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
Part 5: Camera, Photos, and Maps/Navigation

While the current version of webOS does an adequate job as a media player, I think it falls short of what it could, or should, have been.  A lot of commentators have noted that Apple’s success with the iPod means that the iPhone’s media capabilities should be expected to exceed those of their competitors, but I think there were opportunities for Palm to pull ahead here in many ways.  Instead, the media capabilities not only fall short of the iPhone, but, in some ways, also fails to match older competitors such as Windows Mobile and even the Palm OS.  I haven’t seen strong indications yet that HP is targeting these issues with webOS 2.0, although maybe there are partnerships to be announced in February.

The greatest opportunity would have come from countering Apple’s infamous adherence to a closed ecosystem by working to make WebOS  compatible with as many audio/video formats as possible.  Instead, Palm only included support for pretty much the same formats that Apple did, mainly variants on MP3 and AAC audio and H264 and MP4 video.  I think that Palm seriously missed the ball by not at least licensing the Windows Media formats from Microsoft and/or including support for common open-source codecs like Ogg Vorbis and Flac.

A big disadvantage on Palm’s side is a complete lack of support for any kind of protected formats at all.  That isn’t a huge deal for music, since most online stores have now gone to distributing unprotected files, but it greatly limits the available support for commercial movies and TV programs or for audiobooks.  I strongly think they HP should make every effort to get support for Audible.com audiobooks and for Windows Media protected video onto the platform as soon as possible.  In fact, I think seem support for protected video content will be absolutely essential for the tablet that they are expected to announce next week.

One of the biggest advantages Apple has is their tight integration with iTunes, which is now the largest music retailer in the US.  Palm wisely partnered with Apple’s most aggressive online competitor, Amazon.com, to include a nicely designed application for locating, purchasing, and downloading music.  I didn’t really expect to use this much, but I have actually ended up purchasing quite a bit of music this way.   It is nice to be able to purchase and very quickly start listening when I hear about some music of interest while away from home.  The music is the same quality as the downloads purchased from Amazon via the desktop and, since it is unprotected, you can easily transfer the tracks to a computer via the USB connection.

Possibly the single biggest miscalculation that Palm made early on with webOS was hacking synchronization compatibility with iTunes by having the phone attempt to impersonate an iPod.  This put Palm into a war with Apple, which they simply couldn’t win.  For a while, every update to iTunes intentionally broke this feature, with Palm having to quickly code a new hack into their OS updates.  The synchronization has now been broken for over a year and Palm finally gave up on the feature early.  The 1.4 update disabled the “Media Sync” option by default, requiring those still trying to sync with an older version of iTunes to go into the settings to re-enable it.  I’d be surprised if the feature is still present at all in Web OS 2.0.

That war with Apple was a monumental waste of time and resources on Palm’s part that left them with some damage to their reputation (the USB committee even cited them for using Apple’s USB ID) and a missing feature for their users.  It isn’t remotely surprising that Apple didn’t want Palm doing this and it created an ethical grey area at best.  Palm would have been much better off either partnering with a more willing maker of music management software or building their own synchronization tool, possibly making use of Apple’s published API’s for accessing the iTunes library.  Web OS still needs a viable media sync capability and hopefully HP is working on a sustainable solution.

Music

The music player on the Pre has an attractive and easy user interface, but is also limited in a lot of ways.  It provides a touch-friendly interface for locating songs or albums and playing them back as well as the usual forward and backward navigation.   One particularly nice feature is the inclusion of a large “shuffle all” button right at the top of the main screen, making it very quick and easy to start playing random selections from all the tracks on the phone.

The initial menu allows you to select tracks by artists, albums, songs, genres, or playlists.  All of these selection methods only go down a single layer, meaning that once you select an artist, album, or genre, you are then given a list of all the songs that fit that tag.  There is no way to select albums by genre or artist or artists by albums, for example.  It also doesn’t allow you to populate the “Now Playing” list from multiple searches, such as to cue up multiple albums for uninterrupted play. Once you select a song, it simply starts playing all the tracks in the returned result set starting with the one selected.

While the music player does support playlists, there is no mechanism available to create one or to add or remove tracks directly on the phone.  Instead, it expects you to create playlists in iTunes and then transfer them using the no longer supported media sync feature.  I’ve never really been a user of playlists (I tend to listen to entire albums), so I haven’t really explored any alternatives to getting them onto the Pre, but it certainly seems clear that some on-device playlist management is needed.

The audio application doesn’t remember state once you close it meaning that you can’t easily resume playback where you left off unless you are willing to keep the music player application open in the background until you are ready to use it again.  I would prefer for it to at least remember the tracks in the “Now Playing” set and which track you are on.

The player will automatically bookmark the last position played in tracks that are tagged with a genre of “audiobook” or “podcast” and will resume playback from that point the next time that track is selected.  The precision on this isn’t down to the second as you would expect, though, and it often resumes playback as much as a minute or so before or after the actual point where you left off.  The forward and backward seek buttons are similarly imprecise, making it very difficult to find the correct spot.  In fact, scanning forward or backward within a track is an exercise in frustration due to lack of responsiveness and a nearly useless slider on the track position indicator, which only is visible when scanning.

This issue with resuming playback is symptomatic of general problem with accurately keeping track of the correct time code on long files like audiobooks or podcasts.  It always stops playback when it thinks it has reached the end time, which causes it to usually cut off a couple minutes at the end of the track.  I now always use an audio editor to add 10 minutes of silence to the end of audiobooks before transferring them to the Pre in order to accommodate this problem, a fairly ridiculous requirement that is pretty certainly beyond the technical capabilities of most casual users.

The various issues mentioned above add up to some rather serious shortcomings in the music player that HP/Palm really must address.  Even with a nice user interface, it falls pretty far short of what is available on other platforms, even including the Pocket Tunes software that had become pretty much the standard music player on the Palm OS.

Some, but not all, of these issues are addressed in third-party music players that are available from unofficial “homebrew” application stores.  Due to official API limitations, these aren’t available in the official application store, although webOS 2.0 reportedly does open up the necessary APIs to make these applications official.  I have found that even third-party music players do not address the time code accuracy problems, though, meaning the problem is inherent to the webOS music playback functions.

On a more positive note, there are some pretty good streaming audio applications on the Pre that work really well.  Pandora, Slacker and Grooveshark have well-designed applications available and there are also a couple good applications for accessing Shoutcast stations.  A free application called RadioTime provides a good mechanism for finding and listening to the online simulcasts of online radio stations.  Finally, many web-based audio streams will play back just fine in the built-in audio player if you navigate to and select them via the web browser.  This method can be used to access home libraries via Orb or other similar services.  Obviously, the quality of streaming audio is very dependent on the strength of the wireless connection available, but these applications work well with wi-fi or when you have a strong cellular data connection.

Video

I’ve never been too much of a viewer of video on my cell phone.  I typically find a cell phone screen to be too small for most videos and I generally am much more apt to watch anything I’m interested in either on our big screen TV (if possible) or on the laptop or desktop computer.  As a result, my experience with the video playback features of the Pre are somewhat cursory.

The Sprint version of the Pre includes three primary applications for playback of video: the general video player, a YouTube player, and Sprint TV.  There are also included NFL and NASCAR applications that I haven’t really tried, but apparently provide some access to related sporting event videos.

The main “Videos” application has an interface very similar to the “Photos” application.  It provides a simply system to organize videos into albums or to select from a complete list.  The application can play back videos that were recorded using the camera application or videos that are copied to the device via USB or downloaded from web sites or email attachments.  The only video formats recognized or supported are MPEG-4, H.263, and H.264.  During video playback, it automatically switches to landscape mode.  Controls for pausing or navigating through the video appear when you tap the screen.  As with the photo application, any organization into folders has to be done by connecting the phone to a PC with USB.

The YouTube application provides access to pretty much the entire contents of Google’s popular video sharing site.  Videos can be located via search or you can navigate through lists of popular or most-viewed videos as well as through a history of the videos you have viewed previously.  As in the video application, playback is in landscape and the video quality is generally acceptable, although dependent on the strength of your Internet connection (either wi-fi or cellular).  One very nice feature is that embedded YouTube videos on web-sites show up as thumbnails in the browser.  Tapping on them launches that video in the YouTube application.

Sprint TV provides access to a variety of video content from commercial sources contracted with Sprint.  This includes a number of the major broadcast and cable networks as well as various movie studios.  Short form videos (such as movie trailers or clips from TV shows) are included in the monthly plan, while some longer-form content (including feature films) are on a pay-per-view basis.  The biggest negative is that Sprint’s deal only covers programming delivered over their network, which means that the video can’t be streamed over Wi-Fi. The result is mediocre video quality that is very dependent on the strength of the cellular signal.

Coming up in part 7: Third-party Applications and Patches/Homebrew

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.

Up until the late February 2010 release of WebOS 1.4, the biggest limitation with the camera was that it didn’t have any video recording capability.  Fortunately, the camera was always capable of it and the feature simply needed to be implemented in the software.  Video recording and simple editing (basically trimming the start and end) was finally added with that update.  The video quality isn’t spectacular but is useful for quickly capturing moments that come up when a better video camera isn’t available.  It definitely needs a lot of improvement before it would even be a replacement for Flip-style hand-held camcorders.

I think that taking so long to add video recording to the phone was a definite mistake on Palm’s part.  At the time that the Pre was launched,  video recording was already pretty common even with lower end phones and pretty much a standard feature on other smartphones.  Particularly since Apple added it to the iPhone right around the same time as the Pre’s initial release, this stood out as a pretty glaring shortcoming.  It is great that the feature is there now, but there are an awful lot of reviews and other articles still out there saying that this is a feature the Pre lacks.  Somebody casually evaluating the Pre (or later webOS phones) via web searches could easily  get the impression that this is still a limitation.

Photo Gallery

The Photos application isn’t anything overly fancy, but it gets the job done.  It has the key features that you would expect, including the ability to organize photos into albums and support for multi-touch gestures to pan around and zoom in and out on photos.  In addition to viewing photos taken with the phone’s camera, the application also can display photos copied to the phone via USB or downloaded from email or the web.

By default, the application includes galleries for “Photo Roll” (photos taken with the camera go here by default), “Downloads”, “Wallpaper” and “Screen Captures”.  A nice feature of webOS is that hitting the orange, sym, and P key at any time on the keyboard will grab a screen shot that is then available in the “Screen captures”  gallery.  Most of the shots I’ve used in my review were taken this way.  Additional galleries can be created, but not from the phone itself.  Instead, you have to connect the phone to a computer via USB, create additional folders under the photos directory, and then move photos to them.  The ability to manage this on the phone itself definitely needs to be added.

From the full-screen view of a photo, options are available to set the photo as the phone’s wallpaper, assign it as the photo for a contact, send the photo out via email or MMS, or upload the photo to Facebook or Photobucket.  The upload feature is a particularly nice one, but it is also a feature that Palm needs to upgrade to support additional photo services.  Obvious additions would be Picasa, Flickr, and Twitpic and other Twitter-based photo services.  In most cases, photos can still be uploaded to those other services via 3rd party applications, email, or web interfaces, but it would be very welcome to have them integrated into the Photos application.

It would be a big improvement to be able to include captions with the photos when uploading from the Photos application.  Facebook users can also upload photos from the Palm-built Facebook application (available in the app store) and that does allow captioning.  I would also like to see the addition of the ability to do batch uploads (currently, photos have to be selected one at a time for upload) and to assign photos to specific existing or newly-created galleries as well.  Uploads are fortunately done in the background, which does minimize the impact of the lack of batch selection.

The Facebook integration in the Photos application has an odd bug that became a pretty big frustration for me.  At one point, it simply stopped working, instead always telling me my password was incorrect.  I tried removing and adding the account many times (as well as rebooting the phone numerous times) and couldn’t get the problem to go away.  The only way I finally got it working again was to switch to using a secondary email address that I had associated with my Facebook account, definitely a far from ideal choice.  I haven’t tested to see if this problem was fixed in the most recent OS updates, mainly because I’m hesitant to mess with it now that I have it working.

Maps and Navigation

The Pre includes a built-in GPS which can be used with a number of different location-based applications and services.  The Sprint version of the Pre includes Google Maps and Sprint Navigation pre-loaded on the phone.  Location-based features are limited a bit by the lack of a compass in the Pre, limiting its ability to detect orientation.  Unfortunately, that might not be a fixable problem in future models due to the magnets required for the Touchstone charging.

Google Maps on the Pre is familiar to anyone that has used either the web-based version or one of the numerous other mobile versions available on other phones.  The Pre version makes good use of the WebOS multi-touch interface, allowing for easily panning around the maps by finger as well as two-finger zooming just like in the web browser and photo applications.  Re-centering based on the current GPS location is done by simply tapping on the blue dot towards the bottom of the screen.  A search box lets you find locations or businesses (obviously using Google as the data source). Tapping a menu button lets you get directions, switch to satellite view, or overlay traffic data.

While the Google Maps implementation works well as far as it goes, it should be noted that Google seems to have mostly abandoned enhancements to it, meaning that newer features offered on currently more popular platforms (such as Android and iPhone) are missing from the webOS version.  The most immediately noticeable omission is street view, a feature that would certainly be very nice to have when trying to find a specific address or business while on the go.  Also missing is Google’s Latitude location sharing feature as well as integration with their Buzz social networking.

Perhaps with HP’s expected to be aggressive push for webOS, Google will consider once again directing more resources towards the platform.  If not, hopefully HP will find an alternate developer for the maps application that will be willing to bring it up to current standards.  For now, though, webOS users have to be content with a version of Google Maps that works well, but falls somewhat short on the feature list compared to competing platforms.

The turn-by-turn navigation software on the Sprint Pre is a pretty full-featured implementation of the Telenav system, which is common on many mobile phones.  The “Simply Everything Data” plans that Sprint requires with the Pre all include unlimited use of the navigation software, so there are no extra charges involved with it. 

The feature set of Sprint Navigation is pretty much what you would expect.  You can specify destinations by manually entering an address, looking one up in the phone’s contacts, or searching for points of interest.  The verbal navigation cues are clearly spoken and it does phonetically pronounce street names.

The navigation software doesn’t store the maps on the phone, which means that it only works in areas where you have a data signal.  This makes it generally more useful for short trips in urban areas with strong Sprint coverage than for longer city-to-city trips.  That is, in fact, just how I have been using it.  We have a dedicated Tom-Tom navigation device that we use for longer trips, but the navigation software on the Pre is very useful on short trips, particularly when I don’t really know ahead of time that I might need some help with navigation.

Coming up in part 6: Media (music and video)

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.

E-Mail

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

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.

Looking at the calendar online at Google would show the correct information, but the information on the Pre would remain outdated for a while or, occasionally forever, even after tapping the “Sync Now” button.  There have been a few times (both with Google and Facebook), where I found that it stopped recording updates altogether until I removed the account and re-added it.  These are manageable inconveniences, but they definitely work against a hands-off approach to managing multiple calendars and also tend to undermine confidence.

The calendar application itself is somewhat lacking in features and could use some enhancement.  While it does provide options for daily, weekly, or monthly views, it always defaults to the daily view on opening with no option available for changing that.  More importantly, there is no agenda view (like Windows Mobile’s “Today” screen) to provide a quick-view summary of upcoming appointments/events.  The only third-party Agenda application that I’m aware of is a “homebrew” app since Palm currently doesn’t support access to the calendar data in its published application API, although hopefully that will change with 2.0.

Another major omission is the lack of any support for categorization, other than the color coding by calendar sources.  I would argue that color-coding by categories would, for most people, be preferable to the color-coding by calendar sources.  Generally, I’m more interested in being able to quickly visually distinguish business appointments, personal appointments, and family activities than whether these came from Exchange, Google, or Facebook. 

Admittedly, I am generally apt to keep like appointments in the same calendar (work appointments in Exchange, personal appointments in Google, event invitations in Facebook), but that isn’t going to always be the case.  In particular, I often have personal appointments in my work calendar if they require me to be out of the office during work hours while personal appointments outside of work hours typically remain in Google.

Another limitation in the calendar application is limited time zone awareness.  The phone appears to store all appointments internally according to GMT or some other standard baseline, which means that all appointments will shift in the calendar as you travel to other time zones.  During a trip to Florida , all of the calendar entries  I had entered into Google as Eastern time showed up 3 hours off while I was at home in California, although they were correct once the phone was in the right time zone.

It would be nice to at least have the option to have it always display appointments at the specified time regardless of specified time zone instead of adjusting for local time.  There is also no way to specify time zone in appointments entered onto the phone, which means you have to remember to manually adjust if you are in a different time zone than you will be at the time of the appointment.  While this probably isn’t a serious problem for a lot of people, it could be a big issue for those that travel a lot.

Admittedly, Palm’s ability at managing and synchronizing calendars has always been better than their built-in calendar applications.  On the Palm OS, most power users purchased third-party calendar software such as Iambic’s Agendus or Pimlico’s Datebk.  It is likely that the limitations of the webOS calendar application will also eventually be addressed by third party vendors.  Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened yet due to the API limitations mentioned before.  Hopefully the additional APIs opened up in webOS 2.0 will make this possible.

Contacts

When combining contacts from multiple sources, webOS Synergy takes into account that there is likely to be overlap.   As it pulls in data from the various services, it creates composite entries that combine data from all entries for the same name.  For example, for one contact, you might have home address, phone number, and personal email addresses stored in Google Contacts.  For the same person, a profile photo, a more public email address, and birthday might be in their Facebook profile.  Finally, this person’s company, work title, and business phone and email might all be in their LinkedIn profile.  The end result on the phone is a single contact entry containing all of that information.

The result of this behind-the-scenes processing is frequently a much more complete contact profile than from any one source.  In fact, the composite entries are so complete that I now generally use the Pre as my definitive source when looking for information about an individual.  It does such a good job with this that one currently missing feature that I would really like to see Palm add is the ability to tell the Pre to fill in and upload missing data on Google Contacts (or other writable sources) using the information that it gathered from your other sources.

Contact entries from different sources will only be recognized as being for the same person if there is an exact match on the name.  Nicknames, middle initials, maiden names, or other variations do result in multiple contact entries being created on the phone.  Fortunately, this is very easily corrected by opening up one of the contacts and tapping a “Link Other Profile” button to manually combine these entries.  I found that the number of these was relatively low and that it didn’t take long at all to clean it up.

For any conflicting, duplicate information (such as different profile photos or name variations), it is easy to select which information should be treated as the primary.  It also has no problems keeping track of multiple email addresses or phone numbers that might come in from different sources, even in cases where they are tagged the same (such as two different “work” phones).  When making a call or sending a text or email message, you simply tap on the phone number or email address that you want to use.

One down side is that there isn’t really any flexibility about what information to pull down to the phone from each service.  Instead, it is pretty much an all or nothing prospect.  Facebook and Google both offer the ability to categorize contacts into lists or groups (LinkedIn does as well, but only with the extra-charge premium account) and it would definitely be nice to be able to tell the Pre to selectively include or exclude groups.  It does help that the Pre only pulls Google contacts from the “My Contacts” group, which allows for some exclusion.

To mitigate this limitation, it helps to go to the various cloud services and do some clean-up of entries for people that you aren’t really interested in staying in touch with.  Even still, you are likely to have some entries, particularly from Facebook and LinkedIn, for people you want to retain as contacts on those services, but are unlikely to get in touch with frequently, if ever, from the phone.  The impact of this problem is reduced somewhat by webOS’ excellent and very fast search mechanism, which makes it very easy to find the contacts you need without having to scroll through what is likely to be a pretty long list.

Another way to speed access to frequently-used contacts is to assign speed-dial buttons to their phone numbers.  Any letter on the keyboard can be assigned to a speed-dial number, which allows one-press access from the phone application.  While this is nice, it falls a bit short of what is really needed, which is a “favorites” screen for quickly accessing most-used contacts.  This is something that has already been addressed with a couple third-party applications, but it really should have been a standard feature of the contacts (and phone) application.

Coming up in Part 4: Phone, Web, E-mail, and Messaging

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.

Launcher

The main set of screens for accessing the functions and applications on the phone falls short in some key areas, but the good news is that webOS 2.0 promises to fix the biggest problems.  The current design is essentially identical to the one used by Apple on the iPhone, but this is one place where Palm should have looked more closely at their own history than at what Apple had done.  The menu is presented on three pages of icons, with swipes used for vertical scrolling and for moving from page to page.  Icons can be moved around by holding and dragging.

This menu system  works, but is pretty limiting when it comes to organization, particularly if you have added many additional apps to the phone.  The launcher design for the older Palm OS was actually much better and should have been adapted for webOS.  The Palm OS launcher allowed every application/function to be categorized, with each category having a separate page of icons.  Common default categories (like “Main”, “Games”, “System”, etc.) were included, but users could add or remove categories at will.  This design made it much easier to find what you were looking for, particularly on a fairly loaded phone/PDA.

Unofficial patches from the webOS homebrew community have already added the ability to add and remove pages from the launcher, getting past the 3 and only 3 page limitation on stock devices.  webOS 2.0 will make that an official feature and will also add the ability to give each page a name, effectively restoring the categorization abilities of the old Palm OS.  These are changes that are long overdue and will be very welcome.

The launcher also includes a docked set of 5 icons at the bottom of the screen.  These are present whenever not in an application and the dock can be quickly brought up from within an app by pressing down on the gesture area and swiping upward.  By default, the dock includes icons for calendar, phone, contacts, email, and the main menu.  The first four positions can be switched to other applications if you prefer, although I’ve left them at the default as those actually are the apps that I most often want to quickly launch.  The icon for opening the main menu, which can’t be changed, is actually pretty pointless, since a simple upward swipe from the gesture area does the same thing.

Multitasking

The question of whether or not user-controlled multitasking is necessary on a smart phone generates a fair amount of debate and controversy, although I think that is really only because Apple doesn’t fully support it, and their current limited implementation was just introduced last year.  Apple’s implementation places limits on what kinds of functions can run in the background and requires that apps be specifically enabled for multi-tasking by their developers.  In contrast, webOS allows any application (built-in or third party) to run in the background.

All smart phones have to be able to multitask for some functions, such as detecting incoming phone calls and text messages or playing music in the background.  Only some of the current platforms allow for more than one application to run at a time fully under the user’s control.  The iPhone and the older Palm OS are the most obvious examples of ones that do not.  The ability for full, easily-managed multitasking is frequently touted as one of the biggest advantages that Palm webOS has over both its predecessor and the iPhone.

The most persuasive arguments against full multitasking include it being overly taxing to the limited CPU, memory, and battery life on a cell phone and that managing multiple applications at once can be a challenge with such a small screen and limited control set.  Arguably, the multitasking features were one of the biggest contributors to the instability and complexity of Windows Mobile.  The other side of this argument (and the view I subscribe to) is that it should ultimately be up to the end user to decide whether or not to accept the tradeoffs.  To Palm’s credit, the implementation in webOS is excellent and generally does address the user interface problems, although running too many applications at once still reduces battery life.

webOS uses a deck of cards metaphor for multitasking.  Within any application, pressing the small round button in the center of the gesture area reduces the current screen to a card, which is a rectangular thumbnail.  You can then use horizontal touch flicks to switch to the cards of other open applications or you can bring up the main menu or quick launch bar to open other applications.  Pressing and dragging a card allows the order to be re-arranged.  Any open application can be closed by going to card view and simply flicking it upward off the screen.  In the current version, pressing the button while already in card view makes the cards smaller (nice for when you have a lot opened), although I’ve heard that no longer works in webOS 2.0.

This interface is very intuitive and easy to use.  It is certainly much more straightforward than the Windows Mobile task manager.  I understand from friends with Android phones that OS also uses a similar approach to Windows Mobile.  Even Apple’s limited multitasking introduced with iOS 4 has a more clunky interface involving a task bar brought up by double clicks on the home button.  Closing an iOS application requires opening the task bar, pressing down on the icon for a few seconds, and then tapping an “x” that appears next to the icon.  This is way more cumbersome than simply flipping a webOS card upward.

I find the multitasking on the Pre to be very useful and have a hunch that I would quickly be frustrated if I went back to a phone without such an elegant implementation.  When reading through email or social networking messages (Twitter or Facebook), it is nice to be able to open up web links that I can quickly switch over to after I finish going through the messages.  There have also been many cases where I have wanted to cross-reference between emails and calendar entries, sometimes including cutting and pasting of text.  Finally, it certainly is nice to be able to easily pause a game or video when I need to switch over to email, calendar, etc.

Admittedly, all phones generally can handle these same types of things at least to an extent via saved application states, but true multitasking is faster and more reliably and quickly returns to exactly where you left off.  Palm’s implementation of it here is the best I’ve yet seen on a mobile platform.

Coming up in part 3: Synergy (Cloud synchronization of calendar and contacts)

In October 2009, I purchased a Palm Pre smart phone on the Sprint network.  As a Sprint Premiere customer, I am eligible for upgrade pricing on new phones after the first year of the two-year contract, making now a good time to assess my experience with the Pre and webOS and whether or not to continue with it or look at a switch to Android or some other platform.  My review will be presented in several parts over the next several days.

With Hewlett-Packard (HP) recently completing their purchase of Palm, there is the expectation of new webOS devices on the horizon.  Late in 2010, the Pre 2 was announced along with the new 2.0 version of webOS.  More new phone models and a tablet are expected during the first half of 2011, with announcements likely to be made at a press event HP has scheduled for February 9th. The Pre 2 is just a moderate upgrade to the specifications,  but it does address a few of the nagging issues with the Pre.  The OS update is pretty substantial and does add some nice new features, although most of those features will eventually be available on my current Pre as well via a firmware update.

In the United States, the Pre 2 is currently only available in a costly unlocked GSM version, although a subsidized version on Verizon Wireless is expected soon.  Right now, it doesn’t look too likely that other carriers are going to rush to pick it up.  A new Sprint webOS phone could be announced later, but I may have to consider whether or not an upgraded Palm phone would justify changing carriers and paying the cost of the pro-rated early termination fee for the 2-year contract (or waiting until October to upgrade).  I’ve found Sprint’s coverage near me to be spotty, though, so this may be worth considering.

I’m going to go into much more detail about the pluses and minuses of the Pre and webOS over the rest of my review, but I’m going to also cut to the chase and give my current thinking right away.  At this point, my plan is to sit tight for the time being and find out what new phones HP/Palm announces over the early part of 2011.  I do believe that webOS has some strong advantages over the competition that I would hate to give up and I would like to give the company a chance to impress me on the hardware side.  Upgrading to the Pre 2 right away would even be pretty tempting if it were available on Sprint, but I’m kind of glad it isn’t as I might be happier with a more advanced model.

I should mention that actually started writing this review shortly after I purchased the phone and have worked on it periodically, adding new thoughts and observations as my experience with the phone has grown.  Eventually, it felt like it had gotten to be old news, so I set it aside without completing it or posting.  I feel that writing my review over more than a full year of use gives me a more meaningful perspective  than if I had published a first-impressions review shortly after I got the phone.

My History with Palm and Smartphones

I have a pretty long history with Palm devices, starting with my first PDA: a work-issued Palm V back in 2000.  Since then, I have owned a Palm VIIx (their first network-connected device), Palm Tungsten-W (a very early smartphone), Sony Clie UX-50 (Sony licensed Palm OS for PDAs at that time), a Palm Lifedrive (PDA with a 4GB hard drive) and a Treo 700P.  While a couple of those were among the worst designed models that Palm has put out, particularly the Tungsten-W and Lifedrive, I definitely have a strong affinity to Palm’s approach to the design of PDA/phones.

In late 2008, I became frustrated with the limitations of the badly aging Palm OS and switched to a high-end (at the time) Windows Mobile phone: the HTC Touch Pro.  While that phone was very powerful and feature rich, I pretty quickly became frustrated by the slow, clunky, and inconsistent user interface and the general instability of the OS whenever I tried to do anything overly complicated with it.  In addition, Apple’s iPhone had largely re-defined the user interface for a phone and I couldn’t help feeling that I was using a seriously outdated operating system, particularly after my wife got an iPhone allowing me to gain some more direct experience with it.  While many of the technical specs of the Touch Pro are still higher than the Pre, the Palm phone definitely feels much more modern and elegant.

I was interested in Palm’s webOS operating system as soon as they announced it at the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2009 and I followed the reviews and other coverage of the platform very closely, particularly after the official launch of the Pre in the early-summer.  I wasn’t eligible for a reasonably priced upgrade until October 1, which gave me a fair amount of time to monitor the progress of webOS and the Pre as well as its major competitors (particularly the Google-sponsored Android OS) before making a purchase decision.

Eventually, I realized that the webOS seemed to combine many of the good ideas that I’ve long found appealing about the iPhone, while addressing the biggest issues that have kept me from deciding to jump onto that bandwagon.  In particular, the inclusion of a physical keyboard, the generally more open approach to 3rd party development and the better support for multitasking were important advantages.  My research also indicated that the new OS still reflected some of the strengths that I had long associated with Palm, particularly a good balance between ease of use and flexibility/power as well as very innovative control over personal information management (PIM) data such as calendars and contacts.

Hardware

The Pre has a sleek, minimalist design that I find to be both visually attractive and comfortable to use.  This phone is much smaller than my previous smart phones and is comparable in size to (if a bit wider than) non-PDA cell phones that I’ve owned in the past.  Comparing it to my wife’s iPhone, it is a tad thicker, but its other dimensions are definitely smaller, at least when the keyboard slider is closed.  This phone fits in my pants pocket much more comfortably than either the Touch Pro or the Treo 700p did.

As I mentioned, the design is very minimalist with a tiny speaker grille above and a single inconspicuous button (which has been eliminated on the Pre 2 and the earlier Verizon/AT&T Pre Plus) below the screen, which is flush with the case.  The case itself is all glossy black and there are no logos or other branding on the front of the unit.  The back cover is also very uncluttered with just the Palm branding in the center and the camera lens and flash up at the top left and a speaker grille on the top right.  The Sprint branding is limited to an often hidden logo on the back, on the part of the phone exposed when the slider is opened.  The top of the unit has a headphone jack, a ringer switch, and the power button.  Small volume buttons are on the left side and a covered micro-USB/charging port  is on the right side.

This design is remarkably uncluttered, although this can actually work a bit against ease of use.  The unit is so nearly symmetrical that I sometimes initially get it upside-down right after I pick it up.  Some of the external controls and ports are not always immediately easy to find as well.  I’ve had to feel around a bit to find the right spot for the power control and have accidentally flipped the ringer switch occasionally while trying to turn the unit on and off.  All of this becomes mostly second nature with more use, although I’ve found that those problems don’t fully go away.

My biggest complaint about the Pre from a hardware standpoint is that the build isn’t as solid as it should be.  It definitely feels less solidly built than the Touch Pro or the iPhone and the plastic screen isn’t nearly as durable as the iPhone’s glass and does have a few scratches after over a year of use.  The Pre 2 promises to address these issues quite a bit with a switch to a glass screen as well as an overall sturdy design.  This is rather appealing as I really do like the basic form factor of the Pre.  I hope that they will stick with the stronger aspects of the design as they upgrade the hardware in newer models.

Touchstone Charger

One still unique feature of the Pre is the Touchstone charger, a small cylinder that you simply set the phone on to charge it via induction.  The Touchstone is an optional accessory with an original suggested retail price of $69, but it is pretty easy to find one for much lower prices now. At the time I’m writing this, Amazon currently charges just under $30.  To use the Touchstone, you have to replace the Pre’s glossy back with a more rubberized back that is included with the charger (and will be included in the box with the Pre 2).  I actually find this back preferable as it is provides a somewhat better grip on the phone.

I wasn’t sure how big a deal the Touchstone would be at first, but I now find the idea of going back to a cable-based charger or even a more traditional docking station to be very unappealing.  In fact, I would consider the Touchstone to be one of the strongest arguments against switching platforms, considering that the equivalent isn’t really available anywhere else.  The Touchstone is such a convenient way to charge the phone that I ended up buying 3 of them, one each for the bedroom and living room at home and one for my desk at work.  The charger is so small that it easily fits into a travel bag or briefcase for use on the road as well.

One  small complaint is that the Pre’s screen always displays a fairly large display of the current time while on the Touchstone and there is no option to turn it off.  This is pretty bright and a definite annoyance when the Touchstone is being used in a bedroom at night.  There is a “homebrew” application (not in the official Palm catalog) called Brightness Unlinked that solves this problem.  That can be difficult to find and install for inexperienced users, though, and Palm really should make this option available officially instead.

The new webOS 2.0 promises the addition of a feature called “Exhibition” that gives users extensive control over what is on the screen while the phone is on the Touchstone.  As described, any application can be programmed to use this feature and create specific displays for the when the phone is on the Touchstone.  This could be stock quotes, news and weather reports, photos, calendar information, or pretty much anything that comes to mind.  Hopefully this will also finally include a built-in option to turn the screen off completely, if that is what is preferred.

Keyboard

The relatively small keyboard and the choice to use a vertical instead of horizontal slider has always been a somewhat controversial aspect of the Pre.  I honestly have found that I rather like this keyboard design, though, and I hope they don’t abandon the design fully as they move towards more advanced models.  As far as I can tell from the photos and reviews that I’ve seen, the keyboard on the Pre 2 isn’t substantially changed ,so I’m sure that will be a source of criticism for the new model as well.

The keyboard is definitely small, but I’ve found it to be usable.  I vastly prefer physical keyboards on a smart phone to on-screen virtual ones, but I’ve also found that my productivity doesn’t vary that much with the size of the keys.  The keys are much smaller and more closely spaced than the keys on the Touch Pro, but I really haven’t found typing to be noticeably slower or less accurate.  The keys have a pretty good feel and the lay-out is generally good.  I do prefer dedicated number rows on thumb keyboards, but the lack here is far from a deal breaker for me.

While webOS does not currently offer a virtual keyboard as an alternative to sliding out the physical one, early reports have shown that webOS 2.0 does include one as a hidden feature that, presumably, will be activated on models that need it.  I do think it is something they should add for regular slider-based phones like the Pre as there are occasions where bringing up a virtual keyboard for quick searches or small bits of data entry would be preferable to opening the slider.

There are a lot of rumors that a slate phone with no keyboard could be in the works from HP/Palm.  I think that is a good idea as there are clearly those that prefer that kind of phone and the more choices available, the more market there is for webOS phones.  I’ve always felt that Apple’s decision to only offer a single form factor is among the biggest limitations to the iPhone.  As they do introduce no-keyboard phones, I hope they maintain parity in features and capabilities with the keyboard phones.  I certainly would hate to have to, for example, choose between a physical keyboard and a higher resolution screen  or faster 4G networking.

One more keyboard option will become available with the release of webOS 2.0, which is the ability to connect to Bluetooth keyboards.  I did occasionally make use of Bluetooth keyboards with some of my older Palm OS devices and can see value to having that option available for longer emails, working on blog posts, or document-editing, once that capability is available (lack of document editing software is one of the biggest shortcomings of webOS right now).  On the other hand, at least for me, it now seems much less likely that there will be too many cases where I would have a wireless keyboard available but not a laptop or desktop computer or a tablet.  Ultimately, I strongly suspect this feature is more of a preparation for the webOS-based tablet that HP is promising for next year than something that the phone really needs.

Coming up in part 2: User-interface, Launcher, and Multi-tasking.

My first computer experience was with a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model III that my father purchased in 1980 (when I was 10 years old).  Around that same time, Radio Shack made a deal with CompuServe to package and promote their service.  Under branding that Radio Shack called “Videotex”, they packaged CompuServe either with a dumb terminal or with terminal software sold for the TRS-80s.  My father bought a 300-baud modem and the Videotex package for the Model III, giving us our first look at connected computing.

My exposure to the features of CompuServe during this time was really just a taste as the service came with a pretty high hourly fee for use.  I mainly recall spending a little time watching over my father’s shoulder as he used it to access various news, weather, and information like that, although I recall that he generally preferred a competing service called The Source, which CompuServe eventually bought out and absorbed.  I also recall having a couple rare opportunities to spend an hour playing some of CompuServe’s primitive early online games.

Due to the hourly fees, I never spent any time in discussion boards or chat, instead getting early exposure to these via privately-run Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs) and, a few years later, with General Electric’s GEnie service, which was one of the first to offer discussion boards and a few other services at a fixed monthly fee instead of charging by the hour.  CompuServe was actually one of the last services to drop the hourly charges, which probably played a big role in their eventual decline.

After I graduated from college in 1991 with a degree in Computer Science and Engineering, CompuServe was one of the many technology companies to which I applied.  I ended up accepting a job with them as a junior engineer in their Entertainment Technology group, which focused on game products and the CB Simulator, which was their name for online chat.  I worked there for around 4 1/2 years, before I decided to move to California to pursue other opportunities in mid-1996.

The CompuServe headquarters was a campus in an industrial park located in the Columbus, Ohio suburb of Upper Arlington.  It consisted of two major buildings, the larger one (where I worked) housing the corporate business offices and the operations managing the consumer service.  The other building mainly housed their very lucrative network services division.  There was a nice employee cafeteria (The Oak Room), which was run by Marriot and an employee fitness center.
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The Oak Room had pretty decent food and I generally ate there a couple times a week.  They had a selection of standard grill items (burgers, chicken strips, etc.) that were available every day as well as a featured entree.  They would occasionally do prepared to order stir-fry or pasta that were immensely popular and would result in long lines during lunch hour.  I’d typically eat there on days that the entree sounded particularly good or when my schedule made it tough to leave the office for lunch.  When I did leave, there was a Wendy’s, a Pizza Hut, and a sandwich place across the street as well as numerous other restaurants that were a fairly easy drive.  The Oak Room also served as a location for larger meetings and employee gatherings.  I even remember just about everyone in the building gathering in there to watch the OJ Simpson verdict on a big-screen TV.

A couple years into my employment, the company started construction on a large new office building in nearby Hilliard, Ohio.  Much of the operation was eventually to move there and it also included a new state-of-the-art data center.  I did visit the new building a couple times (mainly tours and the occasional meeting), but my department never moved over there.

After the complicated deal where AOL purchased the consumer service and MCI/Worldcom bought the network division (which eventually ended up at Verizon), it appears that the CompuServe headquarters remained in Upper Arlington while the new building went to MCI/Worldcom.  Looking up both locations on Google Maps, it appears to me that AOL still has offices in Upper Arlington and Verizon still uses the Hilliard building.

During the time that I worked at CompuServe, the company was owned by H&R Block, which had bought it in an attempt to establish a strong year-round business to keep a revenue stream going outside of tax season.  It wasn’t an extremely obvious fit for them, though, and I’m not sure that Block ever became overly comfortable with the product.  As employees, we did get some pretty nice discounts on tax services, though.  H&R Block’s sale of the company to AOL and Worldcom came about a year after I left.

The overall business culture was fairly traditional, particularly compared to the Silicon Valley technology companies that were starting to rise at the time.  The employees tended to be somewhat older and experienced.  Being fresh out of college, I definitely felt pretty junior there and was also in a minority being single and childless.  Weekend and evening hours were very rare at the company as well, with most people working pretty traditional 8-5 work hours.  The dress code tended to be “business casual”.  Jeans and t-shirts were not really acceptable, but at least I didn’t have to wear a tie to work.

One part of working at CompuServe that I particularly enjoyed was my involvement as one of the adult leaders of a company-sponsored Explorer Post, which focused on computer technology.  Explorers is a vocation-based, coed program run by the Boy Scouts of America, targeted towards teenagers.  Our weekly meetings typically featured presentations by various CompuServe employees, covering different areas of computer technology.  I think my favorite was probably the meeting where the head of security came in and talked to the kids about the various efforts to thwart hackers that were trying to subvert CompuServe’s systems.  Several of the kids weren’t entirely innocent in this area themselves, which made this lecture hit home.

I also accompanied the kids as one of the chaperones on one ski trip (where I stayed in the lodge reading and drinking cocoa, since skiing has no appeal to me) as well as putting in a lot of work on a booth that the kids manned at an annual scouting show.  Those of us that worked as the adult leaders of this group did develop pretty good friendships, including very enjoyable dinners out together after the meetings.  Two of my fellow leaders even eventually started dating and ended up getting married to each other.

Reflecting CompuServe’s pioneering position in the online services business, the corporate culture was somewhat ahead of its time in a few ways.  Already in the early 1990s, email was already the dominant form of internal communications at CompuServe, not too surprising considering that it was one of their key products.  I remember undergoing a bit of a culture shock when I left the company in 1996 for a new company that did not yet have an email system in place.

Via the same phone numbers that customers used to access CompuServe’s services, employees could access all the various servers that were used for developing, testing, and configuring applications.  That meant that we had access to the vast majority of our work from home, if needed.  My department even included one employee that had switched to primarily working from home after the birth of her child.  This was at a time when I don’t think the term “telecommuting” had even been coined yet.

While my department officially handled all games and entertainment products, the truth is that there really wasn’t a lot of internal development of games going on at the time that I was there.  With access still pretty strictly dial-up and the service still largely text based, online games just weren’t that big a business yet.  As I mentioned earlier, the CB Simulator (chat) was officially classified as a “game” product and it really was our team’s primary focus.  As the junior engineer on the team, I was the one that tended to be assigned secondary tasks, which means I probably did more that wasn’t chat related than anyone else on the team.

One story that was pretty widely circulated among the employees at CompuServe, although I admit I don’t have verification that it was entirely accurate, was that the classification of CB Simulator as a “game” was the single biggest mistake that CompuServe made.  The product was the first online chat room made available to consumers and the widely told story was that CompuServe had considered taking out a patent on it, but decided that it wasn’t worth the time and cost of going through that process for something that was “just a game”.  As a result, online chat never was patented by anybody.  Assuming this is true, it certainly seems very likely that owning the patent on chat could easily have resulted in a pretty dramatically different fate for CompuServe.  Even today, some of the CB radio inspired terminology is still often used for online chats, including calling individual chat rooms “channels” and referring to the user nicknames as “handles”.

Before delving into the specific projects that I worked on, it would be helpful to give a little overview of the primary technologies used at CompuServe, which did tend to reflect the age of the product.  The primary infrastructure was built around Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-10 mini-computers, which the employees pretty much always simply called “tens”.  While the operating system running on the servers was derived from DEC’s standard TOPS-10, it was very heavily customized by CompuServe’s engineers.   CompuServe was so dependent on the PDP-10 technology, that they licensed the architecture from DEC so that they could continue to manufacture them for years after DEC officially discontinued them in the early 1980s.

Those that used the original CompuServe service likely recall the difficult to remember numeric user IDs, which were generally in the form 7xxxx,xxxx, although they eventually expanded to 10xxxx,xxxx once they ran out of the lower numbers.  This was a reflection of the PDP architecture, matching its typical format for user accounts.  The numbers were octal (base-8), which meant that none included 8 or 9 among the digits.  Employee accounts were those where the first number was less than 71000.  I was issued two user accounts, one for use in official work-related tasks (this account had administration rights in some services) and a second free account for my personal use.  The work account had the very easy to remember ID of 70000,1111 and the personal account was 70004,1065.

The various CompuServe applications covered a range of technologies.  Many of the older applications were written in the Fortran programming language and quite a few were written in a now largely forgotten, language called Bliss, which had been pretty widely used in the early days of the PDP systems.  There were also a few applications that were in Pascal, while most new development was done in C or C++, including re-writes of some of the key systems and services.  Many of these newer and upgraded systems were being built on Intel-based servers, typically running BSD UNIX.

For much of the time I was working there, much of the focus of the company was on modernizing the existing systems. While CompuServe had long been the industry leader for online services, AOL, and to a lesser degree Prodigy, were experiencing dramatic growth with much more graphical and user-friendly systems.  While CompuServe never really had a plan to completely abandon its text-based user interface, they did create the CompuServe Information Manager (CIM) software, which was available for MS-DOS, Windows, and Macintosh, that enabled a graphical user interface (windows, pull-down menus, mouse-control, etc.) on some of the core services.

The graphical interface in the CIM software was based around a proprietary protocol called HMI, which stood for “Host-Micro Interface”.  In order to provide the graphical interface on services, their application had to be modified (and often re-written) to use the HMI protocol.  This could be somewhat complex coding, since there was generally a strong desire to keep the text-based interfaces around as well for those users that still preferred to use some other terminal software to access the service.

For the Entertainment Technology department, I was the engineer that was assigned the job of investigating and learning the HMI protocol.  As a test case, I used CompuServe’s existing Biorhythm charting game.  Other than the mathematical formulas for the actual calculations (which I never really understood), this was one of the simplest games on the service, making it a good choice for conversion.  I started off by converting the entire application from Fortran to C, re-organizing as I went to separate the user interface portion from the calculation and chart-generation.  I then put in some detection to determine whether a user was coming in via CIM or some other software and then branch them either to my re-designed HMI interface or to the original text version.  I suspect that some CIM users who stumbled on this game probably found themselves wondering why in the world we had gone to all this trouble to make a fancy user-interface for Biorhythms.

The largest individual project that I did for CompuServe was the development of a pretty complex package that allowed for creation of quizzes and surveys.  The project had started off as a fairly replacement for an existing multiple-choice quiz game.  As I started working on it, I quickly realized that it wouldn’t take that much effort to expand it to also allow fill-in-the-blank answers as well.  I don’t really recall for sure how extensive the survey capabilities were, although I’m pretty sure the data storage was pretty primitive.  The whole package was completely HMI enabled (while also working in text mode) and very customizable to fit different uses.  I designed and coded pretty much the entire product and it ended up being pretty widely used across the service.

I’m having a little bit of difficulty remembering the specific features set of the quiz/survey package.  A large part of the reason for this is that my current job has included some work on a very similar package and I have trouble remembering which features I implemented in which version.  I currently work for the web division of a large media company and have found that quite a bit of the experience that I gained at CompuServe very directly related to the work at my current employer.

As I mentioned before, the CB Simulator was the top focus in our department.  Much of the time I was there, most of my teammates were pretty focused on a complete re-write of the software in C++ running under UNIX.  I did very little in the way of actual coding or design work on this, but was involved in some engineering related to testing and reporting, work that ended up being very similar to some of the key initiatives that I have put into place at my current job.

I had the responsibility of doing load testing of the CB Simulator in order to ensure that it would work properly when large numbers of users were hitting it all at once.  This type of testing involves creating automated scripts that try to simulate some or all of the ways that real users would interact with the product.  I learned a lot about the value of this kind of testing and the techniques involved with implementation doing this work.  I was able to apply that knowledge in my current job by designing a load test lab and the surrounding procedures and policy and selling them to management in order to get them implemented.

The load testing work that I did at CompuServe was kind of primitive compared to the tools and resources available today.  Currently, there are a lot of commercial and open source tools available for scripting load tests and gathering and reporting test results, but at CompuServe I had to program the test scripts manually using the fairly low-level network protocols.  The CompuServe network didn’t really fully match any industry standard, but it was at least mostly based on the X25 protocol.  I had to learn the basics of that protocol and write programs that would open multiple connections to the network and then construct properly formatted packets to log a user in, go to the CB Simulator, and do some basic chat operations.  It was pretty complicated programming and most of the data gathering was largely focused on human observation, but it did provide a lot of useful information and uncover a number of bugs.

The other major task that I had for the CB Simulator was the very first project I was assigned.  In many ways, it was as interesting a lesson in human nature as it was a learning experience technically.  The CB Simulator was completely human moderated, with each active channel always monitored by someone designated by CompuServe.  The moderators were often trusted members of the online community who had been offered a contract by CompuServe.  These moderators had access to commands that allowed them to send private warning messages to users for inappropriate language or an inappropriate handle as well as to kick people out of the channel.

Whenever the moderators used any of these commands, an entry was written to a log file indicating the time, warning given, reason, and the user ID of the person receiving the warning.  For handle warnings, it would also log the handle that prompted it.  My project was to create scripts that would parse through these log files to generate reports that could be easily read and reviewed by the customer service team.  These reports also included some basic data about the frequency of each type of warning on each channel for any given day.  As you might expect, the log entries for the handle warnings could be especially fascinating and, within our department, we would often get some laughs out of the most interesting ones.  I wish I could still remember some examples, although even if I could I’m not sure that including them wouldn’t be less family-friendly than I usually strive for on this blog.

The last really major project that I was involved in at CompuServe was probably the beginning of the end of the company’s independence.  In light of AOL’s ever growing market share, the decision was made that CompuServe needed a separate service that would attempt to more directly compete.  The product that they came up with was “CompuServe WOW!”, which was designed to strictly use a graphical interface (based around an enhanced version of HMI) and to also include extensive family-friendly features, including very strict parental controls.

Our team’s involvement with WOW! was, as you might expect, to adopt the chat application to meet the needs of the new product.  The biggest requirement that didn’t previously exist was the need to allow users to create their own self-named channels and the necessary moderation features surrounding that.  The family-friendly goal of the site and related parental controls also required that we build in much stricter controls for limiting access.  As with the previous CB Simulator projects, the vast majority of the coding and design work was left to the more senior engineers while I was more involved in the testing and troubleshooting work.

The WOW! product was not a success and the product only survived for less than a year.  The big problem was that it didn’t really offer much that wasn’t already available from AOL, which provided little motivation for users to sign up for it instead of the more popular and better established service.  The product had very little appeal to existing CompuServe customers either, since most were looking for something much more business and/or technology oriented.

It was during the WOW! project that I started to see the writing on the wall and realized that CompuServe was a company in decline.  When that was combined with my continued position as the low man on the totem pole in our department, my thoughts definitely started to focus on finding new opportunities.  A vacation to Southern California in late 1995 kind of clinched the decision for me as I had always thought I probably would be happier living out there, a feeling that was pretty much solidified by that trip.  Not long after I got home from that vacation, I updated my resume and started sending out applications.  I left CompuServe to take a job with a small Los Angeles based game developer in May of 1996.

As I mentioned earlier, employees received a free personal account on CompuServe and I did put it to pretty heavy use.  I particularly became a very active participant on the Showbiz Forum, which was a discussion board focused on movies and television (the TV stuff was eventually spun-off to a separate forum, where I also participated).  At the time, I was an extremely frequent moviegoer, typically seeing 1-2 movies in the theater every week as well as being an avid collector of Laserdiscs.  I had already been an active participant on similar boards on the GEnie service and it was great having another place to discuss these topics.

CompuServe had made a deal with Roger Ebert to offer his reviews on the service.  As part of that deal, Ebert was given his own section on the Showbiz Forum, where he was a very active, direct participant.  During those years, it was great fun being able to discuss movies directly with Ebert and he often used the forum as a source for some of his articles, especially his “Movie Answer Man” column.  At one point, he published a book of those columns and I was amused to find my name in the book’s index.  I even had more page citations than Martin Scorsese!

I did meet a few people from the forums in person over the years as well.  One participant on Showbiz was local to Columbus and wrote movie reviews for one of the smaller area newspapers.  On a number of occasions, he invited me to come along to some of the press screenings for new movies, which was pretty cool.  In particular, I remember seeing Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” at a screening that was held a couple months before it finally opened in Columbus.  During the Southern California vacation in 1995, I met up with a pretty large group of forum regulars for dinner and also met up with various forum members a few times after I moved out here.

I signed up for a paying account and continued to participate on the forums for a while after leaving the company, but eventually drifted away from them as my interests changed.  In particular, Disneyland became more of a leisure-time focus for me instead of movies and I generally found more active discussions about that on Usenet newsgroups and, eventually, on web-based forums.  Of course, the CompuServe forums generally declined greatly in activity as the web came into prominence anyway.

AOL is still keeping the CompuServe name around both for a web portal (essentially the old Netscape portal now carries the CompuServe name) and for the “CompuServe 2000” product, which is essentially a re-skinned version of AOL itself.  These products are really just CompuServe in name only, though.  The CompuServe that I knew and have written about in this post no longer exists.

As this very long post probably illustrates, CompuServe played a very important role in my life and I can’t help but feel a bit sad as the original service has finally passed into history.  I’m honestly a bit surprised that it lasted as long as it did, and I haven’t really used it myself for several years, but I still am sorry to see it end.

I definitely tend to be an early-adopter on new gadgets, so it certainly wouldn’t have been surprising if I had run out to buy a Pre last weekend.  In fact, I would have very much liked to have made that purchase.  Unfortunately, I’m already a Sprint customer and, as I mentioned earlier, I purchased a new phone last year.  Because of this, I am not currently eligible for upgrade pricing, which means that any phone purchased now would cost me considerably higher than the new or upgrade eligible customer pricing, which, of course, is the pricing that Sprint and Palm are advertising publicly.

I am, of course, under a 2-year contract with Sprint that was a necessary condition for the purchase of my last phone.  I completely recognize the validity and legality of that contract and that it is the underlying reason why I am not eligible for upgrading without a price penalty.  My purpose in this post is not to argue that my situation is somehow unfair or that I am being denied an entitlement.  I never had any expectation of being able to upgrade early and I don’t believe that there is anything unethical, much less illegal, about the system.

What I do question pretty strongly is whether or not the current business model used by the cell phone industry is a correct one in today’s marketplace.  Particularly since Apple has turned the smartphone into a much more mainstream product with the iPhone, the industry has entered a phase of extremely rapid growth and enhanced competition with frequent introduction of new models with desirable new features.  I strongly question whether customers are going to continue to be willing to accept a system that requires a 2 year wait between upgrades.

I had initially started thinking about this as subject for a blog post after getting into a Twitter discussion of it during the day of the Pre launch.  I got busy with other things and didn’t find time to start working on it until later.  In the meantime, this became a very hot subject generating a lot of coverage both in blogs and the mainstream press after Apple announced the third-generation version of the iPhone and AT&T revealed that the lower pricing would not be available to current iPhone owners that are still under contract.  This is a change from the approach taken with the last version of the iPhone, which was offered at the new-customer price to owners of the previous version, regardless of contract status.

The central idea behind current business model used by the cell phone industry is that the carriers subsidize a portion of the purchase price for the phone in exchange for the customer committing to a service contract, generally for 2 years.  If the customer chooses to switch carriers before the contract is up, he/she is obligated to pay a fairly substantial fee to buy out the contract.  Most carriers offer the customer the option of a smaller discount on an a new phone half way through the contract.  After the contract expires, the customer is generally eligible to again get the same subsidy offered to a new subscriber.

The contract system eliminates a lot of the need for carriers to expend much effort in customer retention, outside of the discounted phones offered at the end of the contract.  This likely saves the companies a lot of money, but is also almost certainly the biggest contributor to the industry’s reputation for poor customer service.  I have found that no matter which of the big cell phone carriers is mentioned, it doesn’t take long for someone to start telling stories about their horrible experiences.

It is in the best interest of the cellular carriers for most phones to have non-subsidized prices that are prohibitively high for most people since, otherwise, it is a safe bet that most people would forgo the contract.  This would make it much easier for customers to switch carriers at will and, thus, would greatly increase the cost and effort that the companies would have to expend towards retention.  I have little doubt that this would dramatically improve the quality of the customer experience, but it might or might not have a negative impact on profitability.

The big question is whether or not the non-subsidized prices really reflect the true cost of a cell phone or if they are kept artificially inflated by the cell phone manufacturers as a result of the subsidy-based sales model.  I admit that I have no direct knowledge, but my educated speculation is that the subsidized prices are probably more realistic.  The non-subsidized prices for phones (especially smartphones) simply seem way out of proportion with the pricing for other portable electronics.  In most cases, those prices are pretty close to what you would pay for a full-featured laptop computer and considerably higher than netbooks, stand-alone PDAs, or portable media players, any of which would seem more comparable technology.

The most obvious direct comparison would really be between the iPhone and the iPod Touch, which is basically an iPhone without the cellular radio or camera.  The pricing information for the 16GB version of the new iPhone 3GS has indicated that it costs $199 fully-subsidized (the price widely advertised), $399 for customers 1-year into their 2-year contract, or $599 un-subsidized.  The suggested retail price of the 16GB iPod Touch is $299 and it can be found in the $260-$275 range if you shop around.  I can certainly see where the added features of the iPhone would justify a higher price, but does it really make sense that they would double it?

In all fairness, my instinct looking at those numbers is that the $399 price offered after 1-year is probably the most realistic one.  While I suspect the price on the iPod Touch is also a bit inflated (it doesn’t really have direct competitors), it really does look like the $199 price probably brings in a pretty thin profit margin, if there is any at all.  The same is probably true with the similarly priced Palm Pre, although it does also have somewhat lighter specs, including only 8GB of memory. Even if the subsidies do push the prices down below the actual cost of the phone, I can still see justification for why the carriers might want to subsidize even for existing customers still under contract in order to prolong their contract and help to ensure loyalty.

I think that they might want to look to the satellite TV business as a possible example.  I’ve been a DirecTV customer for a number of years and they also use a system of contracts and subsidized equipment.  The big difference from the cellular business, though, is that DirecTV lets current customers upgrade their equipment (such as going to a DVR or hi-definition) at the fully subsidized price no matter how far they are into a contract.  The one catch is that doing so will reset their contractual start date to the date of the upgrade.  This helps to accommodate any need that the customer might have to move up to something better or different, while also pushing further back the date at which he/she might be able to switch to a competitor.

I do imagine that the cellular industry would probably prefer to stick with the current fairly customer-unfriendly system for as long as possible, but I do seem some recent signs that they may very well be changing their approach.  The recent publicity over AT&T’s prices for iPhone upgrades hasn’t been very good for them, even if they are pretty clearly within their rights.  A fan base as loyal as the more vocal iPhone owners, particularly when they are so willing to spend more money to make sure they have the latest and greatest, really does need to be cultivated and protected.  Policies that seem to directly target those loyal customers may not be in the company’s best interest, even if they appear to be the most financially prudent on the surface.

Another interesting development is Sprint’s recent introduction of the Sprint Premier loyalty program.  Customers that have achieved high longevity (10 years or more) or have one of the higher-end service plans (priced over $69.99/month, a fairly common price point for a smartphone with both a voice and data plan) are automatically enrolled in that program.  While the program offers a number of smaller benefits, the big one is that those customers are eligible for the fully-subsidized upgrade price at the end of the first year of a 2-year contract.  While Sprint’s recent issues with customer retention probably made this more necessary for them, it still is a pretty clear acknowledgement that higher-end customers are increasingly unwilling to wait 2 years between upgrades.

For the most part, I have generally avoided writing posts that were too focused on technology for this blog.  I have a pretty good idea who my main readers are (most are friends or family) and I have a hunch that the interest level wouldn’t be overly high on most technology-related topics.  At the same time, it certainly is an interest and I often come across bits of technology news or various tech-related tips or experiences that I’d like to relate.  For this reason, I have maintained a second blog for quite a while for more technical posts.

When I first started that blog, it was very narrowly focused on Ultra-Mobile PCs (UMPCs).  I bought one of the earliest models released in that category and thought I’d have a lot to say as a bit of a pioneer in that area.  Eventually, I kind of started to run dry on things to post on that topic and expanded the subject to include all kinds of mobile technology.  Even that was a pretty limiting topic, though, and I eventually kind of abandoned that site as well.

I have now converted the blog into the generalized Bigbeaks Technology Blog.  My plan is to make it more of a traditional weblog with shorter, more frequent posts, frequently highlighting interesting news items or articles that I encounter.  I will also periodically post my personal discoveries or tips regarding technology and I’m sure I will also sometimes write reviews or longer essays as subjects come along that strike my interest.

Occasionally, I’m sure that there will be topics that are technology related (or at least tangentially so), but which still seem to be general interest enough for this blog as well.  In those cases, I probably will post on whichever blog seems to be the best fit and then put up a post on the other one linking back.  I suppose there may be rare occasions where I could choose to just cross-post to both as well.

This original blog will continue to be my place to post whatever comes to mind about any other topic, but I encourage those of you with interest in UMPCs to check out that new site. I have copied the two previously posted articles about UMPCs there, plus there is a new article with my first impressions of my TabletKiosk eo v7110 UMPC.