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)
Part 4: Phone, Web, E-mail, and Messaging

Camera

The Pre is the first cell phone that I have had where I have found the camera to take good enough pictures to be useful.  The phone has a 3-megapixel camera and a built-in flash, specs that fall a bit short of most newer phones but which were pretty good in 2009 and definitely better than any phone I had before.  While the flash makes it more usable indoors and in other low-light conditions than other cell phone cameras that I’ve had in the past, the camera is still better suited to photos taken in good lighting, particularly daylight shots outdoors.

The camera isn’t a substitute for a real dedicated digital camera, but it does take pretty acceptable photos under good conditions.  It has come in very handy for occasional photos taken when I don’t happen to have another camera along or when I want to immediately share a photo via Facebook or Twitter.  I think I took more photos with the Pre in the first couple months that I had it than I ever took with my previous phones.  The photos in this section were all taken using the Pre camera.

Admittedly, smartphone cameras have improved dramatically in the year and a half since the Pre was first released and most comparable phones have ones that are much better.  The Pre 2 increases the specs to a 5 megapixel camera and supposedly has some more advanced imaging than the Pre camera.  Palm/HP definitely does need a higher end phone with even more improvements to the camera, as well as a front-facing one for video conferencing.  The camera also lacks the touch to focus feature now included on the iPhone and many Android phones.

The camera application is pretty simple to use.  I have it on the top row of the first page of the launcher, allowing it to be accessed pretty quickly.  The controls available are a shutter button on the center bottom of the screen, a thumbnail photo to the left of the shutter to switch to the photo display application, and toggle on the right to switch the flash between on, off, and auto (based on a light sensor) modes and to switch to video recording.

I do find that triggering the shutter using an on-screen control is a bit awkward and has taken some getting used to.  I would prefer a physical button for that and have actually found that my first instinct has some times been to hit the center button (which launches card view) instead.  If you don’t mind opening the slider, the shutter can be activated with the spacebar as well.  In some cases, that can be an easier way to take a picture.

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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.

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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

Probably the most innovative feature of WebOS is its ability to consolidate contacts and calendar data from multiple web-based sources, a feature that Palm branded as “Synergy”.  Currently, the OS can consolidate calendars from Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and Microsoft Exchange and contacts from those same services plus LinkedIn.  Calendar entries and contacts entered directly into the phone can be directed to any of those services or to an online Palm Profile that is created during the initial set-up of the phone.

This ability to manage personal data from multiple cloud-based sources is the killer application in WebOS and other platforms (especially Android) are already implementing similar features.  At this point, the lack of a similar feature is probably the most glaring omission in Apple’s iOS.  It is becoming increasingly uncommon for anyone to have all of their contacts and calendars in a single location and the ability to effectively organize and consolidate it all is becoming vital.  Since I’ve had the Pre, it has become my primary calendar and address book.  Even when I’m near a desktop or laptop computer, I know that I’m likely to find the most complete version of what I’m looking for on the phone.

While it generally works reasonably well already, the feature is somewhat in the infant stage.  HP/Palm especially needs to expand it to pull data from a wider variety of sources.  They are still missing a few major services such as MSN and AOL.  Native support for more generic formats such as iCal would certainly be a big plus as well.  Adding synchronization of tasks and memos is also an obvious need that I’m pretty surprised that they have yet to address. WebOS 2.0 reportedly exposes more of Synergy in its public APIs, which should allow more services to implement their own synchronization.

I also strongly believe that HP/Palm should beef up their own Palm Profile service for those that might prefer not to use a 3rd party service for managing their personal information.  At the very least, they should implement the ability to view and manage data stored in the Palm Profile via the web.  Currently the data are only accessible on the phone itself.  There have also been reports of data loss from the Palm Profile when people have replaced or had to hard-reset their phones and this is something that is simply unacceptable with a cloud-based solution and must not continue.

One other shortcoming that is often cited is that there is no out-of-the-box solution for synchronizing with desktop applications for those that are still generally avoiding storing this kind of information in the cloud.  They do provide a tool for doing a one time transfer of data from Microsoft Outlook or the older Palm Desktop (used with the old Palm OS), but it does not establish an ongoing synchronization.  I don’t personally feel this is a bad decision, though.  There are already third-party solutions available to do this kind of synchronization (admittedly at an extra charge) and I think it probably is wiser for Palm to keep their own focus on the cloud-based approach, which I do think will be the preferred solution for most people.

CalendarIn the calendar application, the default view is a combined one with the events from each source (Exchange, Google, Facebook, etc.) color coded.  In the settings, you can select the specific color to use for each source and can also have it remove specific calendars from the combined view.  From the main screen, it is also easy to switch to a filtered view that only shows events from any single source.

Google’s calendar supports multiple calendars on a single account and webOS treats each as a separate source with its own color-coding and option to display or not in the combined view.  Since Google offers the ability to subscribe to iCal or other types of calendar feeds, this provides a method to pull in events from many calendar systems that aren’t directly supported by Palm.  I use TripIt for travel planning and scheduling and was able to subscribe to its calendar feed via Google.

I have found that there are some quirks/bugs in the system, which I hope Palm will work out in time.  Sometimes updates made online to a calendar have taken several hours to show up on the Pre and, occasionally, never made it there at all.  This problem was particularly common when subscribing to an external calendar source in Google and I eventually ended up dropping the TripIt subscription in favor of manual imports.

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This continues my review of the HP/Palm Pre and webOS.  Click here for the introduction and review of the Pre hardware.

User Interface

It is difficult to ignore that the webOS user interface was pretty closely inspired by Apple’s iOS on the iPhone and other related devices.  Palm was the first to directly challenge Apple’s claimed exclusivity on a multi-touch gesture based interface on a handheld, which creates some obvious similarities between the interfaces of the two phones.  I’ve never owned an iPhone, but have become familiar with it because of my wife’s phone as well as some friends and co-workers that have them.  HTC also tried to emulate some of the iPhone-style gesture navigation with the Touch Pro, although it was greatly affected by the limitations of a resistive touch-screen, the lack of multi-touch, and the overall non touch-friendly design of Windows Mobile.

Like the iPhone, the Pre uses a capacitive touch-screen which relies on the conductivity of human skin.  This prevents it from detecting input when using a stylus or much of anything else other than a finger.  This type of touchscreen allows generally accurate finger-based selection with fairly high durability and easy support for multi-touch.  It also demands a user-interface that is designed for finger-based touch in essentially every aspect of its operation.  The physical keyboard on the Pre allows for more traditional data entry and the webOS design makes use of the keyboard to augment the touch screen for tasks such as precise cursor positioning and text selection.  I can’t fault Palm for copying Apple’s approach to touch navigation as the approach works well.  Scrolling, panning, and zooming are incredibly easy and intuitive.

Directly under the screen there is a touch-sensitive “gesture area” that is used for some additional navigation.  The most commonly used is a right to left swipe across this area that goes back to the previous screen.  This is used so frequently that the initial device set-up process when the phone is powered up for the first time includes a short practice session for it.  The other frequently used gesture is an upward swipe from the gesture area onto the screen, which opens the main application launcher, and there are a handful of other less frequently used gestures.  Tapping the gesture area is used to initiate cut/paste and other special operations.  The gesture area has been hailed as one of the more inventive elements of webOS, but I am actually a little torn about its value.  I’ve gotten used to it, but I’m not fully convinced that “back” and “home” buttons wouldn’t be simpler and more straightforward.

I also am not 100% sold on the completely stylus-free interface as I still find occasions where I would like to be able to select items with more precision.  In particular, corrections and insertions during text entry are tricky, although WebOS does alleviate this by allowing finger swipes to be used for linear cursor movement when the “orange” key on the keyboard is held down.  I have also sometimes wished for a stylus (or even responsiveness to fingernails) when selecting smaller links in web pages or emails or when playing some kinds of casual games.  Still, the combination of good predictive algorithms and easy to use zooming does minimize this as an issue.  Of course, the lack of a stylus eliminates the possibility of handwriting recognition or freehand note taking.

Any photo can be set as the background image on the phone (I currently use a photo of Sleeping Beauty Castle at Disneyland).  The photo to use can easily be selected from the Photos application.  The webOS approach of hiding the launcher when not in use makes this particularly useful as the background photo frequently is fully visible instead of being hidden by icons.  Even when the launcher is displayed, it is kept slightly translucent so that the background image is still slightly visible.

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