The Palm Pre is a great device, but the battery needs a little help. Like with the iPhone, you shouldn’t expect this phone to last more than a day or two on a charge. Palm gave us these useful tips for making the Pre’s battery last longer. We tried them, and they made a big difference.
Log out of IM, especially AIM. There’s a bug in the AIM client that sucks up battery way too quickly (Palm’s fixing it) and the Google Talk presence alerts also use battery, though less than AIM. Remember, you can’t just throw the IM program’s card away; you have to click on “Sign Out” in the IM applications.
Turn on Wi-Fi. Sounds unintuitive, right? Well, the Pre doesn’t have the greatest Sprint reception of anything we’ve ever tested, and it actually has a relatively power-efficient Wi-Fi radio. When the Pre’s Wi-Fi is running, it uses Wi-Fi rather than 3G to make Internet connections. So connecting via Wi-Fi saves battery rather than wasting it.
Change your e-mail settings. By tapping on the upper left corner of the screen in the e-mail program, you can pop down a menu that lets you change e-mail preferences. For accounts where you get relatively little mail, set them to push. But for accounts where you get an e-mail every five minutes or more often, set them to check every 15 minutes. That will save battery.
With these battery tips, you’ll definitely get more than a day’s use out of each charge on the Palm Pre.
The first reviews of the Palm Pre are coming out today, and I’ve been looking at every aspect of the year’s hottest smart phone. Here’s what we’ve put out tonight – more is coming over the next few days.
The Palm Touchstone inductive charging accessory not only is a fun way to give your Pre some juice, it makes a great stand for music or video playback.
MotionApps Classic PalmOS emulator is the first must-have app for the Pre. It only works with some PalmOS applications for now, but it opens up a huge world of third-party apps for the Pre.
The new Apple update to iTunes doesn’t break the Pre’s almost miraculous iTunes syncing.
Here’s our 22-image slideshow of the Palm Pre in action.
Sprint’s 3G network is actually better than AT&T’s nationwide, though it doesn’t match up to Verizon Wireless’s. The carrier says they’re working on improving customer service, too.
One last effort. A slow, but firm, shove of the chips. All in. Palm’s only hope to save a company once synonymous with smart handheld devices: the Pre. Their eyebrow raised, daring you to call. They flip. Full house. Respectable. Decent. Impressive even. But not the highest hand.
That’s not to say that the phone isn’t good, because it is. The software has quite a few interesting innovations that push the concepts of what people can do with smartphones, like Google Android when it debuted—only better. The market needs this. The industry needs this. We need this. But the hardware? Cheap. Flimsy. Dangerous even.
I’ve used the Pre as my main device for a week, forwarding my number through Google Voice so I could see what it was like living with it. I was able to pull my contacts from Facebook and Google into the phone quite easily, despite the Pre not supporting syncing to OS X Address Book, so it was a near-seamless transition. Sprint reception is unfortunately bad enough at my house to give me horrible voice quality, but not bad enough to drop calls. The device felt great in my pocket and in my hands, and the text and email notifications are informative without being intrusive. Other than trying to be discreet when I went to my usual exotic locales—the supermarket, Costco, restaurants and San Francisco—there wasn’t anything incredible to note. In short, it’s definitely a capable smartphone, one that I would have no problem using full time.
THE HARDWARE: Screen It’s the best multitouch screen we’ve seen yet. Pre’s screen is smaller than both the iPhone and the G2’s, but has the same 320×480 resolution that equals both, which means the pixels are just more compact. Watching the Dark Knight on both phones showed that the Pre was just slightly crisper, and just slightly nicer than on the iPhone. Though, you probably wouldn’t be able to tell unless you had each side by side. It’s like the difference between a $2,500 TV and a $2,000 TV. Unless you had both in your living room or looked at them one after the other, you couldn’t see a difference.
The black bezel also provides a great contrast to the screen, bordering it with an eye-soothing darkness that makes images pop that much more. At maximum brightness, it doesn’t seem as bright as the iPhone, but is bright enough to be just fine under the sun. The glossy finish makes it slightly harder to see if you’re worried about glare, however. In everyday indoor use, the screen is a tiny bit bluer in color temperature than the iPhone’s—either not something you’d notice or a matter of preference.
But the multitouch! I can’t tell if it’s because there’s a better CPU backing it up, or a better digitizer, or if it’s just better software, but the touch is more accurate, more responsive and just plain better than the iPhone’s. The invention of a ripple effect where you press the screen is genius, and goes partway to solving the chronic problem of passive feedback—whether or not the OS knows you’ve pressed the screen. I say partway, since the phone occasionally still doesn’t register your clicks, even when the ripple appears.
Multitouch is glorious
Screen is bright, bezel provides great contrast and overall holds up nicely to the iPhone
Body and Build The first thing you’ll notice as you slide open the Pre is the absurdly sharp ridge digging against your palm. Nowhere—not on the iPhone, the G1, the G2 or any of HTC’s other smartphones—has a phone been so threatening to the integrity of my skin. If you’re pushing up screen from the bottom of the phone, as you’d instinctively want to do, prepare to get sliced. It’s just that irresponsibly sharp.
To be fair, Palm instructs you to open the phone by placing your thumb on the screen itself and pushing up. Fantastic plan, except for the fact that it’s a touchscreen and by placing your thumb on the screen you’re actually moving stuff around. It’s a kluge; a solution thought of after the fact to salvage a horrible hardware design decision. Even if you do things Palm’s way, the top manages to catch occasionally while sliding open, especially if you’re pushing slightly above or below the middle of the phone.
Maybe I’m being a perfectionist here, but this is the one biggest flaw in the hardware; one that’s not a dealbreaker, but really detracts from the overall experience.
The rest of the body, thankfully, is not nearly as bad. But it’s also not spectacular. The two halves of the device come together fairly tightly, but not tightly enough to prevent you from being able to twist the top and bottom like a plastic Oreo cookie. It’s one of those small things that are inconsequential, but extremely annoying to people who own the phone—like the back battery cover requiring you to pry off three different points in order to get it off. Or the microUSB connector cover that takes fingernails and a blatant disregard for having a permanent hole in the side of your phone in order to remove it.
Despite these issues, while closed, the phone feels just right in your hand. It’s thicker than the iPhone, but rounded like a polished stone and shorter than you’d expect. If Palm had just been able to make the Pre feel and look less plasticky, the closed-state exterior would be almost perfect.
Build quality is only so-so, and feels plasticky
Bottom edge of the phone is way too sharp
Keyboard It’s not good enough for a smartphone. Each of my thumbs take up the width of four keys, ensuring that only a fingernail approach would get me anywhere near accurate typing. It’s a very Centro-like key layout, and each individual key feels slightly too rubbery and sticky to be pleasant. Each key offers lots of resistance and doesn’t depress quite enough to get a good tactile feel while typing quickly.
After using the Pre for a week, I’m able to get a respectable word-per-minute rate on the keys, but the fact that there’s no word prediction—the kind that saves your ass on the iPhone or Android G2—negates some speed you may have gained from using a hardware keyboard. The fact that each physical key is 30% or so smaller than a virtual key on the iPhone should illustrate to how difficult it is to hit the buttons accurately, and how much better typing on the Pre would have been if there were better auto-correction. What the Pre does do is make very very minor changes, like “teh” to “the” or “isnt” to “isn’t”, but that’s only this side of nothing.
It’s a hardware keyboard
Keys are too small, plasticky and don’t give enough feedback
Battery Life On most days, with heavier than usual usage, I was able to make the Pre last just about the entire day. Going from 8AM to 9PM with at least 20% battery left should be no problem. The only time I ran the battery down to zero prematurely was the one day where I was doing heavy testing and had AIM on, which currently has a buggy implementation that sucks more power than is necessary. It’s at the very least on par with the iPhone 3G and G2 battery life, and is way better than the G1’s.
Camera It’s a 3-megapixel camera, but when it comes to actually taking pictures, it isn’t any better than the G2 or the iPhone. Like most cheap-o cameras, photos are fine with ample sunlight, but in low-light conditions pictures become grainy—even when using the “flash” on the back, it’s only barely tolerable.
Camera doesn’t suck
THE SOFTWARE Web OS Here, if I may extend my card metaphor, is where Palm laid down four aces. The OS is really where the Pre shines, and manages to create a coherent internet-based platform that’s even more “connected” than Google Android.
On the whole, the OS is quite pleasant looking—with slick icons, a 5-app launch bar and a three-screen menu system that houses all your applications. The bit of the phone under the screen is a gesture area, which you can use to go back a screen (swipe left) or launch apps from the launch tray (swipe up to the screen). The rest of the gestures are the same as the iPhone’s, except the concept of swiping an app up, off the phone, to close it.
It’s too bad the home screen is so much wasted space. There’s just nothing there except for the five apps on the bottom. Palm’s main idea is to keep that area free; free so you can swipe through the app “cards” of the things you have open, free so you can pull up a Universal Search just by typing, and free so you can open the phone by putting your fat thumb on the screen. But this just means you can only quick-launch five apps from the home screen, forcing you to either go into the launcher (+1 click) or start typing the name of the app you want and hope Universal Search brings it up (+ a bunch of clicks).
There are a few particularly commendable features. The little notification bars on the bottom of the phone for new emails, texts, system actions and song changes are wonderful, and can be dismissed with a swipe. The swipe is also slightly different than on the iPhone, allowing you to just delete list items without having to confirm them. The font they used for emails also seems fat and generous without being overly large, and allows the same five emails to be visible at once as on the iPhone.
A lot of time and care and great ideas were put into this OS
Dialing is somewhere where Palm’s reliance on Universal Search becomes an over reliance on Universal Search. To dial a contact, you either have to pull up the contacts app and manually scroll down to the person you want (there’s no alphabet shortcut) or start typing. So, when you have hundreds of contacts, your only reasonable choice is to use the search. There isn’t even a “favorites” screen of any kind; Palm just gives you a retro speed dial feature where you can map numbers to particular keys on the keyboard—a clumsy solution for speed dialing.
Speaking of Universal Search, it does actually work quite well. It’s the same concept as on iPhone 3.0, searching your contacts, apps, Google, Google Maps, Wikipedia and Twitter for whatever you type. Searching is actually faster than the iPhone’s search, but only because it doesn’t also search emails, or calendar entries or your music. So that “Universal” in Universal Search isn’t quite so Universal.
Universal Search for contacts works well
Dated speed dial implementation
Syncing to Facebook and Google Contacts via Synergy works flawlessly, and merges contacts from both services together so you don’t have duplicates of contacts floating around. A manual merge or a manual split can solve any quirks from this function quite easily. Synergy also combines your SMS and IM conversations into one window, so you can seamlessly text someone and then switch over to IM when he reaches his desk. Synergy’s basically just an easy way to make sure services like Google have your data (Contacts and Calendar) pulled down into your phone automatically.
Facebook and Google sync keeps you connected, but may populate your phones with a bunch of people you don’t actually know
A lot of fuss has been made of the Pre’s ability to multitask, and for good reason. It works. Launching a new app is just a matter of hitting the Center button (the gray button on the front), and opening something from the launcher or the tray. The new app pops up as a new card, pushing your currently running programs to the side. Pressing the Center button again pops up all your cards, which you can then flip through to find the app you want. Sliding the card up, off the screen, closes it.
Opening multiple apps at once really does slow down the phone enough to be noticeable. In fact, if you’re doing something particularly intensive, you’ll actually notice your music stutter, which we’ve never experienced once on the iPhone. Ever. The problem with giving you the ability to open a lot of apps at once means you need to police yourself and close them when they’re not in use. But it’s damn well worth it. Being able to view a PDF, then flipping over to Messaging answer a text, then over to Music to change a song, then over to email to tap out a quickie—that’s computing.
Multitasking works well, but it’s up to you to figure out how many apps your phone can take
It’s interesting that launching apps takes one extra click as you fire up the Launcher, and that the Launcher itself only has three pages of apps to use. It’s better than the one long page that Android has, but not quite as generous as the iPhone’s 9 pages. That one extra tap doesn’t seem like much, but over the course of the two years that you own your phone, that’s many seconds lost with extra taps.
Palm makes one of the first mistakes of UI design by not having text under the icons in the Quick Launch bar, making you guess at what each app is. The good news is that you can swap apps in and out from the launcher, so you probably know what those apps are, since you put them there.
Also, the actual act of launching the app is a little frustrating: When you tap an icon, the launcher disappears and all you see is the home screen, as if you did something wrong. You don’t know whether or not your app has opened successfully until it has. Seeing a totally blank screen or some kind of splash screen come up first before the app is running (like the iPhone, once again) would be a better solution.
The Launcher only has three screens, and requires a lot of scrolling to find your app
The home screen’s Quick Launch only holds five apps, but you can customize them
Music and videos, on the other hand, are handled well. The extra man-hours of getting the Pre to pretend that it’s an iPod for iTunes to sync was well worth it. All the proper files, with their metadata, make it over just fine; playlists too. Videos appear in the Videos app, and your song files can be searched and sorted from inside the Music app. What doesn’t seem to be supported are the ratings or play counts in iTunes. And although you can check the box in iTunes to initiate Calendar/Contact sync with the Pre, they don’t actually make it over to the phone.
So it’s not a perfect implementation. DRM tracks from iTunes aren’t syncable, of course, and you have to leave the Music app open at all times, in the background, for your music to play. That concept seems more than obvious on your PC, but becomes somewhat of an oddity on your phone. You’ll find yourself accidentally closing your Music app more than once.
As for video, it’s essentially what you’d imagine a barebones video player to be, supporting MPEG4, H.263, H.264, MP4, M4V, 3GP, 3GPP, 3G2, and 3GP2—more video codecs than the iPhone (surprise, surprise), but not more than other phones in this class. It does the job, there’s seeking and aspect ratio fitting, but it’s nothing special.
If Palm continues to ensure iTunes syncing capability, it’ll ease the transition for people with large iTunes libraries
App rundown: • Google Maps is actually better on the Pre than it is on the iPhone, loading blocks and scrolling around being much smoother than we’re used to • Sprint Navigator (by TeleNav) is an excellent port of the same program you see in other phones—the GPS works smoothly, like in the Google Maps • Doc View and PDF view are capable enough PDF and Word viewers • There’s an alarm clock, but no stopwatch or world clock; you can download a Weather app from the App Catalog • The photo viewer works the same as the iPhone’s, with swiping gestures, and can upload directly to your Facebook account • The browser works off the latest WebKit build, and is fast and snappy; it should be about as good as iPhone 3.0’s browser, since they both use WebKit • Backup works much like Microsoft’s My Phone, storing your contacts, calendar and tasks, as well as app and system settings on your Palm profile; it comes with the phone, and is useful if you ever have to wipe or replace a lost phone • YouTube quality is just as good as any other phone, even if it does seem to take slightly longer to bring up videos on the Pre
First party apps are solid
The App Catalog is pretty bare at launch, with Pandora, Sudoku, Accuweather, AP/NYT, the Classic Palm OS emulator, Connect 4, Spaz (Twitter client), Tweed (another Twitter client), a Stocks app and some various other utilities. Their respective download screens have ample information, including links to the developer’s home page and support pages, as well as ratings and reviews. Once downloaded, the apps behave like any other native apps on the Pre, and can be multitasked just fine.
All the apps in the catalog now are made by developers with a closer association with Palm, so they get access to the native libraries. Why haven’t they opened up the SDK and allowed everyone to use native libraries instead of just web tech like HTML/Javascript? I don’t know. When it comes down to apps, lack of open SDK is why the Pre is currently inferior to the iPhone or Android. Under this plan, we’ll get a small percentage of good, solid apps, and a bunch of apps that aren’t living up to their potential.
The App Catalog has a handful of decent apps already, but the fact that Palm is singling out only trusted developers to write software for the Pre isn’t a great sign
Now for the miscellaneous complaints. The lack of a D-Pad on the phone forces you to always tap where you want, even when the list item is just one notch lower than the one currently selected. Copying and pasting only works in text fields where you can write, not when reading emails or SMS or web pages.
VERDICT
Think of it like this. The software is agile, smart and capable. The hardware, on the other hand, is a liability. If Palm can get someone else to design and build their hardware—someone who has hands and can feel what a phone is like when physically used, that phone might just be one of the best phones on the market.
I’m bored of the iPhone. The core functionality and design have remained the same for the last two years, and since 3.0 is just more of the same, and—barring some kind of June surprise—that’s another year of the same old icons and swiping and pinching. It’s time for something different. The Pre may have hardware that’s worse than the G1/G2, but the whole package—the software and the hardware—isn’t bad. It’s good. It’s different. That’s something we can get behind. I can’t wait to see what Palm gets dealt in their next hand.
Impressive start to an OS that should form the base of some quality phones in the future
Hardware quality is lacking, and feels flimsy and plasticky compared to the G1, G2 and the iPhone
UPDATE 7pm Pacific: Most major media outlets have now published their official reviews of the Palm Pre. Wired’s Steven Levy found it to be a good-looking, intuitive, capable, powerful phone. Battery life is dreadfully short, but he reports that multitasking rules: Wired.com Product Reviews: Multitasking Pre Brims With Power, Potential
Times tech writer David Pogue confirmed to Wired.com that the review, published on the Hyderabad-based Financial Chronicle website, is his.
Although it’s an early draft, it’s clear that Pogue likes the phone. He calls it “an elegant, joyous, multitouch smartphone that seems intended to be ‘iPhone, remixed.’” With the screen turned off, its hardware reminds him of a “stunning, featureless talisman.” On, the webOS operating system is “gorgeous, fluid and exciting.” He likes its removable battery. And his conclusion makes it clear he’s all over it:
So do the Pre’s perks (beautiful hardware and software, compact size, keyboard, swappable battery, flash, multitasking, calendar consolidation) outweigh its weak spots (battery life, slow program opening, ringer volume, Sprint network)? Oh, yes indeedy. Especially when you consider that last weak spot might be going away. Verizon Wireless has announced that it will carry the Pre ‘‘in the next six months or so.’’ Can you imagine how great that will be? One of the world’s best phones on the best U.S. cell network? If the story of Palm’s rise from the ashes really is like a movie plot, then that twist will give it one heck of a happy ending.
It’s not clear how this review wound up being published so early, but readers on Twitter are already all over the story.
Palm has touted the Pre’s ability to synchronize seamlessly with Apple iTunes. But the latest iTunes 8.2 update raised some doubts as to whether iTunes would still connect flawlessly with the Pre.
Now sources who have tested the Pre with the iTunes 8.2 have confirmed to Wired.com that music syncing still works.
Palm’s new webOS operating system, which powers the Pre, has media sync as one of its key features. With it, users can connect their Pre to a PC or Mac, select ‘media sync’ on the phone and wait for iTunes to launch on their desktop, says Palm.
This effectively makes it as easy to integrate a Pre with iTunes as an iPhone or iPod.
But the feature is dependent to a large extent on Apple’s willingness to play ball. Although iTunes 8.2 doesn’t break the media sync feature, there’s no guarantee that future versions also won’t. After all, what incentive does Apple have to allow easy integration between one of its products and a competing smartphone?
With only days to go before at least four or five Sprint stores begin selling Palm’s Pre, we’re already seeing at least one employee with some time on his hands give the smartphone a go. Moral of the story? Right about now would be an awesome time to know somebody who can get behind a Sprint counter without using an unlawful amount of force.
Ready for your daily dose of obvious? Good. After Verizon Wireless CEO Lowell McAdam proudly proclaimed that America’s largest mobile operator would be painting the Palm Pre red “in about six months,” Sprint has come forward to make sure we know that said statement is probably right on the money. According to Sprint spokesman James Fisher: “We have the Pre through 2009.” Short, sweet and chock full of pent-up rage. ‘Course, six months after the Pre’s launch on Sprint lands us in December, giving VZW just enough time to cripple the phone’s hottest features and push it out before Valentine’s Day. Sounds pretty reasonable, no?
According to Fortune’s respectable Apple 2.0 blog, the Palm Pre has a rather sneaky trick up its sleeve. First, a reminder of the main reason for the iPod’s original success: iTunes. The “vertical integration” of iTunes (for organization) and the iPod (for playback) was a killer combo.
In order to work as well, the Pre needs something like iTunes. So what about iTunes itself? That’s the Pre’s trick — it will sync with Apple’s own software. Fortune:
Plug a Pre into a Mac and it syncs, seamlessly, with Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes.
It won’t pick up iPhone applications, of course, or older, Fairplay DRM’ed music, but everything else should just work. The Pre team is full of ex-Apple engineers, so they should certainly know the strings that need to be pulled inside iTunes to get this working.
It does it by faking out iTunes, making the jukebox software think that it is connected to a real iPod. Hook it up and you’ll be given three options: USB mass storage device, charging only or iTunes sync.
This is a ballsy move from Palm, and we totally love it: a big fat middle finger at Apple. Apple will, we are sure, be readying its legal attack dogs as I write, and don’t be at all surprised if an iTunes update pops up around June 6th. This fight just got a lot more interesting.
Palm media sync is a feature of webOS that synchronizes seamlessly with iTunes, giving you a simple and easy way to transfer DRM-free music, photos and videos to your Palm Pre.(2) Simply connect Pre to your PC or Mac via the USB cable, select “media sync” on the phone, and iTunes will launch on your computer desktop. You can then choose which DRM-free media files to transfer.
Sony Ericsson announced three new phones–Yari, Satio and Aino–that are easy on the eye and boast some powerful features for multimedia fiends. The phones won’t be available until the fourth quarter but the pictures out right now are enough to make us drool.
The Satio is a candybar style phone that was first introduced at the Barcelona Mobile World Congress earlier this year. The device was then called the ‘Idou.’ The Satio is aimed at users who are focused on mobile entertainment as it offers easy access to music and video, says Sony Ericsson.
The second phone, called Yari, is a slider phone billed as a gaming device. What’s interesting about it is that it offers the same kind of gesture controlled movement during games as the Nintendo Wii. That’s not much of an innovation though, considering that most smartphones currently have accelerometers and sensors that can be channeled to create a fun, gaming experience. The phone will come with a 2.4-inch display, 4 megapixel camera and GPS capability. (See complete list of specs here.)
Finally, there’s Aino, a phone with a keypad and a touch interface. Aino will have a whopping 8.1 megapixel camera and will offer a snap-on speaker stand for audio aficionados. (See complete list of specs here.)
The three devices are likely to be available unlocked in the U.S., which should come as no surprise to Sony Ericsson fans. But without support from any of the major telecom carriers, they will carry a price tag (around $500 or more) that is likely to put them out of the reach for most of us.
Sony Ericsson will also have to contend with strong competition from the Palm Pre and possibly a new Apple iPhone. The Palm Pre will be available from Sprint starting June 6 and on other major carriers such as Verizon and AT&T early next year. Apple is said likely to introduce a new iPhone this summer.
Till then, for some mobile eye candy check out Sony Ericsson’s photos of its latest devices.
The Palm Pre will be exclusive to Sprint for a weirdly short six months, after which the handset will show up on Verizon, according to CEO Lowell McAdam. They’ll also get the Storm 2 at about the same time.
That the new BlackBerry Storm will be a Verizon phone isn’t surprising, since they carried the first one. The six month outer limit for an arrival date also isn’t that surprising, since we’ve seen early pictures of the device.
The big news here is obviously the Pre, which, although heralded mostly as a savior for a wounded Palm Inc, could also be a much-need exlusive boon for Sprint. From Reuters:
Sprint shares were down 18 cents at $4.89 in late morning trade on the New York Stock Exchange while Palm shares were up $1.15 at $11.68 on Nasdaq.
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The Palm Pre is a great device, but the battery needs a little help. Like with the iPhone, you shouldn’t expect this phone to last more than a day or two on a charge. Palm gave us these useful tips for making the Pre’s battery last longer. We tried them, and they made a big difference.
It’s here.
Screen
Multitouch is glorious
Screen is bright, bezel provides great contrast and overall holds up nicely to the iPhone
Build quality is only so-so, and feels plasticky
Bottom edge of the phone is way too sharp
Keyboard
Camera
Web OS
There are a few particularly commendable features. The little notification bars on the bottom of the phone for new emails, texts, system actions and song changes are wonderful, and can be dismissed with a swipe. The swipe is also slightly different than on the iPhone, allowing you to just delete list items without having to confirm them. The font they used for emails also seems fat and generous without being overly large, and allows the same five emails to be visible at once as on the iPhone.
Dialing is somewhere where Palm’s reliance on Universal Search becomes an over reliance on Universal Search. To dial a contact, you either have to pull up the contacts app and manually scroll down to the person you want (there’s no alphabet shortcut) or start typing. So, when you have hundreds of contacts, your only reasonable choice is to use the search. There isn’t even a “favorites” screen of any kind; Palm just gives you a retro speed dial feature where you can map numbers to particular keys on the keyboard—a clumsy solution for speed dialing.
Dated speed dial implementation
Syncing to Facebook and Google Contacts via Synergy works flawlessly, and merges contacts from both services together so you don’t have duplicates of contacts floating around. A manual merge or a manual split can solve any quirks from this function quite easily. Synergy also combines your SMS and IM conversations into one window, so you can seamlessly text someone and then switch over to IM when he reaches his desk. Synergy’s basically just an easy way to make sure services like Google have your data (Contacts and Calendar) pulled down into your phone automatically.
A lot of fuss has been made of the Pre’s ability to multitask, and for good reason. It works. Launching a new app is just a matter of hitting the Center button (the gray button on the front), and opening something from the launcher or the tray. The new app pops up as a new card, pushing your currently running programs to the side. Pressing the Center button again pops up all your cards, which you can then flip through to find the app you want. Sliding the card up, off the screen, closes it.
App rundown:
The App Catalog is pretty bare at launch, with Pandora, Sudoku, Accuweather, AP/NYT, the Classic Palm OS emulator, Connect 4, Spaz (Twitter client), Tweed (another Twitter client), a Stocks app and some various other utilities. Their respective download screens have ample information, including links to the developer’s home page and support pages, as well as ratings and reviews. Once downloaded, the apps behave like any other native apps on the Pre, and can be multitasked just fine.
The 