New Phone – the Palm Pre

Well this is a nifty little device. I like it overall. I used to use a Palm Treo 700p but when Verizon started giving away the Pre and the wireless hotspot plan that goes with it, I just couldn’t resist.
The Good:

• Lots of neat gadgets. It has GPS and will geotag photos itself.
• It will allow you to find geocaches on the spur of the moment instead of downloading the geocaches for the entire state at home or trying to predict where you’re going to be when you get a chance to geocache.
• The WiFi hotspot feature is awesome. It couldn’t be any more simple to use.
• The phone will also use other WiFi networks that are around when you want to browse the web or check email. It’s better than using the cell network and it doesn’t count against the 5GB data cap.
• It runs lots of apps at the same time and it’s easy to switch between them while one is thinking or downloading.

The Bad:

• You can’t search calendar appointments! You can pretty much just start typing anywhere – tasks, contacts, memos, app launcher, google maps, pictures - and it will automatically start searching, but not in the calendar.
• All these gadgets suck battery power. The Pre has almost 2/3 of the battery capacity of the Treo 700p. I drained the Pre in about 3 hours 30 minutes of continuous use talking, texting, emailing, mapping, and app downloading.
• The antenna is weak – my 700p got much better signal than the Pre does. The signal is pretty lousy where I work. The Treo 700p could deal with it but the Pre runs down flopping between networks. 
• The GPS took forever too get its first fix. More than 15 minutes. It finally locked in after I clicked on VZNavigator but that might be a coincidence.
• While the Pre will geotag photos, it does not record the time and date the photo was taken in the EXIF information. It only records “date modified” on the file. If it doesn’t have a good GPS fix it will use Google location services to get a fix which is likely to be half a mile or more off.
• The camera on the phone takes pictures that are too big to send via MMS.
• The video editor makes malformed mp4 files. They don’t report the correct video size and have white space in them. They also won’t upload to youtube.