Getting used to it has occupied a fair bit of my time, but here are a few early impressions. Obviously, some of these are impressions of the Android OS, and others are about the phone’s hardware.

• The Android calendar will let me set alarms anywhere from 1-99 units in advance of events, where the units can be minutes, hours, days, or even weeks. This actually beats what the old PalmOS used to let me do (and the webOS replaced by a simple drop-down of 5, 10, 15, and 30 minutes, 1 hour, and 1 day — not very useful; sometimes I want 3 hours’ warning).
• The Epic is a much bigger, chunkier device than the Prē was. It still fits in my pants pocket, but not so smoothly. Not only is it just plain larger than the Prē, it also has less-rounded corners. Also, the protective case I got for the Epic is the rubberized kind, noticeably thicker than the “invisible skin” I had on my Prē.
• What’s with the battery gauge not giving an actual percent? That seems so… naff. I’ve found a nice app to give me usable information: Modded Logic’s Battery Status Bar.
• Live Wallpaper is cool as anything. It also seems to eat batteries like a very hungry thing. I’m still trying to decide if it’s worth it or not.
• Also, the battery seems to take a looooong time to charge. I could plug in a Prē with a nearly-empty battery and have it back up near full in only a couple of hours. The Epic seems to gain only about 20% or so of battery charge in a similar period of time. Yikes!
• Swype works impressively well. Even using the phone one-handed (and hence Swyping with my thumb as I cradle the phone in my fingers), I can frequently get it to understand me well enough (after only a day and a half!) that I rarely slide out the physical keyboard.
• On the other hand, having that physical keyboard available is still really nice, not least because it has cursor-arrow keys, allowing easy editing of text in a way that was tooth-grindingly frustrating at best (and sometimes simply impossible) on the Palm Prē.
• Another big win: visible scroll bars while you’re scrolling a list (then they fade out). The lack of any indication of where you were in a list (especially a long one) was one of my strongest complaints against webOS when it first came out, and Palm hasn’t addressed it in the various updates over the past more-than-a-year. Google’s gotten this right: The scroll bar doesn’t take up any screen space except when you’re using it, and at that point, it gives you both size and position feedback, like a good scroll bar should.
• And, for yet another win that I wasn’t expecting: Haptic feedback! It turns out to be really useful, not just a bell and/or whistle. (Honestly, I’ll have to put some thought into just what’s so cool about it — and what’s so useful; they’re not quite the same things! That can become another article for another time.)
• The standard Android Memo application astounds me. I didn’t think it was possible to design one that was worse than webOS’ “sticky-note inspired” design, but this actually manages it. In its favor, it has 5 colors instead of 4. To its detriment, it can’t display more than 4 of them on the screen at once (as compared to webOS’ 12), and it won’t let you sort the memos by anything other than last edit time. This is a total loss for user experience: Not only does the sorting look completely random until you figure out what’s going on, but it keeps changing, meaning the user can never learn where in the list a given memo’s going to be.

Obviously, there are other memo- and note-pad apps in the Android marketplace. I have faith that quite a few of them will prove better and more useful than the one that came with the OS.

Also, the screen is big and bright and clear. That huge screen is part of the reason for both the device’s size and the battery-life problems, but it sure does look pretty.

All in all, I think I like it. I’ve certainly found more to like than to dislike in the past couple of days, which puts it noticeably ahead of the Palm Prē and webOS, which caused me such grief and anguish last summer (and last autumn, and this spring).

If only it were smaller and had twice the battery capacity… (Yes, I know I’m asking for something completely unreasonable. After all, I’d like that smaller phone to still have the same size screen. Who cares if it’s geometrically impossible?)

When I press the power switch, the phone should turn on.

(Assuming the battery is charged, of course. And I’m willing to accept that a modern smartphone needs to be charged every night. No problem there.) But given that, when I press the “on” switch, I should see the screen light up within, say, one second. It should not take ten seconds. By the time ten seconds go by, I’ll assume that I must not have pressed the power switch hard enough, and I’ll try pressing it a second time.

Did you know that the Palm Prē stores power-switch presses in its input buffer? That means that when the phone finally does get around to waking up, it processes the first impulse, lights up the screen… and then immediately blanks it again as it processes the second impulse. This is extremely frustrating.

When the screen lights up and shows me an “unlock” icon, it should actually let me unlock the unit.

I’m not complaining about the fact that it shows me that icon. I recognize that it’s there to conserve my battery life by making me prove that I’m a human being, and not an inanimate object that jostled the phone in a crowded purse or backpack. I’m fine with that.

What I’m not fine with is having to try three-to-five times to get the icon to recognize my input. And it’s not like the Prē stores this stimulus in its input buffer, so if I just wait for it to catch up… it blanks out the screen and I have to try again.

When a call comes in, I should be able to answer it.

I’ve lost track of how many incoming calls I’ve missed because I couldn’t get the phone to turn on in time to catch the call before it went to voice-mail. The screen was showing me the name and photo of the friend who was calling me — sometimes a friend who I’d explicitly asked to call me, and whose call I was anticipating — and yet I couldn’t actually pick up the phone and say hello to them.

This is what we in the user interface biz call a total, ignominious failure.

(Most of the time, the failure is because the damned “unlock” icon wasn’t taking input yet, so this is really just a special case of the problem above — but it happens in such a different context, and it has such different consequences, that it counts as a separate item.)

When I type on the keyboard, the characters should show up within 5 seconds of the keypresses.

This has the benefit of allowing me to realize that the keypresses have triggered, as well as letting me see what the hell I’ve already succeeded in inputting. It lets me see if I need to go back and fix a typo. It gives me that warm, fuzzy feeling that the phone might actually respond to my input, instead of just sitting there imitating a sleek, shiny, black, sexy rock.

Waiting a full ten seconds (as has happened to me on occasion) is even worse. I wouldn’t want you to get the impression that 5 seconds is the worst delay I’ve ever seen on the Prē; it’s just the limit of what I’ll accept as “basic minimum functionality” (and I think even that is being incredibly generous).

At least once per day, the Palm Prē fails me on at least one of these completely basic requirements. When it works, it’s kind of nice, and even manages to be useful some of the time. But there are just too many occasions when it flat-out fails to function. I’m sick and tired of being out on the town with friends and having someone say, “Can we look up such-and-so on Yelp?” and then struggling with my phone for five minutes before giving up and saying, “No. I can’t look that up for you”. At which point some kind soul with a working smartphone takes pity on me and finishes the job in about a minute.

This is also not meant to be an exhaustive list of the Palm Prē’s failings, or those of webOS. There are all sorts of UI and UX decisions I could rail against, but I don’t want this blog to become a full-time anti-Prē and anti-webOS blog. I have wider interests than that. This post is just meant to be a list of the basic, core usability failures that have driven me to distraction.

For some people, the iPhone’s lack of a physical keyboard is a deal-breaker. For me, the smaller-than-standard keyboard on the average netbook is a powerful disincentive: If I had to use one, it would slow down my interaction with the netbook — and if I learned to be fluent and productive with the small keyboard, it might mess up my muscle memory for dealing with full-size keyboards on my “real” computers. It’s not a trade-off I’m willing to make.

The Palm Prē’s physical keyboard is tiny. I can only key it with my thumbs, and there’s no risk of interference with my pre-existing keyboarding skills. Inputting data with it is achingly slow, but offset by the device’s wonderful portability (it fits into a pocket even easier than an iPhone does). But I can’t really edit text with it, because there’s no D-pad to do precise cursor positioning with. Even the Orange+finger-movement trick is balky and awkward, in my experience; if I want to correct a single-letter typo, getting the cursor after the incorrect character so I can backspace and correct it is such an ordeal, it’s often quicker and easier for me to use Shift+Backspace to delete the entire word and then retype the whole thing.

In effect, even though the phone has the ability to edit text, the interface makes it so difficult that I can’t use the capability. It might as well not be there. What would a better interface mechanism look like?

In Charles Stross’ Accelerando, the protagonist starts off with a set of glasses that provide him with a constant Net connection and heads-up displays of whatever he desires: maps, email, people’s vCards, and so on. But Stross (perhaps wisely) doesn’t give much detail about the glasses’ input mechanism. “He glances up and grabs a pigeon, crops the shot and squirts it at his weblog to show he’s arrived.” How? That part’s left to the reader’s imagination. (A very crafty trick on Stross’ part, and one that writers can pull off and user-interface engineers cannot.)

If I want to do with my phone what Stross’ character did, I have to yank it out of my pocket, press the power switch, then make a swiping gesture that tells the phone its attention has been requested by a real human (rather than simply being jostled in a pocket or handbag). But Stross’ protagonist’s glasses were already powered up and in use, so suppose I were already using my phone and decided I wanted to take a picture of something?

Tap a physical button to escape from whatever app I was already using, then press an on-screen button for the main “launcher” feature. Find the “camera” icon, tap it, wait for the camera to load. Then I can aim and press another on-screen button to capture the image.

Cropping is pretty much out of the question, although someone could write an app for it. And I actually can update my blog from my phone; it has a WebKit-based browser and enough screen real estate to make writing and posting an entry possible, albeit painful.

Stross’ interface has the luxury of not having to be real, of course. But something that already works as a real-life prototype is the Sixth Sense system, built by Pranav Mistry of MIT’s Media Lab. It senses the user’s hands, and you can take a picture simply by framing whatever-it-is you want to capture with your fingers and thumbs. (It does a whole lot of other things, too, and I highly recommend the entire video.)

Again, I take absolutely no credit for this one; all credit goes to pzil.

Phone must be rooted – I did with the USB cable

1. root your way in
2. Invoke sqlite: (I’m not sure if the db file may be different, but it will be in that dir)
   
   sqlite3 /var/palm/data/file_.usr.palm.applications.com.palm.app.firstuse_0/0000000000000003.db
   
   update properties set value=’false’ where name=’isInvalidToken’;
   
   update properties set value=’language’ where name=’screenName’;
   
   .quit
3. Exit the linux prompt, and reboot your phone

I’ve tried the above, and it worked like a charm. After rebooting, I had to tell the phone that I wanted to speak English (not Spanish), re-agree to the Terms and Conditions, and then sign back in to my Palm Profile. It automatically pre-filled my email address; I had to remember my password. Then the Prē downloaded my profile data, asked for another reboot, and came back up as if nothing had ever been wrong.

Two other people on the Prē forum also claim to have had success with pzil’s method.

But what if you don’t have a rooted Prē? Well, I got the following email from Palm tech support this morning. The instructions are messy and scary, and I’m not sure how easily I could follow them if I actually wanted to. I’m glad I don’t have to. If anyone tries these, I’d love to hear about your experience.

Hello Kai,

As you had the issue regarding “getting signed out and erase all data” screen on Prē device, we have found resolution about it.

Please follow the below given steps :

1. First you need to restart the phone using webOS Doctor which will erase all contents of the phone, including data stored in the USB drive.
2. Then download the webOS Doctor from palm.com/rom. Make sure that WebOS doctor will need the phone’s serial number to download the file.
3. Then insert the USB cable into the AC charger, and insert the AC charger into a wall outlet.
4. Now remove and reinsert the phone battery. Please check the link given below to remove and replace battery :
   http://kb.palm.com/wps/portal/kb/common/article/44919_en.html
   
   Then, Press and hold the volume up button, and insert the USB cable into the phone.
5. A large USB icon should appear on the phone screen.
6. Then disconnect the USB cable from the AC charger and run webOS Doctor on the computer by clicking Run. Note: Do not connect the USB cable to the computer.
7. Now click Next in the beginning screen of webOS Doctor, confirm their language selection, and accept the terms and conditions.
8. Then select Next to continue. The webOS Doctor will check the system requirements before proceeding. This may take a few minutes.
9. When prompted by the webOS Doctor, Then connect the phone to the computer with the USB cable. The “Next” button will highlight.
10. Now select the Next button. The webOS Doctor will recover the phone. Then disconnect the phone when completed.
11. The phone will restart into Setup. Tap your language on the screen to select it. Your phone will check the network for voice and data activation.
12. When the Phone Activated message is displayed, tap Next. To accept the terms and conditions for Palm services, tap Accept.
13. Tap Sign in With My Profile.
    • Enter your email address.
    • Enter your password.
    • Tap Sign In.

If you still face issues, you can get back to us on live chat or you can contact our voice support team at: 877-426-3777. Support is available Mon-Fri from 6:00 AM PST to 8:00 PM PST and Sat-Sun from 8:00 AM PST to 5:00 PM PST.

Thanks & regards.
Palm chat support.

It seems like one of the lessons to be learned from this is: Always root your phone, even if you can’t imagine what you’d do with such power. Somewhere down the line, it might come in handy.

Any other lessons? I’m open to suggestions.

2:50 PM Connecting to Rescue Gateway: control.app51.logmeinrescue.com…
2:50 PM Connected to Rescue Gateway. A support representative will be with you shortly.
2:51 PM Support session established with Kade.

2:51 PM Kade: Hello.
2:51 PM Kagan MacTane: Hi.
2:51 PM Kade: I understand that you are getting signed out and erase all data screen.
2:51 PM Kade: Am I correct ?
2:51 PM Kagan MacTane: Yes.
2:51 PM Kagan MacTane: And when I press “Just Restart”, the phone restarts and then shows that same “Signed Out” screen again.
2:52 PM Kagan MacTane: I tried taking out the battery and putting it back in, but it still does the same thing.
2:53 PM Kade: Thank you for the information.
2:53 PM Kade: I apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused to you.
2:53 PM Kagan MacTane: Is there any way I can sign in without losing all my data?
2:54 PM Kade: Let me confirm when exactly did you noticed this error message (date and time) ?
2:54 PM Kagan MacTane: When I woke up this morning, the phone had downloaded the webOS 1.2 update overnight.
2:54 PM Kagan MacTane: It said I needed to restart the phone to complete the upgrade. I said okay.
2:55 PM Kagan MacTane: Then, when it came back up, it showed me the Signed Out screen.
2:55 PM Kagan MacTane: Date: today. Time: around 10:30 am? I wasn’t checking.
2:55 PM Kade: Have you recently update the device to WebOS 1.2 version?
2:56 PM Kagan MacTane: Like I just said: “When I woke up this morning, the phone had downloaded the webOS 1.2 update overnight”
2:56 PM Kade: Okay.
2:58 PM Kagan MacTane: Hello?
2:59 PM Kade: Yes, I am with you.
2:59 PM Kade: I am sorry for the delay.
2:59 PM Kagan MacTane: As long as you’re still here.
2:59 PM Kagan MacTane: I recognize this one might take a little time to research.
3:00 PM Kade: Palm is investigating this issue, however I will make a note of it and escalate this issue to Specialist team also.
3:00 PM Kade: Could you please provide me the below given details information :
3:00 PM Kade: 1. Let me know your Palm profile email address.
3:01 PM Kagan MacTane: Should be kai@mactane.org
3:01 PM Kagan MacTane: That email will certainly reach me.
3:01 PM Kade: Let me know your MEID number.
3:01 PM Kagan MacTane: How do I find that?
3:02 PM Kade: You will find it under the device battery.
3:02 PM Kagan MacTane: Just a moment…
3:02 PM Kade: Sure.
3:02 PM Kagan MacTane: You want the hex, or decimal version?
3:03 PM Kade: Yes, MEID Hex :
3:03 PM Kagan MacTane: Okay. MEID HEX: A100000064331AF
3:04 PM Kade: Thank you for the information.
3:04 PM Kagan MacTane: (I may have gotten one too many or one too few zeroes.)
3:05 PM Kade: Not a problem.
3:06 PM Kagan MacTane: Now do I stay on the line, or will someone email me later on?
3:07 PM Kade: To create a case record and submit the request, I need the following information: First and last name
Primary phone number
Secondary phone number (if any)
Primary email address
Device serial number
Purchase date
Country where you purchased your device
Place of purchase (Ex: Palm store, retail store, wireless service provider store, online)
Do you want to receive promotional email from Palm?
Wireless service provider

3:07 PM Kagan MacTane: First: Kai
3:07 PM Kagan MacTane: Last: MacTane
3:09 PM Kagan MacTane: Primary: 415-REDACTED
Primary email: kai@mactane.org
Device Serial: PSPE06D95093
Purchased: approx. 7/7/2009
Country: USA
Place: Sprint store
No promotional material, please
Wireless Service: also Sprint
3:10 PM Kade: Thank you for the above given information.
3:11 PM Kade: I would like to do, is place your case into a special team that develops technical solutions. They will do further research on it. They would be in touch with you once they have further updates. I cannot commit to a specific callback period, but please know that we are working on your case.
3:11 PM Kagan MacTane: Looks liek purchase date was actually July 6th.
3:11 PM Kade: Okay.
3:12 PM Kagan MacTane: Until I hear back from the special team, my phone is useless.
3:12 PM Kagan MacTane: I hope they’ll be quick.
3:12 PM Kade: Yes, you are correct.
3:12 PM Kade: Thank you for your understanding and patience.
3:12 PM Kagan MacTane: You’re welcome.
3:13 PM Kagan MacTane: Can you tell the team that email is my preferred contact method?
3:13 PM Kade: Sure.
3:13 PM Kagan MacTane: Thanks. the phone number you have is my home phone, which won’t reach me during normal office hours.
3:13 PM Kagan MacTane: (At the office, I use my cell phone… which is currently a brick.)
3:13 PM Kade: Okay, I understand it.
3:13 PM Kagan MacTane: Cool.
3:14 PM Kagan MacTane: Thanks for your help.
3:14 PM Kade: You are most welcome.
3:14 PM Kade: I apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused to you.
3:15 PM Kade: Here’s the reference number for our chat: Chat session ID number: 40711457

Keep this number as a record of this chat, and if you need to contact us again for this same issue, please refer to this number.
3:15 PM Kagan MacTane: Thanks.
3:15 PM Kade: Thank you for contacting Palm and feel free to contact us for further assistance. After our chat ends, you’ll receive a survey.
3:15 PM Kade: Have a nice day !
3:15 PM Kade: Bye !

How long should I wait for a response before giving up and blowing away all the data on my phone? Especially since I can’t imagine what the special team will be able to say, other than, “We’re very sorry, Mr. MacTane, but there’s no way to avoid destroying all of your data. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you.”

(Of course, if I decide to just get it over with, they’ll get back to me with some arcane keystroke combo that would have saved me… if only I’d been patient.)

I woke up this morning to find that the webOS 1.2 upgrade had been pushed to my Prē automatically. I was happy, until the reboot finished and I saw:

Signed Out

You are no longer signed in to your Palm Profile on this phone.

If you plan to use this phone again, you can leave the files on your USB drive intact.

If you’re done using this phone, you can erase all your data on the phone and return to its factory default.

[Just Restart]
[Erase All Data]

The [things in brackets] represent buttons.

And I hit "Just Restart", and I wait about 8 minutes while the phone reboots, and then I see the same screen again. I’m effectively locked out of my phone.

Is there any way out of this that doesn’t involve blowing away all my data, files, apps, bookmarks, and other customizations? Hell, I had photos on there that I hadn’t offloaded! I had calendar reminders for upcoming events, and I can’t recall what they were – if I could remember all that, I wouldn’t need a calendar app!

How do I get out of this without losing all my data?

Obviously, this is a less-than-optimal user experience. Just as obviously, not everyone is experiencing this. But my satisfaction with the Palm Prē has been dropping steadily for the past few weeks, as I wrestle with the near-impossible text-selection and cursor-control problems and snarl at the interminable waits to open applications. This has just sent me into raging, livid territory.

If I have to nuke all my data, I doubt I’ll bother putting much of it back. I may actually migrate back to a Trēo, even though its web browser is nearly unusable for most of my purposes. Since I’m on a shared Sprint plan with my girlfriend, jumping over to the Android isn’t really an option, so I might just drop my smartphone altogether and use a netbook for my mobile computing platform. At least then I can run the OS of my choice, and set up the backup system of my choice to insure against data loss.

Right now, my phone is a brick until I either learn of a way to break out of this loop without losing data, or give up and decide to accept the loss.

Please, if you want a smartphone and you value your sanity, happiness, and data: Don’t get a Prē. That’s my heartfelt personal advice. You have been warned.

(And I so wanted Palm to succeed. Just a few months ago, I was so happy and hopeful. But the other big news today is the insanity of their app store approval process. Palm is screwing this up about as hard as they possibly could.)

Palm’s response to this problem is a single paragraph of corporate PR-speak:

Palm takes privacy very seriously, and offers users ways to turn data collecting services on and off. Our privacy policy is like many policies in the industry and includes very detailed language about potential scenarios in which we might use a customer’s information, all toward a goal of offering a great user experience. For instance, when location based services are used, we collect their information to give them relevant local results in Google Maps. We appreciate the trust that users give us with their information, and have no intention to violate that trust.

The problems with this statement are:

1. There is no indication of how to turn off this particular piece of data collection. Not on Palm’s web site, not in the user manual that came with the Prē, and not in the Prē’s user interface.
2. For all the “detailed language” in Palm’s privacy policy, there is no slightest indication — anywhere — that they collect information about what applications the user runs.

It’s particularly interesting to look at the “On-Device Services” part of the privacy policy: It mentions types of data that will be collected “If you use services we provide” (emphasis added). For example, they say, “When you use a remote diagnostics or software update service, we will collect information related to your device (including serial number, diagnostic information, crash logs, or application configurations)”. This is the only mention of collection data about a user’s applications, and it clearly starts with “when you use a diagnostic service”.

It doesn’t say “once per day, no matter what”.

Other items under “On-Device Services” start with “When you use a back-up and restore service…” and “When you use location based services”.

All of this suggests that users have some sort of control over what gets sent and when. The Palm Prē’s “Location Services” preferences item has a control labeled “Background Data Collection”, with the caption: “Allows Google to automatically collect anonymous location data to improve the quality of location services.” (This is after other controls labeled “Auto Locate”, “Use GPS”, as shown at right. If you turn on Auto Locate, you also get a control labeled “Geotag Photos”.)

It doesn’t say that Google (or anyone else) will collect data on what apps a user is running. And it strongly implies that this data will only be collected when I actually run an app that uses location services — for example, Google Maps, or OpenTable (which wants to know where I am so it can try to find nearby restaurants).

And it blatantly claims that if I turn off that switch, it won’t send my data off to big corporations any more.

So far, I’ve verified a few things:

1. The application data log includes installs, uninstalls, and launch and close times for all apps, not just Palm’s official ones. Homebrew and third-party apps are included.
2. Flipping the Background Data Collection switch does not turn off the contextupload process that’s responsible for sending the information to Palm’s servers.
3. Nor does it stop logging application launch and close times. I’ll repeat that: My Prē is still logging application launch and close times into /var/context/contextfile, even though I have Background Data Collection turned off.

We in the technology business have a technical term for what Palm is doing when it claims that it “offers users ways to turn data collecting services on and off” in the context of this particular data. That term is: lying. Palm is lying to us, pure and simple.

Assumptions

1. You have a web-accessible server where you put your development .ipk files.
2. You can ssh into your Prē.

Download

You can download the script at http://kai.mactane.org/software/libraries/download/homebrew.sh.

Installation

Just drop the shell script into your home directory and make it executable. If you want to be able to use the "my" argument, you'll also need to edit the three configuration variables at the beginning: MY_HOSTNAME, STDPATH, and STDVERSION.

Usage

For most purposes, you'll just want to install your own package that you've been working on. Assuming you've set the config variables correctly, you can just type ./homebrew.sh my appname, where the appname is the base name of your package.

If you're installing multiple .ipks and you don't need to restart the GUI manager for each one, you can use the "skip" command on all but the last:

./homebrew.sh skip my foo
./homebrew.sh skip my bar
./homebrew.sh skip my baz
./homebrew.sh my quux

You can also supply a complete URL: ./homebrew.sh http://forums.precentral.net/spe_attachment/download-23971-com.palm.net.precoder.fcoaster_1.0.2_all.ipk will download and install fileCoaster, so you won't have to mess with my script any more.

What It Does

It automates the process of installing homebrew apps with a rooted Prē, as described on the webOS Internals wiki. Basically, it remounts the root partition in read-write mode, wgets your .ipk file, installs it, does the "Good Housekeeping" backup, remounts the root partition in read-only mode again, and then restarts the GUI manager.

I’ve also got a reasonably good script for installing, updating, and uninstalling homebrew apps for the Prē. Instead of the annoying, six-step process for installing homebrew apps on a rooted Prē, I just shell in and type ./homebrew.sh my 8ball, and the homebrew.sh script does it all for me. I need to publish that thing, now that I’ve got it working fairly well.

Additionally, my Japanese sentence generator, called “J-Babble”, now does proper plain past tenses (the -ta and -nakatta forms), which will make it more useful for me as a tool to keep me from backsliding when I’m busy. I’d link to that, but it’s not really a general-use tool yet. It’s more just for me. Maybe some day, I’ll give it the option for people to customize what vocabulary and grammatical forms they know, so it can just generate stuff they have a chance of understanding. For now, though, its use is just for me: when my life gets too busy for me to read my Japanese textbook and try to make new progress, I can at least bring up J-Babble once a day and get 25 randomly-generated, but grammatically correct and semantically sensible, sentences in Japanese. It’s just enough to keep the neural pathways from atrophying; it allows me to hold my place instead of losing ground.

(I’ve gotten some housework done, too, but this isn’t the place to talk about that.)

First off, a correction to my earlier wail of woe: I claimed that the Task List app was also afflicted by the lack of categories. But it effectively does have categories, it’s just renamed them. You used to have categories with items in them; now, you have lists… with items in them.

Frabjously Cool:

• Multitasking. ‘Nuff said, right? No, not quite, because that includes multiple instances of the same app, such as multiple web browsers. (Obviously, the memory resources are limited, so you’re not going to have a dozen different web pages open. But two or three? Sure!)
• The general look and feel of webOS is pretty cool. There’s a nice “whoosh” sound when you flick a card off the top of the screen. If you turn on “advanced gestures”, you can swipe across the gesture area to switch between apps while leaving them full-sized, and the animation for that is pretty slick. For that matter, the effect when you swipe up from the gesture area into the main screen to pull up the Quick Launch ribbon is also pretty sexy.
• It has support for displaying Japanese characters out-of-the-box. Since I’m currently studying Japanese, this is a wonderful Godsend for me: I can access Japanese resources on the web in the palm of my hand. Heck, sometimes, I just bring up a Japanese web page and look at it, just to see it.

Kind of Nice:

• The keyboard layout is a little different from the Trēo’s. And it’s a better layout. They got rid of the “Menu” key, and then juggled other things around to allow comma and @ sign in normal mode (where they’d previously required symbol-shifting), and semicolon and underscore in symbol-shift mode (they had previously required much more awkward key combos). This doesn’t sound like much, but it makes both normal writing and entering email addresses a lot more fluid.
• The Prē displays the time and the battery-charge indicator all the time, unobtrusively at the top of the screen. The Trēo only displayed those in the main window; if you were using an app, you couldn’t tell the time or see how your battery was doing.
• The screen is nice and crisp. There’s not much to say about that, but it’s nice to look at.
• Satisfying “snikt” sound when you snap it shut.
• The gentle concave curve it makes when extended fits better around the face’s ear-to-mouth curve (for use as a phone) than single-piece smartphones I’ve dealt with. The single-piece ones are flat or even convex; my Trēo was so short, I usually found myself moving it back and forth from mouth to ear, which made my conversations annoying and choppy.
• Comes in black. Sleek and sexy black. Mwah-hah-hah.
• You can use any MP3 as a ringtone. Just connect the Prē up to your computer as a USB drive and drag the MP3 to the “ringtones” folder. Then the ringtone will automatically show up in the list of available ringtones (using the ID3 tag’s “title” attribute, if present). You can assign it as your default, or assign any ringtone to any of your contacts. Load up 500 custom MP3 ringtones, if you want (and if you can spare the disk space). (This feature might go in the “Frabjously Cool” category for people who have been gouged by their cell phone companies for downloadable ringtones, but I never had that problem; the Trēo would do this, too.)
• Naturally, you can zoom in and out of web pages, like on other smartphones. But double-tapping a section of any web page will “auto-zoom” it so that particular part fills the width of the screen. When scrolling around a zoomed page, the browser also tries to come to rest with the edges of page sections at the edges of the screen. It’s helpful. It doesn’t always guess right, but it’s definitely more of a help than a hindrance, and I’m quickly coming to like it.

Could be Better:

• Starting up an application takes longer than I’d like. This is probably partly a question of CPU horsepower; it might get better with the next generation of hardware. I can’t think of any way Palm could easily fix this, and I’m not blaming them for it. It’s just a little annoying.
• While we’re at it, the phone’s bootup time is astoundingly long. This probably isn’t much of an issue for a normal user, because you really don’t reboot your phone very often. Since I’ve been doing weird, hacker-ish things that require lots of reboots to go into and out of Developer Mode, I’ve spent longer than I’d like looking at the slowly pulsing Palm logo.
• By default, webOS gives you only three “pages” in the Launcher. You can put as many apps as you want on a page, and you can move apps around however you want. Still, with only 12 items displayed at a time, it’s easy to get lost. More pages would really help.
  
  And the OS actually does support more… except that Palm commented out the menu items for adding and deleting pages! I can’t understand why. If you root your Prē, you can uncomment that feature and add pages to your heart’s content… but honestly, I’m not sure that rooting is a process the average user is ready for.
• You can have multiple web pages open, but it’s not quite as good as tabbed browsing, because there’s no real way to specify “open this link in a new tab (or window)”. And you can’t even right-click, copy the link location, and then manually open a new window and paste in that URL, because there’s no way to right-click. To be fair, I can’t figure out a good workaround for this either, so I’m not going to blame Palm for not coming up with anything.
• As I’ve already mentioned, Synergy (the calendar app) color codes events based on where it got the information about the event from (e.g., from Google, from Exchange, or from direct entry on the phone). I think it should code stuff based on what type of event it is (work, party, doctor/dentist appointment, social date, etc.).

Bloody Well Needs to Be Fixed:

• Text selection is a major hassle. On the Trēo, you could just hold down Shift and move your cursor around with the D-pad, like Shift-selecting with arrow keys on a full-scale computer. But the Prē doesn’t have any D-pad. You can move the cursor around one letter at a time by holding the Orange key and then moving your finger four-directionally on the touchscreen. And you can select by holding down the Shift key and dragging the cursor around… but it’s slooowww, and often loses the selection if you try to select a lot of stuff. It’s okay for short selections, but trying to select from one end of a text field to the other is nightmarish. There have already been times when I’ve just given up and retyped a whole line of text… like I’d have to do if my smartphone didn’t have a copy-and-paste feature at all.
• Scroll bars. Lists need them. Lists in webOS slide nicely up and down, but unless you’re at one end of the list, you have no idea where in it you are. Or how long it is. Scroll three or four screens… are you just barely into a long list? Nearly at the end of a short one? You’ll need a crystal ball to tell. Zooming web pages means you can get lost in two dimensions, not just one. We need scroll bars to provide an indication of where we are. And when trying to move from one end of a long list to the other end, a scrollbar gives us a faster way of moving than laboriously flicking it over and over again.
• This isn’t Palm’s fault, as I understand it; I am given to understand that the blame for what I’m about to describe goes to Sprint, not Palm. That said…
  
  Sprint apparently pre-loaded the phone with various crapware apps, ranging from an Amazon MP3 store to a variety of Sprint website links to a NASCAR app. Fine, fine, whatever, I’ll just delete those things and free up the space…
  
  What do you mean, I can’t delete them?
  
  *icy look* What!?! I will not accept this.
  
  Adding more Launcher pages is a good reason to root your Prē. But this? This absolutely requires it.

Other Notes and Observations:

• The first time you try to pry off the USB socket cover, it’s nearly impossible. People have complained a lot about that. However, it quickly gets easier — I think this is partly because the cover loosens a bit, and partly because you start learning how to do it. In my case, that learning also included an aspect of “learning that the cover isn’t quite that fragile, and you can claw at it a little more firmly than you first thought”. At any rate, I’m now pretty comfortable with it, and can pop the cover off in about three seconds, tops. And I’ve only owned the thing for… what, about 75 hours? Really, it’s not that bad.
• People have also complained about the battery life. It is definitely shorter than the Trēo’s was, but not by a whole lot. I’ve always been pretty good about keeping my smartphone plugged in when I’m not on the go, so this isn’t a big issue for me.
  
  Also, the thing seems to charge up impressively quickly. I haven’t run any formal tests, but I’m sure it charges up way faster than the Trēo… or than anything else I’m accustomed to.
• The shiny surface shows off human fingerprint oils impressively well. That’s annoying (and makes me want to wash my hands more often), but not actually problematic. I’ve treated it fairly carefully, so I honestly can’t say how easily it scratches.

At the moment, my plan is this: I have something like 27 days left before I can’t return the phone any more. And I still own my Trēo. I’m going to try to make a concerted effort to learn lots of webOS programming in the next three weeks, and see if I can develop a replacement Memo Pad app. One that’s actually usable, instead of effectively being pretty to look at in a demo, but practically useless in real life. If, by the time the deadline is coming up, I can be reasonably certain that I can write such a thing — I don’t have to actually have it done, just be confident that I could do it in a reasonable time-frame — then I’ll keep the Prē.

If not… if I’d be stuck with the hideousness that is the current memo pad? Then I might still keep the Prē. It’s been growing on me. Actually, writing my previous screed helped get some of the pain out of my system, making it more possible for me to see the Prē’s good points.

Of course, as soon as I concocted that plan, I got called up for some contract work that’s been eating a lot of my available time… the universe is not without a sense of humor.