PRE at last! PRE at last!

Rather than repeat the play-by-play that my twittering did for me this morning (also made the short hour wait go by), I'll share my initial thoughts and how they compared to my PREconceptions (har de har har. Thanks everyone, I'm here all night. Try the veal!)

I decided to run the upgrade for my phone to get the 1.0.2 version of the OS, so I have about 10 minutes to kill. (Update: Pretty accurate actually)

Hardware form impression

Once in the store, we were given a chance to hold and play around with a working Palm Pre on display. It's a good look device, for sure. Very sleek, clean lines, and shiny in all the right places. Some early reviews have complained that it feels plastic-y. I can see why they would say that, but it's not a Fisher-Price toy cell phone plastic. It's a very lightweight plastic with an ergnomic feel. Presumably they could have made it feel "harder" or more "metallic", but I prefer the weight savings that you get with such a light phone. You are likely going to be holding this phone up a lot more than your old one, and it will be nice not to have to work out in that period of time.

Sprint set-up

The Sprint Rep actually ran through setting up the Palm Profile for me. I would have rather done it myself, but I suppose it's more efficient to have her do instead. It took under 2 minutes. She also sped me through the tutorial on some basic gestures. (which I was already mildly familiar with thanks to the Internets!). Once paid out, they mention that there is a Palm "specialist" that can walk you through some additional things in the store.

Palm "specialist" and Palm Pre "training"

Feeling much like an RPG or more accurately an MMORPG where you are sent off to perform some tasks to level up, I went to get some useful tips from the Palm specialist fellow. Although I skipped on some of the advanced gesture training, we got both my Gmail and Outlook hooked up pretty quickly. The only oddity was needing to have Outlook fail on the default POP pull, so that you could set it up as an Exchange account manually. Otherwise, if you have a decent set up on Google and Outlook, you'll have everything flow in pretty nicely. I stuck around to hear a couple more tips, and then I ran off to play with stuff at home.

Contacts

One thing that's been mentioned and relatively significant in my opinion, is the fact that you can't control the contacts that are pulled in from Google, Outlook and Facebook. Google and Facebook both have nice list features which allows you to specify targetted groups of interest. Unfortunately, that type of sycronization isn't supported yet. I'm staying away from syncing with Facebook for now.

AppCatalog

Though it's relatively light right now, most of the Apps I downloaded (Tweed, Pandora, Accuweather, etc.) downloaded and installed pretty quickly.

Multi-tasking

Pretty much the promise of the videos I initially watched came to fruition. I had fired up Pandora as a background, and I was easily able to switch back and forth between different cards that I had connected to Tweed, Facebook, email and some settings that I was updating. I still feel like I'm scratching the surface on this one.

Touchstone

I'm pretty glad I took one of the last ones they had in the store. The new phone cover's matte backing is quite nice. If it wasn't obvious, you need to use the new phone cover to use the Touchstone's inductive charger. There were reviews that say that the inductive charger is slower than direct charging, but compared to my old WinMo phone charging, this seems to charge at a reasonable rate.

Keyboard

The spacing seems fine to me, compared to my old phone. A bit rubbery, but a hell of a lot more accurate than any virtual keyboard in my opinion. It did take me a little bit to switch from where letters and symbols were placed though.

Verdict

Wow. I'll write up another set of thoughts in about a week.