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Dear Palm, it's just not working out

jwz.livejournal.com

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Re: Dear Palm, it's just not working out

#41

Post by mattmaroon »

davidmurphy wrote: post #2

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…

Yeah, I'd agree. I don't find it slow for a smartphone other than the Calendar app, which is abysmal. I wonder if he did something to the unit when mucking around with it (I know I've applied a couple hacks that really messed it up) and just needs an OS Doctor reinstall.

Re: Dear Palm, it's just not working out

#43

Post by bhousel »

I agree about the poor performance. I really hope they can fix that somehow, but it's starting to look like the heavy reliance on javascript was a design mistake.

However I don't have any problems with Mac sync. I've always used Spanning Sync to keep my Mac synced up with my Google account. Once there, the Pre just finds everything automagically.

It has been a bit of a shift in thinking to go from the old model of "I need to sync my device with my Mac" to the new "My device will just find what it needs in the cloud". But after using it for a few months, I'm really happy with the change. Palm synergy just works, and I don't at all miss the old way of doing things (cross your fingers and hit the hotsync button).

Re: Dear Palm, it's just not working out

#45

Post by bhousel »

c00p3r wrote: post #33

They still think it is possible to write apps in javascript? Good luck!

Actually you're probably right on the mark..

Acceleroto's blog post about their experience with developing the Pre version of Air Hockey tells the full story:

"Memory management (aka Garbage Collection). WebOS is allows users to run multiple apps at once. Users beg for multitasking. You think it impacts game performance? Absolutely. Even if every app behaves nicely, they all consume memory. Memory management is handled by the OS without any direct say of the individual applications. Whenever the OS decides, it does a Garbage Collection. Currently, this takes about 300ms (about a third of a second). Air Hockey contains specific code to lessen the impact of these pauses, but developers can’t turn them off. A lot of time was spent making sure objects weren’t needlessly allocated to minimize the frequency of the Garbage Collections, but you’ll see the pauses. That may change in the future – we don’t know."

http://blog.acceleroto.com/2009/10/06/the-first-paid-app-is-...

Re: Dear Palm, it's just not working out

#46

Post by malte »

I got my Pre last week. I really like the UI and the idea of multitasking. However, I already sent it back because of the spacebar and the power button not working properly (aparrently not only an issue with my Pre). From my experience from using it for a few days all I can say is that the battery life really sucks. You can't get through a day with moderate use of email, twitter, phone...

I am also a little disappointed by the build quality. It just does not feel smooth when you slide out the keyboard. I, however, did not experience any issues with the calendar. It takes some seconds for every app to load but I did not see a big difference in the loading time of the calendar and the other apps.

Now I have to wait two weeks before I will get it back since they would not just give me a new one. Reading this article really makes me wonder if I made a bad decision buying the Pre.

Re: Dear Palm, it's just not working out

#47

Post by nwatson »

davidw wrote: post #25
blasdel wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some huge holes in the Android APIs that make writing well-produced games extremely challenging. The Audio APIs are particularly shitty, making it basically impossible to have worthwhile soundfx. I just looked and it's now finally possible to read incoming Audio without waiting for the user to finish recording! (though they still don't call it streaming) That you're stuck in their unjustifiably-oddball byte…

> That you're stuck in their unjustifiably-oddball bytecode-interpreter sandbox (no JIT!) It's pretty evident if you think about it: they wanted something open source under a liberal license (Apache/BSD rather than GPL), and so did not want to touch Sun's Java implementation. Therefore, they did their own thing, which is a much solution than hassling with Sun about licensing. I suspect we'll see performance improveme…

For low-level performance-critical stuff you can always go down to C++, though I believe that's limited to operations on your own internal data and does not extend to system-level programming.

Re: Dear Palm, it's just not working out

#48

Post by mbrubeck »

malte wrote: post #46

I got my Pre last week. I really like the UI and the idea of multitasking. However, I already sent it back because of the spacebar and the power button not working properly (aparrently not only an issue with my Pre). From my experience from using it for a few days all I can say is that the battery life really sucks. You can't get through a day with moderate use of email, twitter, phone... I am also a little disappoin…

In my experience with mobile development, disk I/O is especially slow. So the calendar load time might depend on how much data you have saved in your calendar.

Re: Dear Palm, it's just not working out

#49

Post by spot »

blasdel wrote: post #14
jcapote wrote: post #7

Hm, I would've taken jwz for a G1 kinda guy...

As someone who'd previously been on the business end of subpoenas for data and legal discovery during the Netscape lawsuits, he's paranoid about giving any of his data to Google. That's why he was trying to get his Pre to sync solely to his local computer, despite that really not being what its makers intended.

I am curious. As plenty of business people use gmail/docs, what are the subpoena implications of that?

Re: Dear Palm, it's just not working out

#50

Post by davidw »

jodrellblank wrote: post #26
wavesplash wrote: post #12

JWZ isn't being dramatic. The slogan should be "Plam Pre: your life, just slower". I had a Pre for a month, returned it on day 30. It was like living in molasses. Plus the hardware was way way too cheap (fragile plastic screen, sharp edges on the keytray, poor fit between the sliding halves). I was afraid to use the phone for fear of breaking it. You could hear the plastic crunching everytime you typed on the keyboar…

I was afraid to use the phone for fear of breaking it. You could hear the plastic crunching everytime you typed on the keyboard. O/T: I'd like a concise term for this "author switches from 'I' to 'you' and ends up suggesting the reader's involvement where there couldn't have been any. (This reader couldn't hear the author's phone crunching). It's like the reverse of the "royal we". Maybe the "common you" (meaning: I)…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_you
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