Palm Pre Plus
Engadget’s Joshua Topolsky reviewed the revamped Pre Plus from Palm. Allow me to get straight to the points:
- Home button removed and replaced with a thin LED slit.
- Clickier keys but still not clicky enough.
- Stronger hinge for the sliding mechanism; now wants to slide shut a bit easier.
- Keyboard loses orange number keys and has a monochromatic color scheme: harder to find the digits.
- Precarious feeling the cheap plastic MicroUSB door cover will break.
- Storage doubled to 16GB; RAM doubled too.
- Less prevalent card kill warnings.
- Audio is described as “shrilly, almost painful mid-rangey tones”.
- Coming in February: webOS v1.4 (Record and edit video, Flash plugin)
- Verizon Navigator: Good, but not great.
- Mobile Hotspot app: WiFi hotspot allowing up to five connections for $40 per month and a 5GB monthly limit. You go over the limit and you’re hosed: $0.05/MB.
The Pre Plus still isn’t faster. Palm promises speed and better battery life in the next update. Overall Joshua likes the webOS platform:
- … a truly elegant and revolutionary smartphone platform…
- … a tremendous mobile operating system which allows you to handle lots of little tasks at once…
- Android and the iPhone OS may have their killer features, but neither one of them can handle multitasking like the Pre…
- This is a powerful and creative mobile OS with tons of potential…
Personally, Android is not ready for the general public. Android is for early adopters that like to tinker with their gadgets. I’m an early adopter but I’m not a tinkerer so Android is out for me. The iPhone 3GS is probably my ideal smartphone but AT&T ruins it. The Palm Pre Plus coupled with Verizon is quite compelling. I’d rather have a bigger display and a lot more pixels instead of a slide-out keyboard. The reason might be different than others: I need to type Korean and a virtual keyboard makes it infinitely easier. A physical keyboard just like the one found on the Pre Plus that can change into different languages would be really cool and better than a virtual one. My AT&T contract will expire right before Apple announces something on the 27th. In addition to the iPad, I hope Apple announces an updated iPhone that I can take to any carrier.
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