Palm Pre Cell Phone Review

Functionality

Along the bottom of the screen in most views you will see the Quick Launch area which includes five standard  icons: Phone, Calendar, Contacts, Email and Launcher, as shown in Figure 13. The first four  are customizable. So you can place any often-used application there.

Figure 13: The Quick Launch area.

The Phone option takes you to the dialer, shown in Figure 14. From here you can dial a number, access your voice mail or see recent calls. In our testing the Sprint service was good, but this may depend on your location. The voice quality of the phone and the speakerphone is excellent.

Figure 14: The dialer.

Contacts and email work as you would expect, only better because of Synergy which really helps to consolidate information. Importing contacts and initiating email on the Pre is easy. It can handle multiple email accounts and types including POP, IMAP, Exchange, and AOL and other online services. The Pre lets you see them separately or together. It allows you to send and receive a variety of popular attachment types.

The Launcher icon lets you launch applications, which we will talk about in the next page.

The Pre has built-in Wi-Fi, Bluetooth. It also has many ways of conversing other than the telephone. It has support for IM, SMS and MMS.  Once a conversation is
started you can easily switch between SMS and instant messaging, a feature that we’ve not seen on any other phone.

The Pre has 8GB of storage built-in storage, of which about 7 GB is user accessible. This is ample, but since you can also use the phone to play music, take photos, and play music, we would like to have to option of having more built-in memory.

The music player in the Pre is very good. It displays cover art and has good music management. When we tried, it also synched seamlessly with iTunes. Shortly after that, however, Apple changed iTunes to block out the Pre. The Pre countered by developing another work around for Apple’s block, and as we write this, iTunes is working with the Pre again. We can’t say where this will wind up, but we will say that this is a great feature  on the Pre. We feel that Apple can only gain customers who might purchase music in their store if they were to open iTune to the Pre and other music players and would like to see that happen.