Get the Palm Pre at the Shack now for $50 bucks.

Time to get a Palm Pre if you have a regular phone and wish to have multiple emails consolidated into one view, text, Instant Messaging, Media player,  a decent camera, calender, contact database, and much more!   Yes, there are features which are lacking, however knowing Palm and the developer community, Palm should have thousands of applications for games, utilities and other productivity applications.  I bought mine for $200, however went back today to get my $50 refund as well as switching from Verizon, I will get another $100 bucks rebate back. 

I purchased one about 25 days ago and have enjoyed it so far.  I went from a Palm Centro, Palm 700, Palm 650, Motorola??,Motorola Startac Color, Startac, Palm IIIx, Palm III, Palm Pilot.... So as you can see, I've had many gadgets to support my business needs.  Most of all I needed them for my contact database and calendaring.  Email became hugely necessary over the past 10 years, since I had my Palm 650 and using Chatteremail, which was a wonderful little email package, which supported push email with MS Exchange, IMAP integration with GMail and  Yahoo, Pop Mail with my Verizon account and more. 

Yes, the iPhone has been a cool phone with all sorts of applications, however I hear things are lacking as ATT's data network sucks.  Sprint's network is faster is pretty good for coverage, however you can always roam on to Verizon's network if Sprint doesn't have coverage. Sometimes the roaming can be fast or could be only 1x data speeds. 

The nice thing about the Palm Pre is that is does multitasking, (basically running many programs at once in the background while you are working on an application in the foreground)  The finger gestures are pretty cool, with the pinch to enlarge the screen resolution or decrease it. Browsing the internet can now be something fairly easy without a magnifier. Also I can really work with applications which are web enabled.  Things which I couldn't do before unless I had my laptop, now I can just do on the Palm Pre.  You can also tether the phone to your laptop (be a data network wireless hub as well), so you can use your laptop and connect to the Sprint data network. 

You can find out more on this website:  www.precentral.net both on the blogs as well as in the forums.  

I originally started on Sprint Spectrum for digital wireless access, however they got bought out and then I went with ATT Wireless. Then I found out their coverage wasn't as good as Verizon's and I switched to Verizon for probably over 12 years, not finding any other network with better national coverage.   Unfortunately when ATT came out with the iPhone and Verizon couldn't get it. I ended up bitching at Verizon to get a better smartphone, they didn't listen, Palm's were becoming outdated and crashed a lot, so they were unreliable, especially if you were a heavy email user like I was.  I told Verizon to get a good phone, they came out with the Blackberry Storm which I heard sucked from my colleagues, most went back to the older style Blackberry.   Most of my colleagues have iPhones, and they just bitch all of the time about their iPhones.  I liked the user interface of the iPhones, however found that my Palm Centro had many of the functions the iPhone had already, so I didn't switch, till the Pre came out with the much faster network capability and useful browser.

I'm just hoping that more applications come out sooner than later.  There are over 300 applications already developed, however many are still in their infancy stages, so some still lack full functionality, many times because of the WebOS limitations because Palm hasn't released their updated versions yet. They are now on 1.1 release, however 1.2 release should be coming very soon.   Highlight and cut and paste is one of the features, I'm waiting for on static text.  You can cut and paste with editable fields, however not on static text.  A better email solution like Chattteremail, I'm hoping will be out very sooner than later (different alerts for different email boxes, color code emails from each different email service) , keyboard shortcuts like clicking on d for delete, e for mark read, f for forward, r for reply, a for reply all, etc., sleep mode when you want to set the email system to sleep when you do.... I'm sure I have more features which I had on Chatteremail, however not on the Palm Pre currently.  By the way, Palm hired the developer of Chatteremail a year back, so I think he had something to do with the existing email system and hopefully will add those other features back in soon. 

Well that a short review of the Palm Pre currently... They just released the Palm Pixi which is more of a texting version of the Palm Pre.  I like the slide out keyboard on the Pre though as it makes the footprint size smaller however provides a bigger screen to view.   

I guess, I could say I'm supporting Lance's new team. Go team RadioShack!  
Try a Palm Pre and I think you'll like it!