This continues my review of the HP/Palm Pre and webOS. Click below for the previous parts:
Part 1: Introduction and Hardware
Part 2: User Interface, Launcher, and Multitasking
Part 3: Synergy (Calendar and Contacts)
Phone
I use the data features much more than voice, so the voice features are not usually a very high priority when I’m choosing a new smartphone. I certainly do like having a phone available for emergencies or for other occasions when one is needed, but I am must more likely to use email, text messages, or social network sites when keeping in touch with family and friends.
At least for my minimal needs, I have found the Pre/webOS phone features to be completely adequate, although I do recognize that it has some shortcomings, most notably the lack of voice dialing. It does have most of the major features that you would expect from a cell phone, such as tight integration with contacts, user-controllable ring tones, and compatibility with wired and Bluetooth hands-free devices. I’ve found the sound quality on calls to be generally good, although dependent on the strength of the signal, and the speakerphone is reasonably loud.
The phone application can be launched from the quick launch bar or it can easily be launched by clicking on a phone number in a contact entry, e-mail, web site, text message, or just about anywhere else. One of the fastest ways to make a call is to start typing the name of a contact and tap the phone number when the universal search feature finds it. Of course, the phone application is also automatically launched when you choose to answer an incoming phone call.
The primary screen of the phone application is dominated by a numeric dial pad. Direct dialing a phone number using touch screen buttons isn’t quite as effortless as using physical buttons, it works well enough. You can also use the keyboard to search for a contact from that screen, which is certainly the more common approach. A second tab on the screen lets you switch to the call log, which you can filter by sent/received calls or missed calls.
During a call, the screen switches to a screen that shows the name and 
any profile photo for the person you are talking to, assuming that person is in your contact list. For someone not in the contacts, it will display the phone number (for outgoing calls) or the information provided by caller-ID (for incoming). Options for muting or switching to speakerphone are also available on this screen. If you need to use the dial pad (such as to make selections from a menu), it is easy to switch over to it.
The phone includes a proximity sensor that turns off the screen while you have the phone up to your face during the call. I’ve found that this actually works a little bit too well. It sometimes takes a few tries to get the phone to accept touchscreen commands (such as muting or entering numbers in the dial pad) instead of turning off the screen.
When a call comes in, the phone displays a pop-up dialog showing the caller-ID information as well as any details (including a photo) that it can obtain from your contacts. Buttons on the dialog give you the option of answering the call or ignoring it. Opening the slider or picking the phone up off the Touchstone will automatically answer an incoming call as well. Also, if you touch the “answer” button while the phone is on the Touchstone, it will automatically switch to speakerphone.
From the “Sounds and Alerts” settings application, you can select which ring tone you wish to use as well as choose whether the ringer switch on the top of the phone silences the ringer completely or switches it to vibrate. A handful of fairly generic ring tones are included with the phone, but you can also use any compatible audio file on the phone. This flexibility to use your own musical choice as a ring tone is a very nice feature of webOS. In addition, you can set different ring tones for each individual contact from the contacts application.
Very basic integration with Sprint’s voicemail (or that of whichever carrier your phone uses) is provided. The phone’s usual notification system is used to let you know when you have new voicemail and there is also a button on the dial pad screen that can be used to call your voicemail. Unfortunately, webOS does not currently have a visual voicemail application to present messages in an inbox format like you get on the iPhone. It is possible to get visual voicemail with some third party applications, but they will replace your carrier’s voicemail with another service.
Web
The web browser on the Pre is based on the Webkit rendering engine, the same underlying engine used on the browsers for the iPhone and Android as well as Safari and Chrome on the desktop. The result is web rendering that is generally fast and accurate and certainly far more usable than the mobile browsers that I was previously familiar with from Palm OS and Windows Mobile.
Unlike mobile browsers that I’ve used before, I have found that most full web sites are quite usable on the Pre. The browser defaults to mobile versions of sites when available and those do often work better on the small screen. In most cases, the full versions of sites do work as well, which sometimes gives the user a choice between small screen formatting or extra features. The small screen is pretty nicely overcome by use of multi-touch “pinch and stretch” gestures for zooming in and out. It also does a pretty good job of zooming a column of text to fit the screen when double tapped.
Since the Pre uses the same web engine as the iPhone and also has a similar touch-based interface, sites specifically designed for that phone often work well. This is limited a bit by sites that only present the iPhone version if the browser actually identifies itself as an iPhone (in fact, there are patches out there that will cause the Pre browser to pretend to be an iPhone). Fortunately, many sites do allow the iPhone view to be selected manually and it is becoming increasingly common for sites to detect webOS automatically.
There are still some limitations to the browser, easily the most significant being the lack of Adobe Flash support, which excludes quite a few sites. The good news is that webOS 2.0 does include Flash support and Palm is promising it will be included with 2.0 upgrades that will eventually be pushed even to the original Pre. The timeline for this upgrade is not clear at this point, unfortunately. Palm and Adobe actually have promised Flash for the Pre since the phone was first introduced, so this is a very tardy feature. Once Flash does become available, it will represent a significant advantage over the iPhone, since Apple has made it very clear that they do not intend to support it.
The webOS browser also provides support for some of the newer HTML 5 features, although with quite a few limits in the current compatibility. The current version scores 132 out of 300 points at the compatibility measurement site HTML5Test.com. While not spectacular, this is pretty comparable to Firefox 3.6 under Windows and better than many Android phones. Palm has been improving the compatibility with each new version of the OS and I’m sure this will continue to get better. I’m hopeful that the webOS 2.0 version of the browser will substantially improve this compatibility.
Accessing content on the web is a central feature of webOS, as the name of the OS suggests. Simply starting to type on the keyboard from anywhere on the Pre that doesn’t otherwise expect text input activates a universal search feature that will first look for matching application or contact names on the device, but then quickly allow for searches of Google, Wikipedia, or Twitter. If you simply type a web address and press enter, it will open the browser at that page. With webOS 2.0, this feature is re-branded as “Just Type” and provides a public API that will allow any number of services or applications to connect into these searches.
The browser has basic bookmarking capabilities, including the use of user-selectable thumbnails to quickly visually identify them. Bookmarks can also be placed onto the main launcher windows, if desired. Unfortunately, it does not provide any way to categorize or organize bookmarks other than a straight list, though. There also isn’t currently any way to synchronize bookmarks with desktop browsers, a feature that would be extremely welcome. With Palm’s strong commitment to synchronization with cloud services, I’d love to see them partner with XMarks or some other similar service to keep bookmarks in sync between the phone and the desktop.
The e-mail support on the Pre is pretty standard for a current smartphone, but works well. Any number of email accounts can be configured, using any mix of POP3, IMAP, and Microsoft Exchange accounts. The Pre was one of the first phones to allow multiple Exchange accounts, a feature that even Windows Mobile didn’t support at the time. This ability is pretty standard on the major smartphone operating systems now, though. The webOS email application can handle push email with Exchange or IMAP or it can schedule retrievals at regular intervals. With IMAP and Exchange accounts, the software can access any folders or subfolders.
The software automates the configuration for many of the most common email services (such as GMail, Hotmail, AOL, Yahoo, etc.) or the mail servers and account details can be manually configured. It will also try some common web server names (such as “mail.domain.com”) in an attempt to figure out how to automatically configure accounts with services that it doesn’t recognize.
I use 3 primary email accounts, including my work’s corporate Microsoft Exchange account and two personal accounts, which I host at Fastmail. That is not one of the services included in the automatic configuration, and obviously it didn’t recognize the corporate account, so I had to do all of the email configuration manually. The manual process isn’t difficult (assuming you know all the necessary information), but wasn’t quite as intuitive as it should have been either.
During the initial configuration, it first asks you only for your email address and password. What I didn’t realize at first was that there is a “Manual Configuration” option available from the pull down menu. Instead, I simply entered the address and password as requested, figuring that it would quickly realize that the details would have to be entered manually. Instead, it spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out how to log in (presumably trying common server names like “mail.domain.com”) before it finally gave up and forced me into the manual configuration process. Since I knew my accounts would probably require manual configuration, I would have liked to see that option be more readily available via a button or link instead of hidden in a pull-down menu.
Once configured, the email application provides a pretty clean and easy to understand interface. The main screen is split into collapsible sections for “Favorites” and for each of the configured email accounts. The inbox for each account is automatically added to the favorites section and other folders can be added (or removed) as desired simply by tapping a star next to the folder name in the main list for that account. Tapping on any folder’s name opens the message list, as you would expect. A unified inbox showing messages from all accounts’ inboxes is the top option, or you can select the inboxes or other folders individually.
The list of messages is sorted by time/date received and presented most recent first. The 1.4 webOS update added a pull-down menu option to sort by subject or sender instead. Each message is shown on 3 lines, with the sender name, subject line, and the first line of the message body. Messages can be opened by tapping on them or deleted by horizontally swiping across the message. One poor design choice, in my opinion, is that there is no confirmation question when deleting messages. Fortunately, accidentally deleted messages can be recovered from a trash folder. An unofficial patch is also available that adds that missing confirmation and I really hope this will become an official option in a future release.
Continuing the web-centric design of the OS, the body of an email message is essentially displayed inside of a browser window. HTML features such as in-line graphics or hyperlinks are all fully rendered and are very cleanly reformatted to fit the screen. The same gestures for zooming in and out and panning that are found in the browser are available when reading email.
When I first switched from Palm OS to Windows Mobile, the ability to see HTML emails fully rendered was a major jump forward in productivity, but the feature never really worked exceptionally well as it was slow and gave limited control over how to view the messages. On the Pre, it works extremely well and I’ve found it to be once again a leap forward in the ability to effectively read emails of pretty much any type on the phone. The only slightly unfortunate limitation is that it doesn’t currently support switching to landscape for reading emails, although I hope that will show up in a later version as an “Easter egg” (as well as an unofficial patch) to enable this does already exist.
I have a couple other user-interface complaints about the email application. Navigating to the next or previous message is done by tapping on left and right arrows located at the top of the message next to the header. The problem with this is that you have to scroll all the way to the top of the message to do this navigation and there is no quick gesture to do so. This can be especially frustrating with long emails. Another similar navigation complaint that I have is that deleting a message by clicking on the trashcan icon on the read screen always returns to the message list. I would prefer to be able to configure it to go on to the next or previous message instead.
Text Messages and IM
One unusual design choice that Palm made was to combine SMS text messaging and an instant messaging (IM) client into a single application. In addition to SMS, you can configure the application to work with Google Talk, Yahoo Messaging, and AOL/AIM. The client groups together all messages from any individual as a single threaded conversation. Even if the conversation switches back and forth between SMS and one or more IM service, it still will continue to group the messages together.
When one of the IM accounts is added, the buddy list is downloaded and the users are all added to your contacts. As with the other Synergy features, the IM information is added to the existing consolidated contacts if the person already existed on one of your other contact lists or a new contact is created if not. At least in the case of AIM, though, there is a lot of manual linking required as that service generally doesn’t store a name along with the IM handle.
I honestly am not a very active user of either SMS messaging or IM, so I haven’t used this application very extensively. In fact, I temporarily configured IM on my phone as I was working on this review just so I could see how it worked. The only IM service I’ve ever used much was AIM, but I haven’t used it regularly for several years. I had to clean up my buddy list quite a bit before even considering adding it, since there were quite a few old contacts on there that I wouldn’t want to include on my phone. I eventually found it to be a pretty big battery drain for a feature I didn’t really use, so I ended up removing it. I did find it odd that I couldn’t find any way to disconnect from the IM service other than completely removing the account.
I have used the application for SMS messaging a bit more frequently (although I text far less than many people do), and it seems to generally work well. The interface is pretty clear and easy to use and the threaded view does make it easy to keep track of all the texts from a specific person.
Coming up in part 5: Camera, photos, and maps/navigation
