posted by dez on March 3rd, 2010 under Reviews
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.