Some More Palm Pre Review Notes and Thoughts

There's a bunch of little tidbits that came out of my week with the Pre that didn't make it into the main Palm Pre review and slide show. Here are a few items of note:

• Not a formal coverage test by any means, but I was able to listen to Pandora on the Pre with very good success. I made it all the way from downtown Oakland, Calif., to Milpitas (about 35 miles down Interstate 880) without a drop. It looks like when coverage drops from EvDO to 1xRTT, however, that Pandora -- or the Pre -- can't recover and the music dies.

• Instant messaging is a bit of a problem on the Pre, as it can be a major battery hog. Since IM and SMS are both in the same Messaging application, IM won't turn off in the conventional manner. Closing the Messaging app by throwing it off the screen doesn't work -- it still runs in the background. Instead you have get into the Messaging app and click on Buddies and then your presence indicator in order to sign out.

• Many may not know this, but Palm has released a small firmware upgrade since the launch, taking the device to 1.0.2. If it hasn't happened to your device yet, go to the Upgrade application and give it a shot. If on the WAN connection, you may have to try several times. Wi-Fi will be quicker.

• Every now and then the device hangs, showing a blue sky background with a few clouds. To force a restart, hold down the power button and slide the ringer mute back and forth three or four times.

• I'm hearing some reports of trouble with Exchange servers with a little extra security. I haven't noticed that myself, but I did not have a problem downloading attachments in one instance. I got some long error message for a couple hours, but it still worked over IMAP. I couldn't replicate the next day, but it is something to keep an eye on.

• When coming out of BART tunnels or other such areas with poor to nonexistent coverage, the Pre will report that I am roaming and data is not supported. Users should keep an eye on the bill to make sure they aren't getting screwed by something there.

• I didn't talk about the phone's sound quality. In a nutshell, decent from the handset but a little muddy. Understandable, by any means. Over the included wired headset or Bluetooth, it sounds just fine.

• The Touchstone power block is sold as an accessory for $70. You have to swap out the stock back face plate for one with an extra power conductor that comes with the Touchstone. The stone is a little sloped so you can keep using the device while charging.

• Didn't get a chance to try the Pre with iTunes before I sent it back but I did connect it to a PC. When connected, the user must choose -- media sync, USB drive mode or just charge. If in USB drive mode, you can't use the phone. A really draconian way of keeping you from tethering, and pretty stupid if you ask me. If anyone knows a legitimate technical reason for this, I'd love to hear it.

And That's All for Newber

Anyone still hoping Newber will make it through Apple's maze of certification can kiss that hope goodbye and should now start longing for Google to open up subscriptions to Google Voice née GrandCentral soon instead.

From the e-mail just sent to beta users like myself:

"As you may be aware, Newber first applied for acceptance into the App Store on October 2nd, 2008. After more than five months awaiting approval, and despite both overwhelming response from the professional community and varied attempts to get any kind of response from Apple, Newber has not received a review. Not rejected, not accepted - limbo.

We are sad to say that for this reason FreedomVOICE has stopped development on Newber. For this reason we will be ending the extended Newber Beta Test on March 31st, 2009. We would like to give you the next few weeks as an opportunity to begin transfer of your Newber phone number to the carrier of your choice. If you are interested in doing so, simply contact your new carrier and follow their procedure for having a number transferred. Your new carrier may contact FreedomVOICE Technical Support at 1-800-477-1477 ext. 2 if they need to verify any information.

After March 31st, all remaining Newber Beta Test phone numbers will be canceled."

More depressing news about this can be found here.

update: Got the go-ahead to move from GrandCentral to Google Voice yesterday. More on my impressions of the new service coming soon.

Gen 1 iPhone Not Yet Irrelevant

In the run-up to Apple's iPhone OS 3.0 unveiling, I found myself less interested in the specific details of what would or would not come with the actual release, but rather in whether my first generation iPhone would be party to the new features at all.

I expected the worst, anticipating Apple try to force me into a hardware upgrade approximately two seconds after my existing service contract expired. Now I am well aware of the growing obsolescence of my iPhone - with its diminishing battery capacity and molasses slow EDGE data connection - so the new software seemed like a great opportunity to push cheapskates like me into some new hardware.

So I was pleasantly surprised when the news was not quite as dire as I expected.

While iPhone OS 3.0 will be available sometime this summer as a free download to all iPhone 3G users (under contract with a carrier, of course), as a "special bonus", Apple will also let users with Gen 1 hardware install the update for free as well. Due to hardware limitations, 1st generation iPhones would be absent some features though, namely MMS and stereo Bluetooth.

iPod Touch customers (of both hardware generations) can also gain access to the new software for $9.95.

Waiting for GrandCentral

I've been waiting with baited breath all week for Google to upgrade my GrandCentral account to the rebranded Google Voice service. Hopefully with this upgrade, GrandCentral will finally be usable given my particular set of needs and devices - only a full year after I first tried putting the service to work.

20 Minutes in the Room with Windows Mobile 6.5

The other day, Microsoft invited me over for an early look at Window Mobile 6.5, the next iteration of the company's operating system for phones. I didn't get to actually use the OS, but from my brief time watching it in action, I garnered several first impressions.

I think it safe to say that people will like using Windows Mobile 6.5 more than previous iterations. On the down side, there remains a lot of work still to be done before the operating system is ready to ship (I would say a November release is more likely than July), and the focus of the OS has swung back toward end-user enhancements over the needs of corporate administrators.

First of all, the new icon-based Start Menu looks to be a significant improvement over the current menu-driven layout. The honeycomb shape of the touch zones leaves lots of room for finger-based manipulation of the screen -- perhaps too much. While I absolutely love the idea that I will no longer need a stylus to get around in WM, I found on-screen real estate is now not consumed efficiently and users may need to do a lot of scrolling to find the applications they want.

Unlike with the iPhone or Android user interfaces, Windows Mobile 6.5 scrolls top to bottom (rather than side to side). The vertical scroll presents the Start Menu as a long list, rather than a page turning, which required more manipulation than I felt was necessary. This may have been due to the overwhelming sluggishness of the scrolling function, which I was promised will be improved as the OS moves through the beta process. The user can manually customize the order of icons in the menu to put more frequently used applications at the top, but that process could probably use some intelligence to automatically move icons up as applications get used.

I really liked the new approach to showing the user time-sensitive details, even when the phone is locked. I could see the next calendar item without unlocking the interface, and I could directly access applications with a state change from the lock screen. For instance, if a new voice mail is detected, I could go directly from the lock screen to the voice mail application without having to interact with the main menu or home screen first.

Unfortunately, the Microsoft representatives would not show me a touch-screen keyboard -- in fact, I saw no typing at all during the demonstration. The unit I saw in action (an HTC Touch Diamond, I think) did not have a physical keyboard, and I was anxious to see if the new on-screen keyboard was finger-ready (as I truly hate the tiny stylus-oriented on-screen keyboard that usually comes with WM). Even though I specifically asked to see the keyboard, I was deflected off with the nebulous statement that the keyboard will be different depending on the device.

This lack of cooperation leads me to believe that nothing has changed to this point with the touch keyboard. Microsoft had no qualms about showing me other features that didn't yet work right, so why be coy with the keyboard?

WM 6.5 also brings an updated mobile browser with it, at long last bringing a full browser experience natively to Windows Mobile. Users have the choice of either the full Web experience (which includes built-in Flash support) or a more mobile-friendly iteration.

I definitely found the zoom controls more user-friendly than some of the competition. Users could bring up a slider on the right side of the screen to adjust the zoom, then use a finger to move the on-screen focus to the appropriate spot, keeping an eye on on-screen markers that indicate the relative position on the page. The feature is not as intuitive as the iPhone's pinch and spread gestures, but much easier to use than the zoom on RIM's latest BlackBerrys.

Interestingly, the Microsoft representative told me that the browser in WM 6.5 is based on Internet Explorer 6, because that browser was still the most commonly used (and developed for) in the world. To my ears, that claim sounded out-of-date. I took a quick look at the browser utilization rates over the last year for eweek.com, and indeed found IE 6 was runner up to IE 7 (and third, also behind Firefox 3.0 for 2009). I'm no expert on Web development, but it sounds like the WM 6.5 browser may already be a little creaky from old age.

The Microsoft folks also showed me a demo of Recite, the early-stage voice recording and search feature. Although the feature sounds like total winner -- record a voice message and then search for it later with just a keyword -- I got the sense during the meeting that there was a pretty decent chance that Recite would not be in the official 6.5 release. The demo itself was pretty much a disaster, as only one out of four attempts identified the intended message.

We talked a bit about the My Phone synchronization service. First of all, calling My Phone a synchronization service is somewhat disingenuous, since the phone only connects once a day in the middle of the night. Let's just call it a daily backup -- a one-time full backup with ongoing incremental updates. Fortunately, from the screens I saw during the demo, it looks like My Phone will be usable for more than documents, contacts and calendars, as users should be able to back up some media (photos) as well. Ring tones will not be backed up.

The mobile administrator in me got hung up on the utility of My Phone in a business setting. For regulatory purposes, administrators need to be able to account for sensitive information wherever it may be. But My Phone really runs the risk of letting corporate documents out into the wild. Let's say a user downloads an e-mail attachment to the mobile phone, and then the attachment gets backed up to My Phone. Suddenly, this document has replicated to another service altogether, where it is accessible from other devices and PCs and out of corporate control.

When I asked about how administrators could stop this from occurring, I didn't get the sense this was a high priority for Microsoft at this time. Administrators could probably bar the user from replicating documents to My Phone altogether via policy, but perhaps not limit the synchronization to only certain stores or storage devices.

Let's just say I have some fear that in its zeal to replicate and expand beyond some of the appealing features that draw users to Apple or Google devices, Microsoft is giving short shrift to one of the largest segments of its existing customer base -- corporations. While Windows Mobile 6.1 was all about enhancing the mobile OS for corporate use and management, the newest version has swung back the other way to attract consumers and business end users, apparently without expanding the administrator's control over or visibility into how these new features behave.

Apple App Store Crushing Souls

In fall 2008 at CTIA, or more specifically at one of the satellite shows, I met with representatives of a company called Newber. They were writing an application for the iPhone. A little like GrandCentral, Newber provides users with a VOIP phone number, and the application redistributes calls received by that number to whatever number you want, such as to a land line or an iPhone.

I participated in the beta for the software, liking it on the whole when compared with GrandCentral, but not enough to pay the monthly fee once the software and service got approval from Apple's App Store.

Back in November, I got notice that the beta was officially ending, but we testers could keep using it until the App Store launch. I uninstalled the beta and moved on, figuring I would blog a little about it once it officially launched.

Today, it occurred to me that I hadn't heard anything about the software for a long time. Checking Newber's site, I learned why: It still has not been approved, 125 days and counting.

Check out the little ticker on Newber's homepage that counts out its pain, day by day.

The good news is that Newber now has a BlackBerry beta in the hopper too. If the company's lucky, RIM's App Store validation will not be nearly as onerous.

20 Tech Things About Me

Rules: Once you've been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 20 tech-related things, facts, habits or ideas about yourself. At the end, you will tag no one, since you should have forsworn chain letters years ago. However, if you want to share your tech idiosyncrasies, you can reach me at agarcia@eweek.com or leave a comment below.

1. Come July, I will probably ditch my iPhone. Not because of the device itself, but because AT&T's network gives lousy coverage in my house, in my office and along my commute route--even though I live in the heart of technology country. Those 4,490 available rollover minutes say it all.

2. I used to be a zealous advocate of building one's own PC. Now it seems like a lot of trouble, and maybe not such a great way to save money.

3. I built a telephone conference server to use at work out of old PCs, open-source software and a bunch of analog lines off our corporate PBX. The building and testing were infinitely more interesting than the meetings.

4. At home, I've been steadily digitizing all my media, mostly because I hate all the shelf space it takes up. I still can't cut the cord to physical media, though, as I like having it around. This is an annoying conundrum for me.

5. I am as baffled as anyone by Microsoft's phalanx of Windows 7 versions. I'd prefer to see two versions--Home and Corporate--with software add-on packs (for media, security and management). Unfortunately, I suspect this would make things harder for everyone somehow.

6. Despite my years of experience with wireless technology, I still can't make 1080p video stream consistently well without throwing thousands of dollars at the cause.

7. I hate running anti-virus software, and until last year, I never did on my personal systems. The rise of drive-by Web threats secreted on normally trusted sites really freaks me out, though.

8. I use Windows XP, Vista, Seven and CentOS Linux on a regular basis. None of them have changed my life. Perspective, people.

9. I pretty much never back up my personal data.

10. I got my start in IT because I kept accidentally cracking into a Unix server at work. I like to think the IT director saw something in me, but really, I think she just wanted to keep an eye on me.

11. During my first server crisis as an IT staffer, I spent the night on the floor next to the server with a bunch of manuals and Chinese food. The next morning, when everything was working properly, I thought that maybe, just maybe, I could do this for a living. The problem was something like, "Novell 3.12, when running on a server with an EISA bus, loads all memory-resident programs under 640K, no matter how much memory you have." Adding the OS2 namespace had pushed me over the limit. Or something like that--it's kind of a blur now.

12. My first PC was a Texas Instruments TI-99/4a, the second an IBM PC Jr. To keep my parents from using the systems, I wrote an authentication program that, when wrong credentials were entered, would match the onscreen text color to the background, then reboot the machine.

13. I got my first e-mail account in 1991, accessing it using Pine. Seven years later, when they forced everyone on the server to start using POP3, I lost interest in that account.

14. I find helping someone buy a smartphone is much harder than helping them choose a PC. It's simply too personal a preference to impose your will on. I ask three questions: "What carrier do you want to use?" "Can you type on a touch-screen?" "What three things do you want most to do with it?" I point in the right direction, then I get out of the way.

15. My personal domain name is an obscure Simpsons reference. It's not as cool as it once was. Or, it was never cool.

16. I use many VOIP services--mostly Skype, GrandCentral and Raketu. I still have a land line, although I never use it.

17. I loved the hands-on expertise and great customer service of my old DSL ISP, but I love even more the lower price and fast pipes provided by the local cable conglomerate. This makes me very sad.

18. While I suspect that I could easily replace my cable subscription with over-the-air HD, Netflix Watch Now, Hulu and Amazon.com services, I am not quite ready to make that leap.

19. On many occasions, I have stood in a Best Buy or Fry's looking for geek inspiration. More often than not, I will pull out my iPhone and order whatever inspires me online (usually at Amazon.com) while still standing in the store.

20. I think everyone should learn how to do bare-metal virtualization. Find instructions online on how to load VMware's ESXi on a USB stick, plug it into a computer with a lot of RAM and give it a shot. It will be worth the effort. Bonus points if you make an iSCSI server to use with it.

Retail Downturn May Thwart Palm's Last Stand

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Palm finally pulled back the curtains on the Palm Pre--the first device based on the long-awaited, oft-delayed WebOS mobile operating system, previously known as "Nova."

Although early demonstrations indicate the platform is well designed and very slick, I think Palm's latest release may be too little, too late to save the company because of the interplay between the economy and Palm's tarnished reputation.

Over the last 20 months, Palm has surely looked on in envy as Apple and Google enjoyed tremendous early success with brand-new devices running highly anticipated mobile OSes, with thousands of people lining up (or pre-ordering) so they could be the first to have an iPhone or Android phone. Palm would love similar fanfare and quick adoption of WebOS and the Pre.

Both the iPhone and the Android phone came with built-in core audiences to drive initial sales--Apple's Mac aficionados and Android's open-source advocates and developers. Palm once had a strong consumer and business following, but the former dried up after suffering through years of quirky device behavior and stagnation of both the underlying platform and the developer community. Meanwhile, Palm consigned the latter to devices running Windows Mobile.

In December 2008, Palm representatives told BusinessWeek that the new OS is designed to reach the "fat middle of the market"--somewhere between the iPhone and the more business-oriented RIM BlackBerrys or Palm's Windows Mobile Treos. The hope--and design intent--is for WebOS to appeal to consumers who will then bring in into the office and use it for work as much as possible.

To win these customers, Palm will need to overcome its recent reputation for producing uninspiring and under-featured devices. Palm of course will need scores of positive reviews in blogs and the mainstream press, but what it really needs is to get the device into the hands of those who once knew, loved and trusted their Treos or PDAs, in hopes of winning those people over once again. Once in hand, the Pre has a few minutes to quickly prove that it can compete with the state-of-the-art alternatives--on native features, usability, the promise of future growth, utility and customization--before the customer says, "Screw it, I'm getting a BlackBerry."

This is a tall order, but WebOS does look compelling enough to succeed if given a chance.

Unfortunately, Palm will release WebOS devices into a terrible economy that will likely preclude any chance for the new platform to succeed, not only due to the massive slowdown in spending by consumers, but through a decrease in the number of places potentially interested customers can turn to give Palm this one last chance. Following a historically bad holiday shopping season, many financial analysts predict 2009 will continue the downturn for retail establishments. Potentially, hundreds of thousands of U.S.-based stores (and thousands of malls) could be forced to close this year, reducing the number of places consumers can get hands-on with the Palm Pre. Sprint, the exclusive carrier for the Pre when it launches in the first half of 2009, has already shuttered many of its existing outlets and reemphasized its online store presence--an example I expect other carriers to follow as the recession progresses.

Were these potential showcase outlets to disappear--to go along with the in-progress demise of electronics retailer Circuit City--Palm will suddenly have many fewer locations where it can let curious but cautious users sample the new wares.

To reach the fat middle, Palm will definitely need to expand its presence in remaining retail alternatives that cater to this particular audience and are sources of cell phones and smartphones. Wal-Mart springs immediately to mind, as Palm already has some presence there with its low-end, low-margin Centro, and customers know that higher-end devices like the iPhone can be bought there. Other options such as office supply stores would also make sense, although the economy will surely take a toll on that retail sector as well in 2009.

If the Pre does not move as hoped out of the gate, Palm may need to massively discount the device and look to generate income primarily through application sales via the Palm online store. But Palm would need to convince developers to focus their efforts on a late-arriving operating system with no existing customer base. This is a tough proposition, although at least Palm had the foresight to base development upon standards, as applications can be developed quickly with known entities like CSS, HTML and JavaScript.

Untenable Mobile Broadband Pricing Slows Adoption and Innovation

"I just need AT&T to lower the service fees a little bit." "Don't count on it." While these words could have been shared between any two people with a cell phone and a healthy suspicion of their cell phone operators, this lighthearted exchange actually took place in December between Doug Garland, vice president of product management at Google, and AT&T President of Emerging Devices Glen Lurie during a panel discussion on how Silicon Valley can make money from broadband and mobility.

G1 Morning After Problems and Regrets

I barely ever use my iPhone as an actual phone. To me it's an iPod first, an SMS and Internet device second and a phone third. My phone usage is so limited that I'm subscribed to the minimum voice service plan AT&T allows with the iPhone, yet I constantly have around 4,000 minutes in my Rollover bucket (and those minutes expire after 12 months). Unfortunately, this lack of regard for a smart phone's phone features shone through clearly in my recent review of T-Mobile's Android-based G1 with Google smart phone.

After the review went live, I decided to follow up with a series of blog posts (like this one) that would cover some of the many functions of the G1 that I wasn't able to address initially -- including phone functionality, such as looking up contacts and placing calls.

So in the wake of my generally positive review of the G1 as an Internet device, here is the rub: I'm not impressed with the G1 as a phone.

Once I started making calls to actual people, I immediately noticed that the earpiece was not working. When I pressed the phone to my ear, I could hear nothing at all. The calls connect, and the microphone works because the party on the other end could hear me breathing and yelling "Hello? Hellooooo?" Further tests showed the speakerphone works, as do Bluetooth and cabled headsets. It's just the handset's ear speaker that has a problem. The question is whether this problem has been there from the jump and I failed to notice it during my initial tests or whether my fears about the device's fragility in the face of its forceful sliding mechanism have been borne out.

Click here to see images of T-Mobile's Android-based G1 with Google smart phone.

To be clear, I made dozens of calls with the phone during the initial review period as I tested the battery performance, the speakerphone and various headsets, and I never noticed a problem. But I never had an actual conversation with anyone while using the G1 and therefore I am not positive whether it initially worked or was a dud out of the box.

Because I play a podcast across the phone connection during the battery tests, and I never noticed the missing sound during the tests (which I monitor pretty much constantly), I'm inclined to think that the earpiece stopped working while the device was in my possession. And I am sure the snapping slider has had other ill effects on the G1, as the touch-screen has loosened up significantly over the last couple of days. The G1 now feels a little jiggly in my hand, particularly when I am just holding it (rather than actually using it, presumably because my grip is tighter.)

Hardware faults aside, I'm not wild about the Contacts experience with the G1 either. The G1 syncs its contact database with the Gmail account I used to register the phone when I first set it up. The problem is that I don't use my Gmail contacts for anything other than e-mail, so there are no phone numbers in there at all to sync to the G1. All those phone numbers are instead stored in my work Exchange account.

As I mentioned in the review, the G1 doesn't support the Exchange protocol. I can work around this via IMAP for e-mail, but using IMAP will only let me see the names of my contacts. I cannot call them from this interface and in fact, I can't see their phone numbers or their e-mail addresses at all. Which makes this workaround pretty useless for calls.

If you already have all that contact info in Gmail, this isn't a big deal at all -- in fact, this integration is probably a plus. But I am forced to accept the reality that I now need to synchronize my Outlook contacts with Gmail, using something like Plaxo, er, Comcast's Plaxo (how did I miss that merger?) At least until some third-party developer comes along to create a new dial application (which could be any minute, if I'm lucky).