PCs. Why would the Pre debut with features that accentuate cloud-computing and making all of its data available via the web, and then exclude the Memo app from this umbrella?

I have not tried the Music or Video apps yet, but will likely do so in the next few weeks. I now have a PC that just has a small catalogue of my iTunes archive; just some of the songs that are in MP3 format. Since the Palm does not recognize AAC files unless they have been brought over via syncing with iTunes, it will be easier to just focus on testing using MP3s. I am not going to get in the mode of syncing the Pre with iTunes because the shenanigans between Palm and Apple are only going to continue.

Despite the negatives I have discussed above, I am happy with the Pre as a smartphone. Happier than I was with the iPhone. One of the reasons why is the great way in which updates are delivered. Additions to the OS are delivered over-the-air (or OTA). This means that I frequently read about a webOS upgrade during the week. I do nothing; my Pre sits on my nightstand quietly. When I pick it up on Friday, the device has already downloaded the OS update without any intervention on my part. I recognize the danger in this; that one day an update might nuke (or, in the popular vernacular, brick) my Pre and I would know nothing about it and would have been powerless to stop it. It is a risk I will take over the 30 minute software update process I was going through for the iPhone.

The absolutely best feature about the Pre is that it is OS agnostic with regards to interfacing with other computing devices. If the machine has a USB port and can recognize external storage devices, the Pre can interact with it. It has allowed itself to be charged by my XBox 360. I have dragged and dropped files both onto it and off of it in various instances of Windows, as well as OS X. This is invaluable when needing to get photos off of the phone. Even my WinMo phone needs Windows and some locally installed instance of a sync application in order for me to extract data out of its memory or storage card (that is, AFAIK; I am not about to risk plugging my HTC TouchPro into a Mac without doing some research on what has happened to people who have tried this in the past).

Overall, the Pre is a solid phone. I overheard one guy complaining about some of its features while I was buying mine and he was in the process of bringing his back. Most of his complaints involved using the phone for play. While I do not mind using the phone for entertainment, at the end of the day the most important thing for me is for the Pre to participate in my PIM ecosystem without breaking anything. For that, the Pre and its associated webOS do well, and bring some forces to the table that other phones and OS' do not. While I have used the iPhone as a foil to lot of points of evaluation of the Pre, the one thing they have in common that Apple can be thanked for is the ability of a phone to evolve via upgrades to the Operating System. Apple has been the most effective in implementing this market model, and I am sure that the Pre will benefit from it. The device will continue to grow and evolve, returning value on the investment that early adopters have made in a phone that should eventually accommodate most of their needs and desires in their day-to-day employment of this smartphone.