Palm Pre: Why the hype?

So I got to demo Pre today. It's gotten a lot of good reviews, so I was looking forward to trying one out. What happened was... horrible. Here's how it went.


I took the phone from the associates hand, and it felt right in my hand. It just fit. It wasn't inconvenient like an iPhone, but more like a pebble. It was looking good.

Then, I opened it, and things went downhill.

The keyboard is tiny. I had to use my fingernails. Of course, I didn't use the keyboard right away, because it took a full 2 minutes for the touchscreen to start working. Even after it started "working", it was incredibly unresponsive. You have to use your whole finger, which is an issue given the size of the screen. For the whole time I used it, the phone was laggy. Even after I got online and started to type in google in the URL bar, the phone kept trying to refocus my typing elsewhere, making it almost impossible to type in the URL. After I finally got the phone to go to google, it took another minute to get to Twitter, my test site. So far, so bad.

When the phone rolled into twitter, traveling about the speed of a 1800's carriage with president Taft inside, the phone refused to show me the login page. I couldn't get there. It kept redirecting me to random feeds. I had to manually type in the URL just to get to the main page. Even then, I ran into trouble (although this is not really Palms fault). My Password includes uppercase numbers (Like $ and so forth), which are imposable to figure out on the Pre's keyboard. So, I headed over to Wikipedia to get a picture of a keyboard.

But Wikipedia doesn't work on the Pre. It literally doesn't display. the letters are randomly splayed across the screen, and there is a large link to a "mobile version" in large font. Clicking that link froze the phone, to the point that the associate told me to just use a display phone off the shelf. After waiting another few minutes for the phone to start, I decided to look at the phone itself, instead of the internet. It wouldn't be to hard, given the Palm OS's easy to use interface, right?

It took me 5 minutes to find the apps.

All the pictures are non-descript; I clicked on one that looked like a music note, I got volume control. I finally found just a memo pad, and tried typing. It took another 2 minutes just to type "Hello World!". I tried to like it, I really did. But in the end, when it came right down to it, I told them I wasn't interested. I walked out of the store. and never looked back.

Maybe I'm just an idiot. Maybe the phones I used were broken. Maybe my standards are to high. But from my perspective, the Palm Pre is not a good investment.