Sunday, May 23, 2010

Farewell Palm Pre


It's been nearly a year now since I've owned my Palm Pre.  Using the phone has been both a blessing and a curse.  While the phone was a significant upgrade from my Blackberry Curve 8330, it's been a downgrade in regards to usability.

Here are my three complains regarding the Palm Pre:

Battery Life has always sucked.


I've had much better battery performance using my Blackberry and old Motorola IC902.  Now in defense of the Pre, the phone does alot more compared to my prior phones.

Web O/S isn't mature enough.  And personally it feels unstable.


I don't know if it's my hardware, or if it's the homebrew crap I have installed on my phone; but it seems with every O/S update, the stability seems to go down.  Everytime I power on the phone, there's a 50/50 chance the phone will freeze.  I've done numerous doctors to this device and there doesn't seem to be any improvement.

Phone runs hot & hardware is underpowered.


Web O/S often seems sluggish.  In order to fix this, I've used the homebrew CPU kernel provided by Web O/S Internals and there's definitely an improvement in speed.   However, when you deal with overclocking, heat becomes an issue.   Now even before when I ran with the default settings, my phone always ran hot.  Even when I have it sitting on my touchstone charger, charging, the phone can easily reach over 100° F.  I don't know why the phone ran so hot all the time but mine has always been this way from the day I bought it. Putting the heat issue aside, the phone overall is laggy.  Maybe this is because I'm running with a 1st generation Palm Pre as opposed to the Palm Pre Plus?  I have no idea.  Sprint only has Palm Pre (non plus) models available on their network.

Now don't get me wrong, the Palm Pre is definitely been the best phone I've ever used. But at this point Android has jumped way ahead of Web O/S offering a wider variety of applications and customization.  When June 4th comes around, I plan on jumping ship getting the HTC EVO 4G.