Not Really?

There have been several major updates for the Palm Pre since it was launched last summer.  One update made the camera function a bit overly complicated, and another one fixed it.  In general that is rather representative of the 2 steps forward, steps back results that your typical user experiences with Palm Pre’s.  Completely absent still today is any video recording capability in the Palm Pre 1 year after it was announced at CES 2009, and over 6 months after it was launched in the US.  That’s rather extraordinary considering Palm has offered video recording capabilities in Palm devices for about 5 years or more, yet the Palm Pre designed to save the company doesn’t offer this basic standard functionality, following in the Apple iPhone tradition of releasing a very advanced phone with a very noticeable flaw (the same exact flaw no less).

So today, as I went to pick up my phone and make a call, I was call blocked with the news that an update was destined to be downloaded and installed on my phone.  Its been my experience that whenever one of these bad boys is coming down the pipe, NOTHING really works until you bring it in.

So I proceeded to download the update, which I later learned was about 13 mb in size.  I brought it in while at home, where my Sprint network bars on my Pre fluctuate from 0 – 3, even though my wife’s Sprint phone consistently shows 2-4 (not a Palm).  Maybe someone is curving up the bars on her phone, or maybe my Pre gets crappy reception, I don’t know.  I tend to think its partly the update from 1.3.4 and partly the Sprint network, which does not seem to broadcast at a steady strength despite the fact that we are just a few miles from the 4g rollout in Charlotte.

It took about 25 minutes to download, then I got the opportunity to actually ‘install’ it.  That took another 30 minutes.  Ironically, I was helping my wife pull in about 35 updates and one Office Service pack at the same time.  Crazily, the updates and the service pack downloaded faster!

Even though my wifi was turned on on my Pre, it didn’t help speed things up either.

OK, so complaining about the lack of progress (or benchmark maintenance), here’s what you do get with this update.

webOS 1.3.5

Version information

Version: webOS 1.3.5

Release date: 28 December 2009

New applications

NONE

Feature changes to existing applications

App Catalog

• App Catalog significantly improves the application download experience.
• A user can now download multiple applications simultaneously.
• Downloads continue in the background if the user moves away from the download screen.
• A user can manually pause, resume, and cancel downloads.
• A user can also download all available updates for the user’s downloaded applications with a single tap.
• App Catalog automatically resumes downloads in cases where a download was paused because it was interrupted—for example, if a user moves out of network coverage and then moves back into coverage.
• Users can now take advantage of the full storage capacity of the phone for downloading applications. This gives the user more control over how to allocate the phone’s storage space across applications, music, photos, and other media. Downloaded applications are now stored on the phone’s USB drive.
• App Catalog lists search results based on an improved search algorithm.
• Locations from which users can purchase paid apps from App Catalog now include U.S. territories.

Calendar

• In Day view, switching between days happens more quickly.

Date & Time

• When the user has network time zone enabled, a city and country are no longer displayed.

Device Info

• A user can perform a full erase by pressing and holding Sym + the orange/Option key + power for 10 seconds.

Email

• A user can now edit forwarded text for all email account types.
• When the user sets up more than one Yahoo! email account, the account names displayed in Account List view include the associated email address so that the user can distinguish them.
• If an account mailbox is too full to send messages, after the user frees up space in the mailbox on the server, the user can send the messages successfully.
• The default email signature no longer includes the macron over the “e” in “Pre,” so that the product name shows correctly on a recipient’s phone.

Messaging

• If a user deletes a conversation with a contact, new conversations with that contact are now correctly displayed in Conversations view.

Screen & Lock

• When the screen is locked, the time displays in a new font.

Sprint Navigation

• A user can launch Sprint Navigation from an address in an open contact entry in Contacts.

System

• Users can now take advantage of the full storage capacity of the phone for downloading applications. This gives the user more control over how to allocate the phone’s storage space across applications, music, photos, and other media. Downloaded applications are now stored on the phone’s USB drive.
• This update improves battery life in areas of poor wireless network coverage.
• If the user is working in an application that supports landscape mode (such as Web or Videos), notifications now appear at the bottom of the landscape screen.
• After a user signs in to an existing Palm profile, applications the user installed from App Catalog are restored in the background. The user can use other features of the phone while the apps are being restored.
• Swiping to delete a list item that contains a link no longer causes the link to open in the web browser.

Updates

• After taking the 1.3.5 update, users can download future updates over a 2G (1xRTT , GPRS , EDGE ) data connection by opening Updates and tapping Download Now.

Web

• The web browser now supports the display of animated GIFs.
• Audio files with a .3g2 extension play correctly as audio files, not video files.

Security

This release includes a security fix to the dev portal. Credit to Kris Siegal for reporting the issue. Individuals interested in contacting Palm to report suspected security issues can find more information at palm.com/security.

source http://www.precentral.net/webos-135-now-available-download

I purchased a new G1 on Friday.  My phone has pretty much been dead to me since.  I was debating on getting a PRE from Sprint (new carrier for me) or getting a G1 from T-Mobile my preferred carrier.  I ultimately decided to opt for the G1.  It had most of the functionality I was looking for, it was on my T-Mobile plan so no need to kill a contract, and the plan pricing seemed right.

BUT

I rapidly learned that the G1 kind of sucks (seriously, not an anti-fan boy statement or anything).

It can only import contacts via GMail and Gmail contact import definitely does suck.  Here’s why, it maps all of your contact fields to a text note field in gmail. 

ergo if you have an email address in an email field, it gets dumped in the notes field.  If you have a phone number in a phone number field, it gets piled in the notes field too.  If you have an address, zip code, cell phone etc in their respective fields, Gmail does not provide mapping to send it to the Gmail fields it just dumps everything into a generic notes field.  In fact, all in the SAME generic notes field. 

That might be OK, if you have say, 20 or 50 contacts.  Pain in the ass, but ok.

But I have 1,600 contacts.  I’ve been around awhile and have done a lot of business with a lot of people over the years, not to mention my social networking contacts.  There is no way in the world that I can go into Gmail and start copy pasting text out of a note field into the actual data field Google should have been able to map to.

So today is Sunday, 48 hours after I bought my new phone.  I can’t call anyone with the dumb phone.  And I do use the word dumb in a literal way.  The G1 is no smart phone, it has been dumbed down due to Gmail.  So today, I’m boxing everything up and returning it to TMobile for a refund.  T-Mobile my favorite carrier is not really to blame here (other than approving a PDA smart phone for their line up that can’t import any phone numbers).

But I’m going to have to take my business elsewhere on this one.  I have lost 2 days with the phone, and missed a couple important calls as well.  Plus, the goofy ear bud that jacks into the usb slot on the bottom of the phone is almost impossible to hear through.

Oh, and T-Mobile sold me a G1 with a version number of 1.0 as opposed to the more currently available 1.1 or 1.5.  The hardware is the same, but the firmware is different.  The big difference is that I CAN NOT update my own firmware.  There’s an update out there, but I can not access it through the phone because 1.0 does not literally have the ‘update’ button deep down in settings.  This means I have no on screen keyboard, no video recorder and who knows what else.

No phone, no address book, static generating ear buds, no ‘update’ button –> Phone Return. 

For what its worth I do like the interface, the keyboard is not as comfortable as my old treo 700, but not bad.  I seem to recall having a keyboard adapter for an old old palm pilot years back that felt exactly the same as the G1.  From a tactile perspective, the G1 keyboard is not bad, its just a little dated (by about 10 years).

Oh and by the way if you need technical support from T-Mobile for the G1, you have to say ‘Blackberry technical support’ in the automated menu to actually get to the PDA department of t-mobile which services the G1 too.  (This is what a t-mobile tech support person told me)  The phone menu system has not yet been configured to respond to ‘G1 Problems’, ‘G1 techsupport’ ‘G1 help’ etc.

Monopoly power wants my contacts

I also wanted to mention that it trouble me a bit that I HAVE to upload my contacts to Google.  They are a monopoly after all and already monitor almost every website I visit.  Now through their G1 phone, they can monitor all the calls I make, not to mention the emails I send.  I’m a former signals intelligence analyst and understand the principals of gleaming information from an analysis of communications node.  Frankly, letting them get their hands on 2 more nodes (contacts and calls) is a little troubling.  People would be up in arms if Microsoft forced you to upload all of your contact information into one of their databases, can’t understand why people let that slide with Google.

Google Can’t Even Export its own Data from Gmail Successfully

One of the suggestions I received from tmobile tech support involved the concept of exporting some contacts from Gmail into a csv format, so that I could then use the csv column headings to manually update the columns of my own csv file.  So I tried exporting a single contact to get the file headers.

I used my wife’s contact info, which included home and work addresses.

Google’s exported file failed to export the city, state and zip code of the addresses for home and work.  So even if I use these headings, to manually construct my own CSV Google will probably strip out this very important information.