Why I dumped my Palm Pre for an iPhone
Ah, the Pre. It’s so Zen, so well integrated, so pretty. The default ringtones sound like rain, or gentle guitar strings. My background image looks like a Monet. It’s gorgeous. The integrated messaging just works – it’s seamless. I can very simply switch between AIM and Text when trying to reach my husband. The WebOS is great – I can multitask like crazy, send mail or IM’s while I’m talking on the phone. The shape is great and that awesome little docking station that lets the phone charge just sitting on it is so cool. And it’s functional too – I can see stuff as it comes in. And it does smart things too – in my meeting reminders it has a one-button click to email someone if I’m running late (very handy in the car – the message is pre-set as well). It doesn’t have a ton of apps, but I’m not a big app user so I’ve been fine with Sudoku and Spaz. And Sprint wasn’t as bad as I’d feared. The coverage area isn’t as good as AT&T, but the when the calls worked they were extremely clear.
I’ve had the phone just less than three months. I figured that a 1.0 phone wouldn’t be perfect, but that it would be okay. And it was okay for a while. In fact, it was great for a while.
And here’s the “but…”. First, the battery life. I don’t think it can go 6 hours without charging, and that’s if I’m not doing anything with it. It can’t hold a charge overnight, or for a full workday. I started really worrying about ski season, where I’m out for 8 hours with small kids doing risky things at high speeds all over the mountains, and I knew that the Pre wasn’t going to last a full day without a charge. Particularly not in the cold. So was I going to have to get a second phone just for skiing?
Next there was the simple issue with speed. The WebOS is really cool (someone should buy Palm just to get it – it’s impressive) but it’s a pig. It’s S-L-O-W. If I ran more than three apps, it slowed to a crawl. If I let Spaz (the twitter app) run for any length of time, it would actually start to heat up and devour battery. I had a Blackberry for many years prior to the Pre, and I was used to clicking an icon and having the app just launch. That wasn’t always the case with the Pre – sometimes it could take a several second lag before launching. As I used it more I found myself holding my finger down on an icon to get it to launch. I’d find myself pressing harder to get it to launch (like when you talk louder to someone who doesn’t speak English to make them understand you…with the same result).
What really started getting me was the random hanging and random reboots. I’d often have it sitting on the dock for several hours at work, and then I’d pick it up to go out and it would be completely hung. I’d have to reboot. This happened a couple times a week. In the last month, it started to reboot for no reason almost daily.
Then there was the phone – which in theory is why I bought it in the first place. I set up auto-dial codes for my frequently dialed numbers, but after the first time I couldn’t get them to work. (I was back to the “if I press the #T long enough and hard enough maybe it will work?) The main phone interface is the keypad, so I had to type in the name of the contact to get them, which was a total pain in the car. But worse yet, if you bumped the phone icon, you’d find it autodialing people. I have no idea how many colleagues I’ve auto-dialed in the last month, but it’s a lot (sorry folks). Thankfully I didn’t auto-dial 911 like my friendSteven Heintz, but it started to become super annoying regardless. And when I’d try to get the mis-dialed call to drop, it would take several seconds – I’d be pounding on the hang up button. Really frustrating. So I got to the point where I didn’t want to even use the phone unless I had to.
I found myself just not using the Pre. I didn’t use it for email as gmail didn’t come in about 2/3 of the time. The phone part was a pain and a liability. It was great for texting, but that’s not a great reason to have a smart phone.
And then… I dropped it. It was in its case, but the screen cracked a little. On the Pre, if the screen cracks, it doesn’t really work. At first I could sort of work around it, but within a day it does what a chipped windshield does in the cold – it splintered. I suddenly had a crack the length of the screen. And not only did the screen not work anymore, it took on a life of its own. If I bumped it in the wrong place, it would call people and I’d have no way to shut it off – I’d click the shutdown button and it would happily pop back on. Finally it started just dialing random numbers on its own. My son and I got a big kick watching it dial about 40-odd 6’s and 5’s for no reason – it was on autodial.
Fortunately I knew the battery would die soon and my liability would end!
So Saturday I went down to the Sprint store to see what my options were. Now, I drop devices frequently, so I pad them appropriately and buy warranties. I had the insurance on the phone – but the deductible was $100! How much to get out of my 2 year Sprint contract with 21 months left on it? $200. So at a minimum I had to spend $100 on a phone that I wasn’t liking – with “overnight delivery” that would get it to me on Tuesday?! (side note – have all the unemployed car salespeople become cell phone salespeople? Except at Apple?)
So I cruised down to the Apple store. They had me up and running on an iPhone with my number ported in 45 minutes. 35 minutes of that was spent on hold with Sprint trying to get my customer account number. When I called them at first and finally reached a human to tell them that I wanted to discontinue my service, she promptly dumped me back into the general hold queue for another 20 minutes. I didn’t even tell the second person that I wanted to discontinue service, I just got my account number.
How do I like my iPhone? So far so good. The phone works great and it hasn’t dialed any random colleagues in the last 24 hours. I still have to get my work mail configured and my contacts ported in – that has not been simple at all but I’m guessing it’s an RTFM issue. And given that the rest of my computing devices are all Apple, this should simplify my life a bit more. Always a good thing.
Michele's Miscellaney 