Palm Pre Plus and Palm Pixi Plus for Verizon, PreCentral.net Reviews -- the Competition
Dieter's got his Palm Pre Plus on Verizon complete review, and Palm Pixi Plus on Verizon complete review up on PreCentral.net, and is here to tell us how the new button-reduced, memory doubled, gaming enabled, built-in MiFi sporting, webOS 1.3.5.1 rocking device(s) hold up. Which is totally unfair, given this is TiPb's week to look at Palm and webOS for the 2009 Smartphone Round Robin! But whatever, Palm can change the game all they want, the question is -- is it enough?
On the Palm Pre Plus:
The Palm Pre Plus is the flagship for Palm, then, but can it legitimately be called a flagship for Verizon? Almost, but not quite yet. The key is Mobile Hotspot, which is awesome and one of the best reasons for recommending the Palm Pre Plus to a business user. Palm already has pretty decent push email and Exchange support - all they need now is full Document editing (and perhaps some battery life improvement) to make the case that the Palm Pre Plus is amongst the best business smartphones on the market.
On the Palm Pixi Plus:
The Palm Pixi Plus is marketed as "First smartphone" or a "Starter Smartphone." I don't find that moniker especially fair, as the Pixi Plus is as capable as the large majority of other smartphones out there. It compares well against the BlackBerry lineup and even the Android lineup in my opinion. Still, you can't get around the fact that it's less powerful than the Pre Plus and so if you are expecting you'll be using your phone heavily, seriously consider springing for the Pre.
I'll have my take on the platform for you by the weekend, but go read Dieter's now. Then come back and let me know what you think. Has Palm done enough to stay competitive with an upcoming iPhone 4.0 and 4th gen iPhone hardware in 2010?
Editor-in-Chief of iMore, Executive Producer at Mobile Nations, co-host of Iterate and ZEN and TECH, cook, grappler, photon wrangler.
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Multitasking, yay!
Everyone makes such a big stink about multitasking, but in the time the Pre takes to load an app you can have already tapped the home button and started the new app.
The grass isnt always greener on the other side
Not correct JK..
lets say I was inputting my work schedule into my calendar...simply swiping across the gesture area I can switch apps and input the times/dates etc faster than if I was constantly quitting and reopening apps.
or if I'm in an rss reader and I want to read an article later? Tap the button to open the article in the browser and while the browser loads up I switch back and continue browsing or mark all as read. All while I'm skipping the current track in Pandora from it's controls in the notification bar.
Stop thinking of the old iPhone way JK. When you have an app open already, you don't have to load it up again. Its up and running waiting for you to come back. The advance gestures you can easily swipe back and forth between apps. If you like loading apps, then yeah, go ahead and close them, and reload them. Otherwise, just keep your most used apps running in the background.
To me, Palm is ahead of Apple in terms of OS. You can't beat multi-tasking and a brilliant notification panel. The question should be: Will Apple's iPhone OS 4.0 be on par and/or better than Palm.
I'm curious about 4.0 too. While I doubt the solution will be as elegant as webOS it'll be enough to satisfy the majority of iPhone users.
Proswitcher for the iPhone is all I have to say. And multitasking is very important, for my fellow iPhone users.
Actually I would place the iPhone and Palm OS at about even. Both devices have pros and cons but the overall out of the box experience is where the iPhone OS shines plus it's better fit for busness that the Palm OS. Multi-tasking is much needed on the iPhone but realisticly only a few types of programs actually require it. Multi-tasking is a few more needed by the users that the software and the iPhone does multi-task; just not theird party software. Palm needs better hardware because no one should have to get use to a keyboard as small as that and it is small (type with my finger nails; give me a break that is just rediculous.) WebOS will not take off until larger devices are made to really take advantage of the features.
I'm with jk about multitasking not being a big deal. I have pro switcher and while all the points that have been made about how islts more efficient are true, I still find my self rarely if ever using it.
Although if multitasking is needed to give me the gd temp on the gd weather icon, than I'm all for it.
I've used a pre and I've used an iphone and after using the pre for a while I realized that multitasking really is a big deal! Some people with iphones tend to have a certain attitude about missing features the iphone doesn't have by saying who needs that and it's not important until apple actually comes out with it and all of a sudden that can't live w/o it. To the people with the jailbroken iphones and that they hardly ever use it, I think it's because they have to go into the proswitcher to use it (correct me if I'm wrong.) It's not built into the OS from the start. Trust me when I say when the iphone comes out with multitasking you guys will love it and all of a sudden can live w/o it.
Palm has definitely done enough to stay competitive with hardware. Short of the digital compass and auto-focus in the camera, the Pre-plus is capable of everything the 3GS is capable of, purely in terms of processing, graphics, and hardware capability. The remaining (and much more debatable) question is whether it will be able to gather a critical mass of users and developers to grow the WebOS software ecosystem, and stay competitive with the upcoming iPhone 4.0 and 4th gen iPhone hardware in 2010? That remains to be seen.
As someone who has used both platforms, I think Palm is on to something, but like all companies, they're still missing a few pieces to the puzzle, and those pieces might be critical to potential users/switchers. Given the amazing pace of update releases for the Pre compared to other smartphone update cycles, however, I think there's a pretty good opportunity for Palm to fill in those pieces and pile on innovations in the space between other companies releases.