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I’m in love with my Palm Pre

I've never been much of a tech/gadget junkie (outside of gaming, of course), but I started to get kind of pumped for the Palm Pre. Working with so many iPhone users, I would often find myself jealous of what the phone/gaming platform can do, and I started to want something like that for myself. E3 was the icing on the cake, as being around 800 other individuals with iPhones was just too much. So, I took the plunge, and while I think the Pre isn't rivaling the iPhone in terms of what it can do (yet, anyway), I do think it's the best phone I've ever had.

Likes:

• Conversation grouping: If I'm on AIM, or texting, the phone does a good job of collecting all of my conversations together and keeps things neat. It's a good approach that allows me to have multiple conversations going at once without having to navigate a ton of menus and doesn't keep me from browsing or doing other things mid-conversation.
• Battery life: I was way more concerned about this when I had auto sign-in for AIM and Email, but once I set those to manual, I started seeing some great battery life. I can almost go two days on one charge now, and I still have access to those features whenever I want them.
• Apps: There aren't many apps available yet, but I did find a couple that have been incredibly useful right out of the gate. Those are Tweed (Twitter), Sporting News Pro Baseball (Baseball news and live scores for all games), Fandango (purchase movie tickets right from my phone?! Yes, please!), and GoodFood (restaurant guide/locator with user reviews).

Dislikes:

• Gestures: I like the gestures overall, but they seem kind of limited. I don't know why the device only senses a right-to-left swipe, when it should have intergrated a left-to-right, too.
• Pop-up home bar: There's this gesture you can do to immediately pull up your home bar (customizable) no matter what you're doing, and it seems silly to me. I haven't used it once, especially when just using the normal gestures gets you there about as fast as you would want.
• Clicky clamshell: When the device is closed (see: not slid open like in the image above), and you press on the top portion of the touch-screen, the device kind of clicks, like there's a little play with it. I don't like that, because I keep thinking I'm going to snap the thing in half. It should be more sturdy here.
• Battery dies, it dies: If the phone ever gets fully dead, or the internal battery is nuked, then you lose everything on your phone. Palm lets you download your "profile" to a new phone rather easily, but not all of your settings make it over. Real bummer there.

So, yeah, that's just some quick thoughts. As someone who generally dislikes the Mac stuff (I'm looking at you, iTunes), I'm glad the Pre turned out to be such a good device, because it's a nice iPhone alternative and gets the job done for me.

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