The Palm Pre Review

Google Maps

Android based phones still get the sweetest implementation of Google Maps, but the Pre gets one that’s at least on par with what’s in the iPhone OS. There are some minor UI differences but fundamentally it works the same.

Google Maps does take much longer to load on the Pre than on the iPhone, but once in the app you can interact with it much faster.

Address Book

Thanks to Synergy, the Pre’s Address Book is pretty awesome. I get pictures for all of my contacts that I didn’t have to assign myself (as long as they have a picture associated with them from somewhere, either my address book, my Gmail, or Facebook), I get their AIM/GTalk status indicated by a dot to the left of their name and I can scroll through the list very quickly. The scrolling here is quick and smooth, unlike in the Email app; I don’t get why.

Music and Movies

The Pre, as you’ve undoubtedly heard, unofficially supports syncing over iTunes. It reports itself as an iPod allowing iTunes to sync with it as if it were an iPod. Apple could easily prevent this from happening, and Palm could attempt to circumvent Apple’s prevention and this whole thing could turn into a war of sorts but for now if you plug in your Pre you can sync your music just fine.

Works like a charm, or an iPod, for now.

The music player is very simple and has built in searching capabilities. You can browse your music according to artist, album, song title, genre or individual playlists. There’s of course support for randomized play (sigh, or Shuffle I guess). You can even buy tracks from Amazon’s DRM-free MP3 store; clicking the link in the Music app just opens a separate card for the Amazon Music store.

The Pre can also function as a movie player. It’s capabilities are similar to the iPhone here as well. There is no way to purchase/rent movies from the phone unfortunately; we’re not quite there yet.

The App Store

The Palm store pretty much sucks right now. There are hardly any official applications and honestly there’s more interesting content being produced by the homebrew community than anything officially embraced by Palm today. That could change in the future, but if you need an app that’s in Apple’s app store already, there’s no reason to even consider Palm.

Three games in the entire App Catalog.

Case in point? I just threw up a few Sonos ZonePlayers around my house. Sonos has a free iPhone app to control them all. It’s pretty sweet. There is no equivalent on the Pre. Giving up my iPhone would mean giving up the convenience of controlling my music, all over my house, from my phone. Apple did a very wise thing by dropping the 3G’s price to $99; it’s going to be very difficult for Palm or any other manufacturer to compete with the developer base of the iPhone. Apple with an installed base advantage? What sort of bizarro world are we living in?

The Pre just launched this month, and there isn’t a hardware-level SDK available so it’s no surprise that the Pre’s app store is very barren. I do expect that to obviously change over time.