15 things that suck about the Palm Pre

I’m coming from a Blackberry 8830, and after having a Palm Pre for a few days, I have quite a few criticisms. It’s not to say I don’t like the Palm Pre, but it definitely isn’t perfect.

• BATTERY LIFE! I can’t stress this enough. The battery life is absolutely horrible. I’ve tried wifi on and off. I run no apps in the background. When the phone is open (ie the screen is on), I lose about 1% of battery every 2 minutes. Today, I woke up, unplugged the phone, looked at 3 emails, and I was already down to 94%. Two and a half hours later, with minimal use (ie, checking an occasional email as it came in), I was at 65%. I’m not signed into any IM app, since AIM is reported to have battery life problems. I have to charge it at least 2 times a day. I lose about 1% for every text message I send or receive.
• The camera, at least in darker situations, seems to have a blueish tinge at the “top” of every photo (the top of the camera, so it may be on a side if the camera is rotated). No matter how I turn the camera, it’s always there. Below are some sample pictures showing it (click to see fullsized):
  Notice the left side here

  
  Again notice the left side

• You can’t change the sounds for texts and emails and set the volume differently than the general system sound.
• It doesn’t respect notification settings on email accounts. I have one account set to never show notifications when a new email arrives. I still get them.
• Text entry: there are no arrow keys on the keyboard, so it’s almost impossible to move the cursor within a text field to edit text. You have to try to tap the screen at the right place, and you can never get it right; it’s always somehow one character in front or behind where you want to be. Having an option to delete the character to the right would help with this. On websites with small text entry fields, especially ones that come pre-filled in, it’s all but impossible to edit them. This was trivial on the Blackberry
  EDIT: Yes, I know about holding the orange button and scrolling, but this doesn’t work on small text entry boxes. You have to move your finger within the box (which is only sometimes 2 characters wide) instead of being able to slide it anywhere on the screen
• Copy and paste: you can’t select any text that’s not in a text entry field. This makes copy and paste, in my opinion, useless.
• Can’t forward text messages (or copy them…see above).
• Google Maps:
  • Doesn’t have Google transit integration like the Blackberry
  • Can’t just tap a location on the map and say “directions to here”. You have to put in an intersection manually.
  • Very slow to load. It lags and doesn’t finish even rending the app itself for a few seconds (ie, only one side of the text entry box at the top is present).
  • GPS: my iPod can find my location in my apartment instantly. The Pre can’t find it at all; it just approximates it via triangulation.
• Calendar:
  • You have to wait a second for it to “render” each day before you can scroll/move to the next day.
  • Birthdays don’t show up in the calendar. Birthdays show up for each contact (either from Google or Facebook), but they don’t show on the calendar.
• Lags scrolling in the Launcher. Left and right are particularly bad, but up and down also lags. Isn’t it supposed to be hardware accelerated?
• Email lags compared to the Blackberry.
• MicroUSB: Why not just use miniUSB like everything else? I have plenty of miniUSB cables, and I could always find one at someone’s house if I was in a bind and needed a quick charge.
• No microSD slot.
• It would be nice to have a notification light for new messages
• Keyboard is much more difficult to use compared to a Blackberry, but I’m already getting used to it.

Other than all of these issues, I really like the phone. The browser is very fast and renders pages great. Multitasking is amazing. As mentioned, reading email is sluggish compared to the Blackberry, but it makes up for it in the read/delete status having 2 way sync with Gmail which wasn’t possible on the Blackberry with BIS. Many of these issues can probably be fixed by a software update; I have my fingers crossed.