Palm Pre Plus

The days when Palm was shorthand for PDAs, those pocket computers that people used to manage their diaries and address books that were popular a decade ago is long gone.  After having a go at the business smartphone market with the Treo range, which was more than satisfactory but is now beginning to show its age, it was time for Palm to get back in the game and re-establish its reputation for making excellent mobile devices.

So a long time after the first Palm Pre, the Palm Pre Plus is here and will be available in the UK soon.  But has Palm left it a little too late?


Handling: why don't you make a cup of coffee while you wait for it to start up?

When we test phones, we've often had the chance to play with them at press conferences or other events, but on some occasions, the unit that comes to the lab is the first one we've ever laid our hands on.  That leaves the door wide open to surprises, and with the Pre Plus, they began as soon as we tried to switch it on.  Our first impressions weren't great.  Why?  Because it took a disgracefully long amount of time to power up.  Waiting more than two minutes before you can use your phone is really out of order.  It was so bad that most people who tried in our lab thought that the handset was broken the first time they tried to switch it on!

Hardware: looks like a pebble-feels like one too

Well, the coffee's ready, but the Pre is still whirring away, so let's take a look around the outside.  It's 10 cm tall and 6 cm across, making it seem relatively compact.  However, it's also very thick and heavy.  1.7 cm from front to back ant 140 g on the scales might be reasonable on the Motorola Milestone, for instance, but here the proportions seem wrong.


The rear surface is traditional in a decent enough matte black plastic, but that's much less luxurious than the Teflon or brushed aluminium found on some of its competitors.  The front, though, is all glossy plastic.  When you slide it open, the Pre takes on a more curvaceous form which sits well against the side of your face while you're talking into it.  The keyboard is in soft plastic, with plenty of room between the keys. 


You can plug the handsfree kit into a headphone jack, but it's in a very silly place.  It's on the top of the phone, but in the half that contains the keyboard.  As a result, when you slide the keyboard down to type, the cable rubs up against the back of the screen, so you'll need to be careful to make sure your other headphones fit if you don't want to use the ones supplied by Palm.

Interface: easy to use OS

The first time you switch it on, a tutorial takes you through two essential gestures that you can use on the touchscreen, and there are another dozen in a little booklet that comes with the phone.  That might seem a lot, but you learn how to use them very quickly as the system is very well thought-out.  There's a special touch-sensitive zone at the bottom of the screen just for that.

If you're a regular reader, you'll know that we don't normally like touch-sensitive buttons.  But Palm has avoided the usual traps, and there's no chance of accidentally launching another app if you brush your fingers across this zone.

Overall, using the phone is pretty easy, and if you're used to either Android or OS X Mobile, you'll be fine.  There are two sets of tabs: by default, you scroll through previews of the apps that are currently running, and when you open the main menu, they show the apps as well as main settings and so on.

Internet: good zooming but no Flash

Palm's proprietary web browser is excellent.  It's easy to use, accurate, fast and hard to fault, except on two points.  The first is that there's no support for Flash.  The second problem isn't directly related to the browser itself but has a big impact on surfing the web, and that's the poor reception of 3G.  As a direct result, browsing is slow, unless you switch to WiFi.


And while you're browsing, another problem is that the screen itself is extremely glossy, which has an impact on legibility.

While we're on the subject of the screen, we'd like to know know why Palm thought it was worth using rounded corners on just about every app.  When the screen only measures 3.1'', they just make things look even smaller ...

Multimedia: a better camera than the iPhone

We know that the iPhone isn't exactly known for having a top quality camera, but we wanted to find a favourable comparison, because the camera here is far from being excellent.  And Palm isn't even hiding behind plenty of pixels, as the Pre's sensor only has 3 Megapixels.


There's nothing more to add about videos and music.  The list of file formats that are supported is excellent, and the player software is very easy to use.  The output from the audio jack is very clean, although the headphones that are supplied don't exactly make the most of it.

A GPS chip doesn't work wonders, and it's probably best seen as a solution for getting out of a fix than something to use everyday.

We should also take a look at Palm's App Catalog, but we'll try to avoid the usual criticisms that there aren't actually that many apps available to download.  Instead we'll point out that it's well laid-out, and makes browsing for interesting apps fun.  All of the usual apps from big names that you'd expect are already there, too.


Let's end on another sour note, the battery life.  The Pre Plus is completely incapable of lasting more than a day if you use it for any more than calls and texts.  That's really not good enough, and is worse even than the iPhone, which is one of the worst offenders in this regard.  Right now, it's a big problem for Palm.

So what do we make of the Palm Pre Plus?  Well it's a great phone ... but it's a year late.  Today, it's only a good phone.  Falling behind on both battery life and the quality of its camera, to name just two problems, the Pre doesn't have anything to set it apart from other smartphones and is left in the dust by the latest Android handsets.  It's a shame, because it works perfectly and has an easy-to-use browser, two great qualities.