Welcome to Round Table, which is in fact not a table at all. Round Table is a continuing series on PreCentral where we pose a question to the staff and they provide their thoughts and insights. The question could be something simple like “what’s your favorite webOS app?” or something a bit more complicated, like “where does Palm go from here?” Or maybe we’ll just end up chatting about our favorite movies, you never know. This time around we’re dispensing thoughts on something that has puzzled and eluded us for months: the Palm C40.

read more

READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

While we understand the drive to throw in freebies to entice a customer to buy a product, we as the customer generally prefer that the freebie be somehow useful to the product I am looking to purchase. Case-in-point, Wal-Mart Wireless’s online site (powered by LetsTalk) is giving out free 4GB microSD cards from Kingston with select Sprint phone purchases, including the Samsung Instinct S30, HTC Hero, Palm Centro, Samsung Moment, and the Palm Pre and Pixi. Wait, that’s not right…

In other news, Verizon’s website also has some cleaning up to do, as Hebrew language blog Palm Preacher noticed. Verizon’s fancy try-it-out emulator for the Pre Plus lists the following tech specs: 7630 MB ROM/256 MB RAM. If you’ve been following the news about the Pre Plus at all, you’ll noticed that those numbers are exactly half of what they should be, in fact they’re the specifications of the regular Pre, not the double plus good Pre Plus. At least some other parts of the Verizon website list the Pre Plus with the proper storage and memory. Now if only Verizon would actually show off the Pre Plus on their website…

Thanks to Darrell and avnera for the tips!

READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

<!–break–>

• No microSD slot: This is perhaps the biggest annoyance for me personally. With a music collection hovering around 20 gig, it would be awfully nice to load some of that up on a 16 GB card so as to not eat into the device memory. Alas, it was not to be.
• 8gb of on-board memory: Feeding off the previous bullet, this is another often criticized aspect of the Pre. While 8 GB is certainly plenty for the typical user, those of us who are a smidge media-centric can fill up 8 gig in about 15 minutes. The silver lining here is that a 16 GB version is expected at some point after initial launch.
• Battery: When it was discovered that the Pre had a removable battery, there was much rejoicing. When the cover was removed, and we first saw said battery, there was then much sorrow, for inside, we saw none other than the 1150mAh battery from the Palm Centro. While we still don’t know how the Pre does with power management, the sheer size of the battery can all but guarantee nightly charging for heavy users (not that this is a huge deal, just as long as it survives a day).
• webOS: Wait, what? How can the Pre’s biggest strength, also be one of its most criticized features? It’s a good question, and it has a lot to do with resistance to change, combined with webOS being an unsupported, unproven platform. There are many long time Palm users that both love and depend on the Palm GarnetOS, and know the ins-and-outs like the back of their hand. There are also thousands of third party applications (useful ones at that), that further enhance the productivity of PalmOS. Thankfully, for all involved, the Pre WILL have a PalmOS emulation application, so they’re looking out for the long-time user. Hopefully in time, as more webOS applications and devices come to market, this will become a moot issue.
• Sprint: While not specifically device-related, this wouldn’t be a proper "complaints" list if we didn’t mention the destination carrier. While I personally have had nothing but good experiences with Sprint, there is no denying that they are sporting a poor reputation in today’s market. Thankfully, it’s been well-documented that while Sprint’s Customer Service still isn’t great, it’s improving, and well on its way toward being a proper CS division once again. As far as their signal strength goes, this should be a relative non-issue. Sprint’s coverage area is pretty decent, and they have roaming agreements with Verizon and Alltel, so it should be rare that you find yourself with no signal what-so-ever (Unless you’re driving through West Virginia, which in my experience is a complete cell signal black hole).

READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>