4,5天的使用经验(转帖）

abigman · 发表于 2009-6-12 12:17

http://the-gadgeteer.com/2009/06/11/a-week-with-the-palm-pre-smartphone-day-4-5/
A Week With The Palm Pre Smartphone - Day 4 & 5by Julie on June 11, 2009 · 7 comments
in Palm OS related

This entry is part 3 of 2 in the series A Week With The Palm Pre Smartphone

It’s a phone, it’s a music player, it’s a camera, it’s a Palm Pre. Is it good at any of those tasks? I have been trying these feature for the past couple of days and here are the results…

Before I get into anything else, I did want to mention that I haven’t experienced any more weird battery suckage issues like I did the other day. No major hardware issues lately either…
The Palm Pre as a… phoneToday let’s make some calls, receive some calls, play some music and take some pix with the built in 3 megapixel camera.

Initiating a phone call requires two steps at a minimum. If the Pre is already awake and in the card view, you can just press the Green call icon and then start tapping the number you want to dial. If you want to search by name, slide open the keyboard and a list of matching contacts will appear and filter as you type. You can also assign speed dial numbers to the numbers on the touch pad and hold them down to call.

If your phone is idle and a call is received, the display will look like the image above. I assumed by the image that I would be able to press the hardware button to answer the call. Ummmm…. nope. So ok, I thought then just tap the call button on the screen to answer the call. No again. You have to slide the call button up as you would do to unlock the phone. Argh… I hate this as it’s sometimes hard to do with one hand and your thumb. Especially while driving. Yeah, yeah, I still don’t use a Bluetooth headset

all the time.

If the phone is awake, this is what you’ll see. A simple tap of the Green or Red buttons will answer or end a call.

If I had an image set for myself, it would show up, but otherwise, you see the little person shape. This is the during call display. You can switch to speaker phone, mute, go to the dial pad or add another person to the call for a conference. The Pre has a proximity sensor, so when you have the phone up to your face, the screen will turn off. Pull it away and it turns back on. Wonder where they got that idea? Hmmmm

If you miss a call and turn on your phone, you’ll see something like this. I thought the notification system was really nifty for about 1 day. Now I’m over it. It seems to get in my way more than help me.

Tap the missing call button to see more info and call the person back if you desire.

Small icons in the bottom right corner will also remind you of missing calls, voice mails and other notifications. BTW, I can’t get rid of the darned alarm icon no matter what I do. I had set a timer the other day to remind me when to take a lasagna out of the oven. Now it’s stuck there even though I’ve deleted the alarm. Grrrrrr…

There’s a standard call log screen that lists outgoing and missed calls.
Call quality with the Pre, even while roaming

, seems to be much better than what I’m used to with my GSM phones on AT&T. My calls with the Pre have been significantly better sounding. That said, Sprint reception here isn’t very good. At my home, it’s roaming 100% of the time. At my work I’m not roaming, but I have had numerous times when I would call the Pre with my desk phone or AT&T phone and the calls would go to straight to voice mail even when the Pre shows 2 bars. I don’t know if this is a Sprint issue or a Pre issue.
Update: I figured out that this only happens when I’m doing data on the Pre. If I’m loading a webpage or doing something that is accessing data, incoming phone calls go straight to voice mail. I’m wondering if this is because I don’t have 3G here.
For any iPhone

users out there thinking of jumping ship to get a Pre, you should know that the Pre doesn’t have visual voice mail. Not that the lack of that feature would be a deal breaker for me. But once you’ve used it, you realize just how handy it is.
So for phone calls, I’m not real impressed with the Pre. Although call quality is very good, I hate not being able to make or answer a call with a actual physical button. I guess I’m just too old school about some things

The Pre as a digital audio playerLoading and playing your favorite music on the Pre is easy.

Just plug the Pre into your computer with the USB cable. Then tap the USB Drive button and the Pre will mount like a flash drive. Drag and drop folders of your music onto the Pre. Unplug and then launch the Music player.
You can also use the Media Sync option, which will load iTunes on your computer and allow you to sync with that.

The music player is not unlike other media players. In other words, you’re not going to have any problems figuring out how to use it. You can view music by artist, albums, songs, genres or playlists. There’s also a link for the Amazon MP3 store in the player. More about Amazon in a bit…

If you have album art with your music, it shows up in the various lists.

The now playing screen can be seen in album art view…

Or song list view. That light blue progress bar to the left of the top song will fill in the whole row as the song plays.
Since the Palm Pre multitasks, you can play music while you surf or do other things. Nifty.
If you need a new song fix, you can go to the Amazon MP3 store and buy some with your Pre.

The interface for the store is easy to navigate.

It has a search feature - of course.

You can buy albums or songs, which will be charged to the credit card that you have on file with Amazon.com.
The Pre as a cameraI was anxious to try out the Pre’s built in 3 megapixel camera. I was encouraged by the fact that it has a built in LED flash.

When you launch the camera application, you’re put in viewfinder mode by default. My screenshot didn’t capture the live view finder, but you get the idea. The interface is very simplistic. There’s a green shutter button and the flash button that toggles between always on, never on and auto on. The other button launches the photo viewer.

Photos are separated into photo roles, all images, screen captures and wallpapers.

Images are shown in thumbnails that can be then shown full screen, zoomed, etc.
Here are some sample pix that you can check out. Click on them to see the full sized images.

The camera takes ok pictures indoors and outdoors, but you can forget macro shots. Darn. I always like a phone with a camera that can take good close up pix because I sometimes like to snap pictures of product labels, magazine ads, etc when I’m at a store.
The camera also doesn’t record video… boo. You can’t change the resolution (which is 1520 x 2032), zoom, etc. either.
I’ve had the Palm Pre for 5 days now and so far I have to tell you that not in love with it. I am still loving the size and the display, but the rest is just ok for me. I was hoping to be wowed the way I was when I first tried an iPhone. That’s the whole thing, so far the Pre is too much like an iPhone for me. Yeah, it has some features that the iPhone doesn’t have like a real keyboard and multi-tasking. But other than those two main features, I’m not yet thinking that I can’t live without this phone. Maybe I’ll change my mind before the week is over though. We’ll see…
I plan to cover quite a bit in my next post:

PIM syncing

A Week With The Palm Pre Smartphone

A Week With The Palm Pre Smartphone - Day 1

A Week With The Palm Pre Smartphone - Day 2 & 3

A Week With The Palm Pre Smartphone - Day 4 & 5

Series Navigation«A Week With The Palm Pre Smartphone - Day 2 & 3
Tagged as: Palm, Palm pre

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{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }

1 Cameron June 11, 2009 at 10:17 pm RE: not being able to receive calls while getting data from web: I believe this is a limitation of Sprint’s network itself; nothing to do with 3G. You can’t do both Data and voice at the same time. It’s one of the other.

2 Tyler Puckett June 11, 2009 at 10:19 pm Julie,
Coming from a Centro, would this be a great phone to upgrade to? I’m seriously considering switching to Sprint to buy it. I’ve been coming up with excuses to switch to another carrier for a long time now. AT&T’s billing practices are really starting to work on me. I hate their expensive voice plans, expensive text plans, and expensive data plans. Plus the fact I get TONS of dropped calls and poor signal indoors (and outdoors) in regions where I should be getting excellent signal.
Although the iPhone is a really, really great phone, I refuse to give AT&T $30 a month for a data plan on a phone that has WiFi. You can’t use the MediaNet trick with the iPhone, nor can you use it with a Centro you bought from AT&T or I would have data on my Centro as we speak.
Sprint’s $60 plan with unlimited data, text, 500 minutes, GPS navigator, and Sprint TV is really luring me in. I think I’ll at least go to the Sprint store and try the Pre.

3 Julie June 11, 2009 at 10:25 pm @Tyler It’s hard for me to consider switching away from AT&T because I like to change phones so often and it seems like GSM phones are more prolific than CDMA phones. That said, I have been VERY impressed with Sprint call quality. AT&T just plain sucks. But all that said, if i were going to switch carriers right now, it would probably be to Verizon… that’s just because that’s the only carrier in my town that has EVDO. And there’s a tower less than 1 mile from my house

Coming from a Centro, I think you would like the Pre… But you might have problems going from stylus to finger. I know I still do.
If you do go check one out, please come back and tell us what you think about the Pre.

4 Julie June 11, 2009 at 10:26 pm @Cameron Is that a limitation with CDMA 3G? Because I had some folks on AT&T 3G do some quick tests and they were able to do two things at once.

5 Tyler Puckett June 11, 2009 at 10:36 pm @Julie, Cameron:
I believe that is a limitation of CDMA and EvDO. I seem to recall they both run on the same band, and thus can’t be use concurrently.
This is in contrast to GSM, which runs on 850 or (rarely) 900 in the USA, while HSDPA runs on 1900.
Don’t take this as gospel, it’s just what I seem to recall from the depths of my brain…

6 Tyler Puckett June 11, 2009 at 10:40 pm @Julie:
Will do! Have you noticed any of the slugishness that has been reported? I’ve seen videos where the Pre will routinely take 9+ seconds to open apps like the Camera. I certainly hope those issues are resolved, as the Pre has just as good (if not better) a processor as the iPhone 3G.
Also, how’s the battery life? I’ve heard reports where the phone will quit at 1pm or a little later, perhaps around 3pm. A phone that will not make it through the day is a useless paperweight, regardless of how nice the UI and physical design is. The interesting thing is the Pre uses the same battery as the Centro, which has pretty decent battery life, but is much less complicated.

7 andix June 11, 2009 at 11:15 pm I don’t know. I have been looking and looking at the photos and despite the Pre not being available in Canada (northern Canada to be more precise), for me it’s a no. absolutely, definitely and finally NO.
I’ve just reverted from a HTC Touch to an old simple Nokia 6275i phone, part of it being the absolutely impossible user interface of the Windows Mobile. I was hoping that the Pre would sport something as sleek as the Treo, just a tad fine-tuned but equally practical. for some reason Palm has chosen to appeal to 16 year-old “cool” kids with a penchant for useless eye candy instead of business users.
and I don’t get it, why does everyone want to have their products looking and feeling like iPhones while being limited by patent issues, instead of coming up with their own thinking? it’s really sad… and if I ever upgrade to something again, it’ll be a Blackberry. that is, if I don’t manage to find myself a Motorola StarTac in the meantime.

tjlrm · 发表于 2009-6-12 15:20

顶了再详细看

lzyc2004 · 发表于 2009-6-12 15:21

汗一个，等高手翻译了，只怪上学不努力

parasun · 发表于 2009-6-12 16:28

看来pre还是不错的，现有问题都是小意思

wenbq · 发表于 2009-6-12 16:40

看英文还是有点吃力的！呵呵！

notell · 发表于 2009-6-12 16:46

只看了下图片爽了一下

jinfu2008 · 发表于 2009-6-12 18:08

原帖由 lzyc2004 于 2009-6-12 15:21 发表 6 n# D5 y L7 f4 G0 X3 Z) j
汗一个，等高手翻译了，只怪上学不努力

哈哈，我也是，读书懒

qzcjx · 发表于 2009-6-12 20:03

每天到此顶顶帖，耐心等候。

athena0888 · 发表于 2009-6-12 20:04

不错！！！！！！！！！！！！！！

仴克斯 · 发表于 2009-6-12 20:07

看来坛子要请翻译了

crabhero · 发表于 2009-6-12 20:22

看不懂英文就等RDX和larryhui写中文的使用经验吧。
多多顶贴把他们码的文章顶出来。

拾穗者 · 发表于 2009-6-12 21:25

顶起看看！1

zouhero · 发表于 2009-6-12 21:45

pre 太像iphone，虽然具有一些iphone没有的细节……
palmfan最需要的便捷和快速，包括快速的中文输入是否能够在pre身上延续下去？？？

iceworld · 发表于 2009-6-12 22:01

我感觉在pre原生的软件完善之前，classic能够充分利用起原有资源的话，这个过渡阶段应该还是不错的，召唤神奇的小青蛙～

vincegu · 发表于 2009-6-12 22:21

写得很细啊:)1

kevinlan · 发表于 2009-6-12 22:27

虽然我是英文专科毕业的（自考），可是还是太吃力了。。。。。。哈哈哈哈，笑掉牙！！！！！哪位大佬来翻译一下喽。谢谢

[ 本帖最后由 kevinlan 于 2009-6-12 22:28 编辑 ]

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