It’s the curse of the modern smartphone: a zillion chips and sensors and a bright powerful screen and umpteen radios all sucking power from battery tech that hasn’t seen drastic improvement in the last decade. And it’s also one of the biggest Achilles’ heels of the Palm Pre and Pre Plus. It’s been a while since we last visited this area, with the Pre and Pixi having now launched onto several new networks across the world, it’s high time we revisit the land of electricity. After the break, we break it down…

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Do you want Microsoft Exchange for all that magical calendar, email, and contacts syncing and pushing onto your webOS phone, but don’t feel like paying for a server all your own? Mail2Web may be the solution you’ve been looking for. The service hooks into your current email accounts, including Gmail and Hotmail, as well as your ISP or business mails, pushes it through their Exchange servers, and down to your phone.

Mail2Web also provides you with something that your Palm Profile doesn’t give: online web browser access through a standard Outlook Web Access client. Mail2Web costs $4.95/month, though a 60-day free trial is currently available. For more information, check out Mail2Web’s website.

Of course, there are plenty of other hosted-exchange services out there like 4smartphone and 1and1 – which is your favorite?

Thanks to not-yet-pre for the tip!

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We’ve been hearing reports that since webOS 1.3.1, some Exchange users have been experiencing an issue that prevents the successful sync of calendar data between their phones and Exchange servers. The issue, which appears to be linked to an incorrect timezone setting, does have an unofficial workaround: Going to the Date & Time menu, setting Network time to "off", and manually selecting the correct time zone should restore proper sync functionality.

Palm has recognized that this is an issue for some, but it seems that they’re having a difficult time reproducing this issue.  A Palm Technical Support employee responded directly to users with this issue in their support forums:

We have been trying to reproduce this for awhile and can’t get the same things you guys are seeing to appear on devices that we are using, so we would like to possibly look at some log files on the devices and see what is causing the error.

Specifically we would like to see a log from someone that turned off network time and the issue resolved, and someone that doing the same thing did not resolve this issue.

The good news is that given Palm’s track record, I think that we can safely assume that if this issue does turn out to be a widespread one, they will likely release a fix in short order. We’ve seen rapid fire bug fixes in the past: if you recall, webOS 1.2.1 was released a short five days after 1.2.0, fixing the Exchange issues brought by that release.

So, help us gauge just how widespread this is: have you been affected by this bug?

Thanks to Trajadoja for the tip!

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Howard Stern, take note: Lotus Notes synchronization has come to the Palm Pre, courtesy of CommonTime’s newly updated mNotes Wireless. The update to mNotes brings over-the-air Lotus Notes sync to webOS, as well as the iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, and S60. Lotus Notes support the Pre through mNotes is handled through Microsoft Exchange syncing; essentially mNotes is transforms Lotus Notes into an Exchange account.

The latest version of mNotes and the mSuite for Palm Pre is available as a free trial from the CommonTime website, extended use comes to the tune of $140/year.

Thanks to muchtall for the tip!

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The core functions of any Palm device have always been the PIMs: Personal Information Management. That’s your contacts, memos, tasks, and calendar. The contacts app is quite good with the Synergy unified contract, Tasks is has seen some minor improvements, while Memos feels almost toy-like. But that’s not what bothers us the most, for that you have to look at Calendar.

Don’t get us wrong, we think its great that you can pull down our calendars from Google and Exchange and show it all in one view. We like how easy it is to use, but to be frank, it’s simply too slow and too limited. What do I mean by too slow? When I swipe to a new day, it can take seconds for the gray loading overlay to disappear. That wouldn’t be so bad if I could still swipe to another day, but I have to wait for that day to load before I can move to the next. When I move to a day that has several events scheduled it takes even longer to load, which leads me to suspect that the calendar is checking for changes of for each event before letting me interact with or move on from that day.

This makes me wonder where that background multi-tasking is happening; calendar data is on the order a handful of kilobytes, couldn’t this all be synced regularly behind the scenes? Maybe it is, but then I have to wonder why I have to wait for each day to check for changes first – just start a full sync of upcoming days the instant I load the calendar.

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Notify Corp’s NotifyLink over-the-air syncing solution [pdf] has been updated to bring support to the Palm Pre and webOS. Now before you get excited about a new addition to Synergy or something like that, we should note that NotifyLink is built on top of Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync, so Pre users waiting on NotifyLink support have been waiting on Notify for the update. Version 4.6.2 of NotifyLink (both On-Demand and On-Premise varieties) supports synchronization of email, calendar, contacts, and tasks with the Pre, just as you would expect with any EAS system.

Thanks to everybody that sent this in!

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Certain key elements remain every bit as instrumental to smartphones today as they did when the first Palm Pilot became available: Email, Contacts, Calendar, and Tasks.

Although many of you are familiar with the idea that every smartphone has these basic features, perhaps there is no more important topic to discuss in a real review than a real-world day-to-day account of how these key components work in harmony on the job.

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It was several weeks ago that we discovered the building blocks for AOL support inside webOS, but we also knew that getting that support was contingent upon action from both AOL and Palm. Well, recently AOL released a huge update to their sync services, adding 70 new devices to the list. The Pre was not on that list, so PreCentral member and Twitter user Bill decided to ask AOL for Synergy support. Their answer: we’re working on it.

AOL Sync is powered by Funambol, an open source synchronization and push email service. Currently Funambol is supported on over two billion devices, including the iPhone and Windows Mobile phones, though Palm has not updated the Pre to support Funambol. Doing so would not only bring AOL Sync to the table, but would also enable corporations to easily set up a push email and synchronization server without having to deal with Microsoft Exchange of BlackBerry Enterprise Server.

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