Pre Meta-Review
June 4th, 2009, 12:28am by MikeJust to get the ball rolling: The reviews are coming in on the Pre, and from what I’ve seen so far, they’re universally positive, with only a few drawbacks. I’m talking about Engadget and Gizmodo (though Ryan Block had a couple of tweets about it, too). I’ve only really read Engadget’s so far. No major problems (except for a small piece of their unit actually breaking off! Glad they seem to have a good replacement program in place), and the UI looks really slick. My initial thoughts:
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Notifications are pretty great, and the ability to play music in the background seems pretty darn useful in the car (though I’m guessing the Pre doesn’t have a line out?).
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As demo’ed in the Engadget video, I think the cut and paste, and text selection, looks pretty clunky. Looked easy enough when the phone is on the table, but looked like it might be hard with the Pre in your hand. I’m sure that’s not the case, but it still didn’t look too easy.
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The whole “you can check the weather while talking to your friend” is cool — except that, as they later remark, EV-DO can’t do voice and data at the same time. This seems like a major point of sucking for what looks like awesome multitasking capabilities of the phone. The GSM version will not have this issue.
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I think I twittered about this a while back, but Engadget agrees with me that the Pre’s screen font is really nice. Except for the calculator, which is butt-ugly.
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Synergy sounds like a total mess if you’re on Facebook, or if you use gmail and have your contacts auto-saved. But it seems easy to fix — just allow the user some control over what gets synced. Calendar syncing also sounds problematic (for someone like me who uses calendars a lot) — like the iPhone, you can’t choose colors for calendars (though at least now on the iPhone my calendar colors match my iCal). And you can’t subscribe, for example, to only some of your Google calendars — it’s all or none.
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Push GMail sounds nice, but otherwise, the Mail program seems like nothing special at all. As they said, the ability to manage several messages at once is pretty important, as Apple figured out early on with iPhone. Hopefully Palm will follow suit. Considering how much the rest of the UI seems to innovate, it’s disappointing that Mail is so … blah.
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Engadget seems to play up the “you can see more info in the Pre’s browser,” but that seems to be partially because the font is quite a bit smaller. I just don’t know what the point of their observation is — it’s not hard to figure out how to squeeze more content on the screen.
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The keyboard is tiny compared to the iPhone’s, and the spelling correction sounds like it isn’t so great. I think I’d have a hard time with it (typing on a Centro’s tiny keys was a pain for me), but maybe if you’re used to it, it’s not so bad.
Overall, it sounds like a strong “go,” and I’m waiting to hear reviews from people I know (I’m looking at you, Jake!). What did you guys make of the reviews?
June 4th, 2009 at 1:12 am
Man, I started to read the reviews, but I just don’t have the patience! So for now I’ll rely on Mike’s meta-review, and stick with my decision to buy the Pre on Saturday (and figure out the plan later) and then try a hands-on.
June 4th, 2009 at 6:54 am
I think the Pre is well on it’s way to being the most thoroughly reviewed device on the planet! I think I’m going to stop reading (after just the Engadget one) and wait for Jake’s!
June 4th, 2009 at 11:08 am
I’ll keep updating as I read reviews, since I seem to keep doing it even though I said I wouldn’t:
Mossberg is trying hard not to like the phone. He’s clearly an iPhone fanboy, so his review basically sums to “nice start, will challenge iPhone for some, not for me.” Haven’t counted, but I’ll bet “iPhone” shows up more than “Pre” in the article.
And, tells why even though Apple’s App Store is sometimes infuriating, the other extreme can be pretty maddening, too:
I’m interested to see how the store/3rd party development shapes up. I’m checking out a site/app called WorldMate on my iPhone, and ran across this post on their blog that says why they’re waiting to develop for the Pre. I think that’s probably a shared sentiment among mobile app developers.
June 4th, 2009 at 5:33 pm
If you don’t like my meta-review, then check out Gizmodo’s Matrix of Pre Reviews. They also talk about Mossberg’s propensity to talk about the iPhone…
June 5th, 2009 at 12:19 am
This is the only meta-review I need!