Last night when I went to a Sprint store to ask about the Palm Pre, the sales person suggested that they might have some extra Pres because someone had driven through another store's window. I didn't think much of the comment at the time but today while checking Twitter, I saw that story repeated and sure enough it's true.
Saturday, June 6, 2009
Fondling the Palm Pre
I took a trip a Sprint store in downtown Chicago today for the express purpose of playing around with the Palm Pre. I was actually tempted to buy it right there and then but an hour or so of playing around with the Pre help cool my ardor. (Does this word mean what I think it means?) Which is not to say that I didn't like the Pre, only that I don't think its necessarily worth switching carriers and giving up my T-Mobile G1.I arrived at the store at about 9AM and there was a line of about 20 people ahead of me. I had visited the store the day before and been told by a clerk that they had 32 Pres to sell and two demo units. So I was in time. A clerk offered me a demo unit to play with and I snapped a picture to test the camera. I was immediately impressed. The picture looked great and I snapped an identical picture with my G1 for comparison purposes. The picture quality of the two phones seemed roughly comparable. I thought that the Pre took a better picture but it's hard to tell on a three inch screen. What I really wanted to do was email the Pre's picture to myself so I could compare them directly. Alas, the email on the demo unit wasn't set up so I couldn't do this, grrr.
But the Pre I could still see the strength of the Pre's camera. My G1 takes good pictures when it has good lighting but the shutter speed is very slow. I'll often move it too early and ruin a picture. But the Pre I demoed had no such problem. It snapped the picture immediately. Programs on the Pre launch quickly, more quickly than they do on my G1. Unfortunately, the Pre I used was prone to strange and sudden periods of lagginess especially when trying to use the gestures. The Sprint staff insisted that this was due to fact thaty the demo unit was a month old and not yet fully baked. They insisted that the retail units had fully up to date software that the demo unit lacked. I'll take their word for it but it seems strange. Surely Sprint or Palm could have pushed out an over the air update to the demo units the night before to make sure they would perform like a brand new unit. After all, this was presumably an important day for both Palm and Sprint and you would think that they would do everything in their power to see that in store demos went off without a hitch. Oh well.
One thing that the Pre did very well was rotate the screen. Every time that I've played with an iPhone or iPod Touch it showed a small but noticeable delay when it rotated screen from portrait to landscape mode and vice versa. My G1 only recently got this ability and when it rotates the screen, it is even slower. But with the Pre screen rotation was instantaneous. This is clearly a fast little machine. The card view worked perfectly and felt very natural.
The Pre itself is quite beautiful. It felt good in my had and curves gently when open to hug the contours of my head when I hold it up to my ear. Unfortunately, the shiny, glossy surface is a fingerprint magnet.
As far as the gestures go, the most natural ones are the back swipe and the swipe up gesture which brings on the wave bar and launcher. They were very smooth and even fun to do—most of the time. Sometimes the wave would get stuck in the middle of the screen. Sometimes tapping on the launcher button would launch the phone application and vice versa. I also had trouble pulling off a lot of the other gestures. The double tap to zoom in on part of a web page tended to work perfectly but the pinch and squeeze to zoom in or out was flakey and unpredictable. Again the Sprint staff insisted that this was the fault of half-baked demo software and that the retail phones would behave properly. They were certainly helpful and patient with customers who were actually ready to buy, making sure that they didn't leave the store unless their phone worked. But they were hampered in that they couldn't just open a retail and use the phone unless a customer was ready to buy it.
I suppose from Sprint's perspective my complaints don't matter since by my own admission, I wasn't ready to buy the phone. And indeed, I can't even say that they've lost me as a customer. I was impressed enough by what I saw that I'll probably go back in a couple of weeks after the hype has died down and see if they have a fully baked demo unit to play with. But I certainly didn't fall in love with the Pre and buy it on the spot. Of course there were people in line behind me who were ready to buy it anyway....
As far as the gestures go, the most natural ones are the back swipe and the swipe up gesture which brings on the wave bar and launcher. They were very smooth and even fun to do—most of the time. Sometimes the wave would get stuck in the middle of the screen. Sometimes tapping on the launcher button would launch the phone application and vice versa. I also had trouble pulling off a lot of the other gestures. The double tap to zoom in on part of a web page tended to work perfectly but the pinch and squeeze to zoom in or out was flakey and unpredictable. Again the Sprint staff insisted that this was the fault of half-baked demo software and that the retail phones would behave properly. They were certainly helpful and patient with customers who were actually ready to buy, making sure that they didn't leave the store unless their phone worked. But they were hampered in that they couldn't just open a retail and use the phone unless a customer was ready to buy it.
I suppose from Sprint's perspective my complaints don't matter since by my own admission, I wasn't ready to buy the phone. And indeed, I can't even say that they've lost me as a customer. I was impressed enough by what I saw that I'll probably go back in a couple of weeks after the hype has died down and see if they have a fully baked demo unit to play with. But I certainly didn't fall in love with the Pre and buy it on the spot. Of course there were people in line behind me who were ready to buy it anyway....
The Pre launch reminds me of a failed television show called "Kitchen Confidential." The pilot of that show featured a brilliant chef at a restaurant whose opening night goes disastrously. But the food is delicious and the local food critic gives the place a thumbs up—after noting that they have to get their house in order to become a truly great restaurant. Right now Sprint and Palm respectively are Nolita and Jack Bourdain—they have a great product but they still need to get their act together to sell it.
In any case my plan remains the same. I'll wait for an unlocked GSM version to come out before I buy the Pre. I bought my G1 mostly because my Treo 680 was becoming too unstable and I hated the browser and hated having to hard reset it and reinstall my programs to get it to run properly. (The 680 is actually a pretty efficient PDA when it's relieved of its phone and Internet duties.) While my G1 can be annoying at times, it can get laggy and I sometimes have to reset it in order to get it to behave but for the most part, it's still going strong and I enjoy using it. I'm in the middle of a two year contract. I can afford to wait....
Back to the Future?
Today as the Palm Pre debuts with its fancy multi-touch technology which extends the multi-technology that Apple pioneered with the iPhone I find myself wondering if the this whole "giving your phone the finger" thing is such a good idea after all. Part of what makes me wonder this is something I saw in my Twitter feed. PC Software News has a link to an interesting product, a touchscreen stylus. And this isn't the first time I've seen such a product, Thinkgeek has them too. The point of the touchscreen stylus is that it provides better control which makes typing on the iPhone's tiny virtual keyboard easier. I can see that. I can also see that it might enable also enable better control for drawing applications as well. It's interesting how now that the last hold outs in the stylus driven touchscreen camp has joined the multi-touch party that people might be starting to get nostalgic for the old stylus driven touchscreen devices.
Friday, June 5, 2009
"Find on page" Makes Getting Around Android Browser Easier
The temptation of the upcoming Palm Pre notwithstanding, I am very happy with my T-Mobile G1 since the recent "Cupcake" update. One new feature which I've begun to take advantage of is the "Find on page" command in the web browser which works very nicely with the new virtual keyboard. Although buried under the "More" option in the browser's menu Find on page helps you get around web pages more quickly.
Here's an example of how:
I tend to use Chicago's public transportation system a lot and one of the nice things about it is the CTA Bus Tracker which allows me to access real time information on bus arrival times. Since each bus route on the bus tracker page has its own unique route number, selecting Find in page and typing just two digits, allows me to get to a the bus route I'm looking for faster than I could if I just scrolled the page. So by making my navigation around its browser easier, Android's new improvements also make it easier for me to navigate around my home town.
Here's an example of how:
I tend to use Chicago's public transportation system a lot and one of the nice things about it is the CTA Bus Tracker which allows me to access real time information on bus arrival times. Since each bus route on the bus tracker page has its own unique route number, selecting Find in page and typing just two digits, allows me to get to a the bus route I'm looking for faster than I could if I just scrolled the page. So by making my navigation around its browser easier, Android's new improvements also make it easier for me to navigate around my home town.
Palm Pre Almost Here
I guess a picture is worth a 1000 words. After months of hype, the Palm Pre will finally be released tomorrow and my feelings are mixed. My plan is (was?) to wait six months to a year for an unlocked GSM version. But every time my T-Mobile G1 acts up a bit I wonder if I should make the jump. Even though I love my Android phone, the fact remains that it still hasn't replaced my Palm TX as a PDA—Palm's old PIM software and third party apps are just so easy and familiar that it's hard to find Android apps to truly replace them. The Pre as Palm's latest and greatest could be the device I've been waiting for; it promises to be even more web savvy than my G1 and the Classic emulator would allow me to run my old PalmOS applications, the best of both worlds. And it promises to be compatible with iTunes which would give me a nice, big screen for those movies I carry on my iPod but never watch because its screen is too small....While I'm eager to hold the Pre in my hands and actually play with it, I'm dreading the prospect of actually going through another upgrade. And then there's the prospect of switching carriers. I'm pretty happy with T-Mobile. They have good coverage and good 3G service here in Chicago. Sprint on the other hand had very bad coverage a few years ago and I have no idea if they've improved. For me Sprint really is the chink in the Palm Pre's armor.
I'll probably stick to my plan for now. I'll go and check the Pre out but I'm not planning to buy it. My G1 is very good for now and I'm still discovering new features since the Cupcake update.
What Will Be In Windows 7 When It Ships?
I am enjoying Windows 7 in its current Release Candidate form. Unfortunately, Microsoft has decided that to split it up into five different versions—two less than the number of versions available for Windows Vista but still at least two too many in my opinion. ZDNet has an excellent article explaining the differences between the different versions. But it also makes me wonder why I should bother giving more than a second thought to choosing which version of Windows to use. I have installed Windows 7 on three of my computers and it runs just fine. (Granted, there have been bugs and I haven't tried to install it on anything with less than 2GB of RAM.)
When the time comes to buy an actual version of Windows 7 what will I have to do? Buy the Professional Edition for my home server and my laptops I suppose. But I don't really see much use for the other versions. According to the ZDNet article, the netbook oriented Starter Edition won't be as bad as we've been led to believe. At least Microsoft removed the three application limit from it. The lack of DVD capability isn't too big of a deal, Microsoft's media player sucks anyway. One of the first things I do on a new Windows computer is install better media players like Gomplayer, VLC, and Media Player Classic Home Cinema along with the excellent ffdshow tryouts and Haali Media Splitter codecs. It may seem like a pain but with these applications, I can play just about any DVD and video file around.
But the Windows 7 Starter Edition will also restrict the hardware it will be allowed to run on and limit personalization options by not allowing you to change the desktop background or system sounds. ZDNet doesn't think that this is a big deal but I've always believed that personal computers should be personal and would see this as a downgrade from my XP powered netbook. One of the reasons Windows XP remains popular long after Micrsoft released a successor OS is because of the rise of netbooks. If Microsoft thinks it can change that by selling a merely semi-crippled version of Windows 7, it might find itself supporting its older OS for a long, long time.
All in all, it looks like Microsoft is poised to repeat one of the mistakes it made with Vista by releasing too many versions of its OS which ultimately confuses consumers. While it is being careful to scale back its hardware requirements for lower end machines—another big mistake that Microsoft made with Vista was trying to push it onto machines without the memory or processor power to run it well—it may also wind up making those machines unpleasant to use. If someone finds a computer unpleasant to use, they don't just throw it away, they try to figure out a way to fix it first. Whether this means installing an alternate OS like Ubuntu Linux or and older OS like Windows XP, it's a stumble by Microsoft.
And not many people feel bad for Microsoft when it stumbles.
Cupcake's New Bookmarks and Some Complaints
I just wanted to write up a quick post pointing out that the updated browser in the Cupcake Android for the T-Mobile G1 has one noteworthy improvement (besides enabling copy and paste). The Bookmarks menu now has three tabs and includes a list of Most Visited websites and a History tab. Before the update, History was a seperate menu item. Now it has been folded into the Bookmarks menu and is organized with submenus for items from "Yesterday," "5 days ago," "1 month ago," and "Before 1 month ago." Each website has a handy star which you can tap to turn it into a Bookmark. The Most Visited tab has these stars as well. This is a very welcome improvement over the old Bookmarks and History menu items.
The GMail application has also been subtly improved with little checkmarks that allow you to select multiple items for tasks like deleting spam. Unfortunately, GMail is actually a bit slower now than it was before the update. In fact despite Cupcake's improvments, my G1 phone is still relatively slow at times. It's not overwhelmingly slow but does slow down nevertheless.
The GMail application has also been subtly improved with little checkmarks that allow you to select multiple items for tasks like deleting spam. Unfortunately, GMail is actually a bit slower now than it was before the update. In fact despite Cupcake's improvments, my G1 phone is still relatively slow at times. It's not overwhelmingly slow but does slow down nevertheless.
Another disappointment? Twidget, the little widget for displaying Twitter updates. I really like this little widget at first but after about 24 hours it started crashing repeatedly and I had to uninstall it. This is a shame, I hope it gets fixed soon because it was a nice little app.
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Google Squared—An Internet Search Spreadsheet?
Lifehacker reports on a new experimental Google feature called Google Squared. They compare it to Wolfram Alpha but Wolfram Alpha is more of a mathematical information engine than a real search engine and Google Squared is more of a comparison engine. In fact, Google's demo video shows a comparison between hybrid cars. I couldn't help but think about Google Shopping which also allows you to make comparisons, in this case between products. Google Squared may eventually evolve into a complement to Google Shopping by allowing people to narrow down their choices before looking for the best price on a final product. Trying various searches was an interesting exercise. Google's suggested use, comparing hybrid cars is a pretty good one of Google Squared's potential as it finds a wide variety of cars and allows you tweak the search nicely, easily finding prices, fuel economy (MPG) ratings, and hybrid models that don't appear on the grid at first. Searching for a less environmentally correct type of car yields decent but clearly inferior results. (At one point, Google Squared actually displayed an MPG rating of 100 MPG for a Hummer H3 thanks to this blog post. A pop up list of possible alternative values which were labeled as "low conficence" lead to this Wikipedia page which displays fuel economy ratings for American cars which I would have thought would be regarded as fairly accurate considering how heavily Google Squared relies on Wikipedia for its information.) Similarly, a search for Atom powered netbooks yields decent results but has trouble finding prices for them.
I thought that Google Squared might be good for comparing politicians based on their stances on issues but that didn't work out quite so well. Searching for "Illinois congressmen," Google accurately found and displayed information about current and former Illinois congress people. But trying to add information on their stances on an issue such as a abortion or immigration yielded no information. Similarly searching for a specific piece of legislation like the Employee Free Choice Act yielded no information. Searching by that bill's ID number (H.R. 1409) in the House database also yielded no results even though putting that number into Google normal search box finds it immediately. Curiously, inputting the word "liberal" does yield rankings for some of them based on a Wikipedia article on RINOs (Republicans who are considered "Republican in name only" because they not conservative enough for the party "base").
For all its flaws, Google Squared shows great potential as a comparison tool. It's no alternative to Wolfram Alpha (which is still in its infancy and defies easy categorization). But Lifehacker also compared it to a spreadsheet and on this they are spot on. Google Squared is just begging to be integrated into Google Docs and might even be better off being absorbed into them as an analysis tool.
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