I’ve had the Palm Pre Plus and Palm Pixi Plus for about 2 weeks now. I have to say that even though I was excited to use the phones and find out more regarding the operating system that runs both of them (WebOS by Palm) I very quickly started disliking the phones (mostly the system they run on).

WebOS

I’m no slouch when it comes to finding answers about things that I’m curious about. Because I’ve never been a Palm user (consciously) I figured that this new OS might be something at least worth trying.  It wasn’t.  I’m a techie guy. I like my settings and customizability to be very close to my fingertips. I did not find this with the system. I wasn’t even comfortable enough after 3 hours of browsing around, calling myself, texting myself, and the like to make either one of the phones my main phone for the time I had them.

I had to Google EVERYTHING. Although the mobile hotspot app is cool and very functional, I’d rather have it on my myTouch.

Form Factor

I have to say. I love love LOVE the Pixi. Texting is easy because of the keyboard. It was easy enough to type myself a long email and I could kick out 160 characters for a text in no time with very few mistakes. I don’t really like the way that palm has it’s keyboards setup, but that could be because I’m used to the touch screen phones now that have alt buttons to show me different keys instead of the single/double click methods for staying in the mode or just using one character.

The Pre to me is blah. The middle two keys in the qwerty keyboard are squished together. I don’t even want to imagine how that design meeting went, but I’ll try to throw my version of  it out there for you.

Designer: We have to make the phones a bit wider so that we can fit all the keys with equal spacing

Engineering Manager: No

Decision Maker: How about we just put the T/Y, G/H, and V/B buttons closer together?

Designer: But the usability on that is horrible

Decision Maker: usawhat? *signs off onweird spacing of keys*

Decision Maker: While you’re at it, can you make it so that the buttons are nearly flush with the shell of the phone so that they are hard to discern from the next key?

Engineer: Sure, just send me a requirements doc with what you want.

Designer: I need a beer

Final Thoughts

In all fairness, the phones aren’t really marketed towards my demographic. They do have good responsiveness and have a few gesture features that I would like on my own phone (throw an application away to close it would ROCK on the Android Platform).

Disclaimer: I was given a Palm Pixi Plus and a Palm Pre Plus by Verizon Wireless to use and review for two weeks. The phones came with an unlimited data and phone plan already on them. I am not a Verizon Wireless consumer.

This week’s Tuesday Blogversation is with Colleen McGuire. I had an inkling that I wanted to interview her for this week, but I received a few recommendations from people specifically mentioning her to do an interview with. She graciously allowed me this opportunity. Thanks Colleen!

Colleen McGuire (blog | twitter) is a communications professional working in the heath insurance industry for the past 11 years. She is a music junkie and relies on City Pages for concert information for the Twin Cities music scene. She has been posting to her blog since August 2009.

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We’re switching to Scrum. I’ve worked in Agile-like environments before, but nothing ‘pure’. It’s always been a mixture of some Agile, XP, and Waterfall which can create process issues if not done right.  However even if you have a process in place correctly it still depends on the people working through it and I’ve been a part of one successful custom built process implementation.

We’ve got our final day of training tomorrow on the process. I can honestly say I’ve never actually be ‘trained’ in how the software development process works. I’ve done my share of reading and teaching myself, but today was the first time that a consultant was sitting in front of a group that included me.

I think this will be a good thing for not only myself but also for the company I work for. There wasn’t much of a process when I started, but really when you only have one QA person (my boss) at a startup you tend to get a lot of push to production situations (aka Cowboy coding: yeehaw).  Lately there have been improvements being made to the process pre-development. The inclusion of any standardized process is an improvement.

The pure look at what all the Agile sub-sets are made of can be read at http://agilemanifesto.org/.

The biggest thing I’m taking from all this is that the consultant helping us out isn’t trying to fit our process into a predetermined mold, but rather the other way around. He’s also going to participate in the implementation of our process, which will be very helpful.

I hope to give updates periodically in how we’re moving into this direction.

Wow, this weekend got completely away from me. It started Friday with Megan and I putting a holding deposit down on the apartment that we want (End of April, YAY!). Then a birthday party yesterday along with laundry. And today I helped my older brother take apart a gym set that he was selling. I’ve hardly been home, but I definitely feel like it’s Sunday.

This week isn’t going to be much lighter either. We start training on Agile (SCRUM) tomorrow at work and that pretty much takes up my next two working days. The Twitter app that I’m developing should start rolling out it’s initial start on collecting data this week: Should being the key operative. Also needed to do is some pre-training reading.

Also, Undercover Boss is on tonight so I’m trying to get my task list zero’d out before starting my veg session this evening. Hopefully I’ll be able to get some reading done tonight both with my current book (The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown) and also try to get a good chunk of my RSS Subscriptions read (I haven’t even looked at them since Thursday night).