Dear Palm, it's just not working out

I love my Palm Pre, but I agree, the calendar load time is really absurd. One of the things I loved about my old Palm Treo was being able to be out and about and quickly add an event to it when I came across an interesting flyer or article about something that was happening. It's such a royal pain on the Pre.

The phone features on the Pre are horrible and utterly unacceptable on the Pre -- you often can't conference two calls together, and if there are two calls on the line (conferenced or not), you can't hang up only one of them.

But I still think it's a fantastic device overall.

I haven't tried the Pre myself, but if jwz's experiences aren't unique (most likely), it's really a shame. The specs don't look so bad- is it webOS dragging it down?

It looks like Motorola's Droid is the best hope at this point to drive some innovatin' by competing at the level of the iPhone.

Or is there another contender I've missed? Is the HTC Hero/G2 worth looking at?

It's too bad, I thought the Pre's card metaphor, along with its pervasive notifications and multi-input open-API contact/message/lifestream datastore was the best hope yet for a great multitasking handheld.

The Verizon Droid is the only hope for an iPhone competitor at this point. It looks like it fixes all the hardware issues with the previous devices:

  * shipping the latest virgin Google build — no carrier or manufacturer fuckery
  * CPU + RAM as good or better than everything else (600mhz OMAP3 + 256mb RAM)
  * a capacitive touchscreen with 3x the iPhone's resolution
  * only a bit thicker than a current iPhone
  * a motherfucking headphone jack
  * nice hardware (landscape) and software (portrait) keyboards
  * 16gb of built-in flash AND a micro-SD slot
  * a camera that they made a cursory attempt to make decent (a flash!)

Now the only problem will be the Android software — the spartan builtin apps, the craptacular APIs, and the abysmal/non-existent third-party apps. Hopefully that will all improve quickly once Verizon is shipping millions of the things. Having hardware that's not worse than the iPhone will be a huge help.

Not sure why suddenly jwz is considered to be a consumer electronics guru? There's always churn and any particular device isn't for everyone. He's just very vocal about it.

The Pre suffers from some slowdown issues which as some commenters point out is almost certainly a software issue, which means it's fixable :) Would like to see Palm take up the community created patches, but it's the wealth and quality of these open modifications (tweaks/patches) as well as the rate of new additions to the app catalog that leave me hopeful. It isn't gonna be a market buster, but I think webos is fairly solidly staying around.

Why does everyone think Droid is the only hope? Nokia's Maemo-based N900 looks promising as well.

Their latest Symbian/series60 phones (e.g. E71, E75) are also pretty decent nowadays, although I would compare those to Blackberry rather than the iPhone.