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5 minute review of the Pre August 7, 2009

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Since I’m in the US, I had planned on finding a Sprint store and checking out the Palm Pre. Turns out Chandler (or maybe all of Arizona) is more of a Verizon area. There’s maybe 6 Verizon stores in the big mall but no Sprint stores (6 stores in 1 mall… WTF?).

So I tracked down a Sprint store and got there when it was open and the guy let me play with the Pre. Even better, the security cable had been pulled off that day so I got to hold it proper, without a cable to get in the way.

My current phone is a Treo 650 so my opinion of the Pre is based in part on how it compares to that phone. The only thing is I didn’t actually have my Treo to compare it to (I left it in Australia). D’oh!

The phone is thin. I mean, it’s probably not a big deal to someone that’s had a newer phone but it seems about half as thick as the Treo. It’s shorter when closed but longer when open. It’s actually wider than I would have expected given the other dimensions. My wife has a Nokia 5800 and I guess I was expecting something closer to that width. I don’t think it’s any wider than the Treo but since every other dimension has reduced it feels wide in my hand.

The Pre is also lighter than the Treo. Given how poor the battery life is (so much for the “Palm Pre battery life will knock your socks off!” claims thrown around before release) I would definitely consider an expanded capacity battery because the size/weight trade-off should still result in a phone that’s smaller and lighter than my Treo.

Things on the screen were a bit smaller than I had expected. I’ve seen and played with iPhones and it seems the Pre uses similar pixel-sized items which results in smaller physical-sized items. That doesn’t seem to be a major problem but in some cases you need to be a bit more careful with your clicks. The screen itself looked good and responded as well as I’d expect. I would like to see a drawing app or something to see how accurate the screen is at the pixel level. I was disappointed to see the notes app does not allow for cursor movement but I managed to find a text editing control that did and while it wasn’t as nice as cursor keys would be, it was at least bearable. Much quicker than the iPhone thanks to avoiding the need to click and hold just to position the cursor. Despite my reservations, I think text entry will prove to be ok on the Pre even if it isn’t as good as the Treo. The biggest problem I could forsee is trying to use tiny fonts for code editing (something I do via SrcEdit on the Treo now).

Speed was what I expected based on the footage I’ve seen. Disappointingly slow. I mean, this is a 500Mhz device running a glorified web browser and it does not do everything instantaneously. The Treo has a measly 312Mhz older-generation ARM chip, emulates a Dragonball CPU for app code and still manages to do things instantaneously. I know… it’s not a direct or fair comparison but in terms of user experience, the reduction in performance is a mark against the Pre. I think by far the biggest problem here is the “new app hang” effect. Start an app and watch your Pre turn into a brick for up to a few seconds. You can’t do anything to the phone while it starts an app. This means you _need_ to use multi-tasking because switching apps by starting and stopping them (PalmOS-style) will be slow.

I think the Pre could benefit here from various optimization techniques. Things like starting a new “app environment” in the background to reduce the time it takes to start an app and keeping apps open when you close them (memory permitting) for faster re-launch. Apple’s .nib files are instantiated at build time and this memory is serialized to disk. This lets complex UIs be loaded quicker because the cost is just the time to serialize the memory from disk. The Pre could perhaps serialize the whole “app environment” to disk which would allow faster launching. I believe emacs did a similar thing in early versions because the cost of serializing the app from disk into memory was much quicker than the cost of actually starting up the lisp interpreter and executing all the startup code.

And finally the keyboard. I’ve heard some people say good things. I’ve heard some people say bad things. I haven’t seen a direct comparison to the Treo 650 so I was very nervous about this. I tried an iPhone keyboard and was able to type “the quick brown fox jumped over the slow lazy dog” quickly without making any mistakes and I haven’t really played with iPhones at all. I’m happy to report that I had no problems typing that sentence on the Pre either. Maybe I’m good at adapting to keyboards or something? I have big hands too so the keys on all of these phones are extremely small targets for my fingers. Actually, my large hands mean I will have no problems using the phone one handed, even with the keyboard open. I can reach all over the screen and all over the keyboard with my thumb. From experience with my Treo though, I’ll most likely drop to 2 hands for typing and use my right thumb for clicking the screen.

The keyboard buttons are less pronounced than the Treo 650’s keys. Less height and flatter but still rounded. It’s a different feel than the Treo. I felt the keys around the one I was pressing more but it didn’t seem to impact on my ability to reliably hit individual keys. The press action was a little softer than the Treo but again, this didn’t seem to cause any problems. The keys didn’t seem to take up a significantly smaller area but without my Treo to compare to it’s hard to be sure.

I was concerned about the lip at the top. I’ve used sliding phones before and found the top row of keys almost impossible to press due to my big fingers hitting the lip. I’m happy to report that the Pre fared well here. Only 1 keypress I tried resulted in my finger hitting the lip and even then I still managed to press the key accurately. The sloping front of the lip is probably all that saves the phone here. It turns out the biggest problem with the keyboard is the rim on the sides. For some reason I can’t fathom, the keyboard is recessed, excessively so at the bottom. However there’s a big gap at the bottom so the deep rim there doesn’t seem to get in the way. It’s the rim on the sides gets in the way. The most obvious example of the problems this causes is entering numbers. I know you can double-click the alt (orange) button to turn on numlock but on my Treo I tend to just hold the button with my left hand hanging off the side (ie. out of the way) and type out numbers with my right hand. On the Pre though, I can’t hang my left hand off the side of the phone because of the rim. This makes it a little hard to actually hit all of the number keys while holding the orange key. It might ruin the aesthetics of the phone while closed but I’d actually consider filing away part or all of the rim to make the keyboard more accessible.

Some of the symbol were in new places compared to the Treo. Shouldn’t be a big deal once I get the hand of it.

So there’s my review of the Pre after spending about 5 minutes with it. Nothing there to turn me off so unless this Eos device shows up and looks better I’d say there’s a Pre in my future. Now hurry up and release a GSM model Palm!

By the way, the guy behind the counter said Sprint employees can finally purchase a Pre today. I said, “couldn’t you just walk into Best Buy and get one?” and he said no. That’s got to have been annoying if you’re a Pre-wanting Sprint employee.

Text entry on the Pre makes me nervous July 17, 2009

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Now that the Mojo SDK is available, I’ve played around with a Pre (or at least the emulator, which is pretty close). I happened to receive an email and decided to reply using the webOS email app. What I found worries me.

First, I should explain where I’m coming from. I currently have a Treo 650 which has a touch screen, a keyboard and a navigation key that normally moves the cursor in multi-line text editing apps. I have composed large amounts of code and a fair amount of non-code writing on my Treo with no problems. The keyboard lets me type fast and accurately. The screen gives me gross cursor movement (replacing a mouse on a desktop machine). Most significantly, the navigation key lets me move the cursor. When writing anything more than a few sentences this ability becomes important.

So how does this work on the Pre?

The keyboard is there and while I have yet to see a decent side-by-side with a Treo 650 keyboard I’m cautiously optimistic that the keyboard will be ok.

The touch screen is a little different. The lack of a stylus means the accuracy of gross cursor movement will be impacted. Since I was using the emulator it was not a problem because I had a mouse. The iPhone OS gives you accuracy by using a magnifying glass effect. While this is handy I noticed on a friend’s iPod Touch that gross cursor placement was slowed down by the need to first tap-and-hold to get the magnifying glass effect to come up.

Now for the missing bit, the navigation key. There is nothing like it on the Pre. Even the iPhone’s virtual keyboard lacks “cursor movement” keys. So what does that mean? It means if you want to move the cursor you have only 2 options:

1) If you need to move the cursor to the left and don’t mind re-typing stuff you can press backspace. That’s really only acceptable while you’re writing stuff (when you make a mistake).

2) You can touch the screen to position the cursor.

There’s a bit of a problem with 2 though. Unlike the iPhone (which has the keyboard right next to the content thanks to its on-screen keyboard) the Pre has about 2cm between the screen and the keyboard. On top of that, the keyboard is recessed thanks to the slider design. It was bad enough re-positioning the cursor with a mouse. I really worry that it will be practically unfeasible to move the cursor on the actual device. Also, while the iPhone OS could be extended to include movement keys on the virtual keyboard, there just aren’t any keys on the Pre that can be intuitively re-mapped for cursor movement.

Now vim key bindings are something I could use. Maybe I can hack the webOS to give me vim key bindings in text widgets.

Palm Pre vs Nokia 5800 XpressMusic March 9, 2009

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So I’m just not that into the iPhone and the Pre hasn’t materialized yet. Palm’s delay could cause them to lose a fan because my eye has been caught by the 5800.

Working at Nokia means that I get to see various prototype devices. If it wasn’t for this, I would probably not even know what a 5800 was. I saw one at the office, got to play with it and even though it was a prototype running pre-release software I was impressed.

The UI is no iPhone/webOS killer but I’ve always been a function over form guy. Symbian/S60 is a solid platform capable of getting the job done. If I need it, there’s StyleTap for running my legacy Palm apps (an option the Pre cannot have while apps must be written in JavaScript).

Development is superior to webOS. I’ve tried to get excited about Mojo but it’s really hard. In contrast the 5800 will run native code and thanks to Qt for S60 I’ll be able to use an API I’m already familiar with. The only downside could be a need to use a Windows machine for development. Hopefully this will let me avoid that though.

The phone comes with 8GB of removable storage (“something or other”-SD). There are already 16GB cards available for that slot too. Not that I necessarily think I’ll need more than 8GB of storage but knowing I have that option is certainly nice.

The 5800 officially goes on sale in Australia in 11 days.

Agora bites the dust (thanks to stupid developers) January 17, 2009

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So the Agora (the phone I was most interested in until the Pre was announced) will not be released. Why? Because those stupid developers have made apps that won’t work on its screen.

Let’s back it up for a bit and describe the problem from the beginning.

You can lock the screen size and DPI and let people use pixels. Everyone did this in the older days of computing for speed reasons. Nokia did this with earlier S60 releases (even turning off pixels on newer phones so they’d have the required number of pixels).

You can start small and get bigger. As above but let the desktop scale up. Apps get more room (though they may not use them well) but each increase in pixels must be matched to an increase in physical size. Computers operating systems are still struggling to get rid of this legacy so that we can enjoy high-DPI displays.

You can hide the extra pixels. Palm OS legacy says the screen is 160×160. Newer devices have more pixels but the OS hides this, using the pixels to do things like nicer font rendering. Of course, Palm didn’t completely hide the screen size so you see apps that use the pixels more effectively.

The “correct” approach is to plan to have a variety of screen sizes (both pixels and physical size). Developers must take care to test in a variety of sizes and to handle the sizes properly. The platform needs to provide good support and even (IMO) take some of the burden away from the developer.

An app doesn’t really need to know how many pixels are on the screen yet that’s easy to get from just about any platform. Instead, an app needs to know how big the text is (since the UI should scale with the text), how much physical space is available (ie. how many lines of text fit on the display) and what orientation the screen is in. The layout of the UI might change for landscape/portrait and an optimized version might be used on smaller screens but these things don’t need pixels.

In reality, this is not what I see. In the platforms I’ve coded for you can go to the trouble of determining these things but it’s not automatic and it’s error prone. You need to test multiple resolutions and aspect ratios but that means having a bunch of devices or doing a bunch of serial testing. Why not just give me 4 views of my app when I run it via emulation? 2 portrait screens, 2 landscape screens with big/small and more/fewer pixels.

There’s a system that more closely matches the “correct” behaviour I described above. It’s web pages. Web pages are expected to work with different window sizes and font sizes. The “UI” scales with the fonts. Scrolling of the content is not done by the content but by the frame. What I’ve seen of webOS reminds me of these principles. I wonder if it’ll scale better than what we’ve had before.

Back to my point.

It seems Android developers are doing the wrong thing and making their apps for the G1’s screen. That means the apps will need to be fixed to run properly on the Agora if they can usefully run at all, it all depends on how much support the OS provides. Kogan isn’t exactly a big company. I expect they’ve found out they’re the only ones doing a small-pixel Android phone. I don’t blame them for abandoning the Agora over this, I certainly wouldn’t want to rely on developers to fix their apps for a “little Australian phone” either.

Oh yeah. This doesn’t apply to games. In fact, any app that “renders” content will need to do its own DPI calculations and deal with pixels.

Palm Pre screen is what? January 13, 2009

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About 20 minutes into the massive hands-on video here, Peter Skillman (VP of Product Design at Palm) is commenting on the screen.

“whites are really white, blacks are really white”

Um… I always thought you wanted your blacks to be really black?

;)

Palm Pre copy and paste? January 13, 2009

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Damn I hate press release journalism. Many articles mention that the Pre supports Copy and Paste. I have seen exactly 1 image showing what appears to be a menu with Copy and Paste items in it. Despite watching every “hands on” video I can find, I have yet to see anyone actually use copy and paste while the camera is rolling.

What’s up with that?

Oh… here it is. Doesn’t look particularly elegant to me however. I mean, trying to highlight text with a finger while holding the shift key? Ew. What happened to one handed operation Palm?

I want a Palm Pre January 11, 2009

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So I’ve been happy with my Treo 650 but I’ve also been looking at the new devices coming onto the market. Palm OS is a dead end (I’m pretty sure Palm itself has said this) so migrating onto something else will be on the cards at some point. The question is what to?

The iPhone came out and makes me drool. Unfortunately, it’s expensive and locked down. I would definitely need to jailbreak an iPhone to be happy with it.

In pretty stark contrast to the iPhone’s walled garden is Android. The Kogan Agora is the first Android-running handset that will be released over here (at the end of January) so that’s something I’m keen to look at. Unlike the Horrible G1, the Agora retains a Treo-like form factor. This makes the screen smaller but gives me a keyboard I can type on with one hand.

But wait, there’s another option. The Palm Pre looks like a basically perfect phone to me. The only thing wrong with the launch unit is that we don’t have a CDMA-based network in Australia any more. Luckily there’s a GSM version in the works.

The hardware itself is awesome. The latest of everything, the powerful new OMAP 3. I’ve looked with interest at slide phones in the past but I’ve mostly dismissed them for 2 reasons.

1) The sliders often feel crappy.
2) The top keys on the slider are hard for my fingers to hit (due to the lack of dead space above the top row of keys).

Some sliders have a nice, spring-loaded flick and I’m hoping that’s what the Pre has. For problem number 2, the photos I’ve seen look encouraging but I guess I’ll have to wait and see how good it is.

Of course, the other big problem with sliders is that you can’t use the phone with the slider closed. The Pre doesn’t seem to have this restriction. I don’t use the keyboard on my Treo all the time so I think this will work fine. Of course, as a bonus, you get a phone that is both smaller and has a bigger screen.

From what I’ve seen about the OS it’s going to be much more open, more like Android than iPhone. I especially like that Palm is eating its own dog food here and not giving developers a second-rate environment like Apple did (and still does, via the off-limits private frameworks). The whole “just write a web page” thing really scares me. I have no problems learning a new API but I have tried and failed to make a web page that looked anything like an app. I just hope there’s good templates, standard icons and such. Using JavaScript isn’t really a big deal. It sounds like the platform’s APIs are all exposed to that.

Of course I really hope there’ll be a native API at some point. Palm is talking about a third party providing compatibility for existing apps but that’s only going to happen with native code. Maybe the native code will take the form of a plugin that is accessed via JavaScript?

A big question is how open the OS really is. It seems like it’ll be open from the app side but what about the rest of the system? Will it need a jailbreak? Will it be open source? (I very much doubt it, this “secret sauce” is the only thing that’ll keep Palm ahead of its competition).

I use a Mac at home so you’d think I’d lean towards iPhone. That would be the case if (and only if) an iPhone was as open as a Mac. I’m not an open source zealot so while I’m interested in Android, it’s not for philosophical reasons. Android looks like it’ll get native apps before too long so that platform could be a good place to be. The UI is definitely not up to the benchmark Apple set but I suspect the UI can be improved significantly without a huge effort. Palm Pre easily meets Apple’s benchmark and I think surpasses it by offering features Apple had trouble giving us.

I really love how the Card paradigm works exactly the same as Safari’s tab management in iPhone. It’s so obvious, I can’t believe Apple didn’t think of it already.

To spell it out, I have completely ignored the Blackberry. Too proprietary and locked down for me (apparently that has changed recently so maybe I should give these a look).

The dark horse I see in all of this is Nokia. Since I now work for them I feel like I should at least try to use one of their phones. The only problem? Their phones suck. The low end S40 OS has had features added to it so it’s now as complicated as S60 (Bree hates her new Nokia phone, a very bad omen). S60 itself is slow and complicated. With S60 moving towards open source, with Qt running on S60, with new phones in the pipeline I hope that Nokia can make a device I can like.

In the mean time, I want a Pre. Lets just hope the market doesn’t change between now and the time I can buy one. After all, the Agora is available at the end of January while there is no official date set for a GSM Pre.