3 Weeks with a Palm Pre, Blackberry Bold and Apple iPhone
Wednesday, July 29th, 2009It goes without saying that as the founder of a variety of dot coms and angel investor in other tech companies that I am a hardcore techno-nerd. So when the Palm Pre came out, I had to have one.
iCall was approved as a Pre developer some time ago and without a hands-on experience with the device, we really couldn’t make an educated assessment about the platform.
As an iPhone developer, we have purchased something along the lines of 25 iPhones in the past two years to always make sure that every developer and tester has one of each physical revisions of the devices.
Blackberry has been seductive with their push e-mail and their plans for a killer-app store, so we now own a handful of blackberry bold’s as well.
All told I have something like 45 phone numbers not including my various office numbers, home numbers and iCall phone numbers.
So for three weeks I devoted myself to using only one device per week. Prior to using the device I spent a day or so acquainting myself with the features and setup of each device, so each week with one device was a fair full week of use of combined business and home use.
I thought that since I’ve never written a technology review but read them constantly and had a unique experience that it would be worth sharing.
The setup:
- 1 Blackberry Bold on AT&T
- 1 iPhone 3G on AT&T
- 1 Palm Pre on Sprint
The location:
- New York/New Jersey/Connecticut Tri-State area
The plan:
- Use each device exclusively for one week to it’s full capabilities in order to determine which device truly tops the others and which device we as mobile developers would like to devote our resources to.
The catch:
- No device would ever be physically tethered to my computer. Physical syncing is pointless and defeats the purpose of a true digital assistant in my opinion.
Blackberry Bold:
- Typing: The physical keyboard makes it extremely easy and intuitive to pick up and begin using. It’s a bit small so speed is never great, but learning curve is short.
- E-mail: for both personal and business e-mail was a breeze, I visited the AT&T blackberry web site, put in my details, added a few server-side filters and within a few minutes my blackberry alerted me for each new e-mail.
- Calendaring and Contacts: Challenging to set up initially. As a mac user I have a mobile me subscription and the Bold does not support CalDav standards so I had to switch my calendaring from our internal CalDav office calendar and my personal Mobile Me calendar to using Google. As well, I had to enable “Google Sync” for my address book. Once those two tasks were completed and the Google Sync for Blackberry app was installed OTA, syncing was instant and simple and both calendaring and contacts worked very well.
- Web Browsing: Bottom line is that it stinks on the Blackberry. The 3G network is nice and fast but the browser is cludgy, hard to use, and truthfully I found myself using my wife’s iPhone to surf the web.
- Phone Calling: Great phone. Call waiting, calling, reception was good. When other people did not have signals on the same network I had bars and could both make and receive phone calls.
- Battery Life: Fair. On 3G I could go a full 12-14 hours of intermittent e-mail, web browsing, texting and perhaps 30-45 minutes of calling per day. By the end of the day the battery was low.
- Alarm Clock: This seems like a small deal but truthfully I really love having one device, including my alarm clock… I placed the charging dock next to my bed, when I docked the phone it immediately went into “sleep” mode which means dimming the screen substantially. The profile configuration allowed me to specify that I should only see LED and audible alerts for phone calls, not e-mails, not text-messages, not facebook alerts etc..etc.. Without spoiling the rest of the review, I got spoiled by this feature of the Blackberry.
- Customization: Fairly easy to put your most used apps on the home screen so that they are quickly available, icons and themes are readily available. Hiding all of the default AT&T junk apps that I’ll never use took a bit of research (hint: make a folder called “crap I’ll never use” and move all the worthless apps into it… then hide that folder. Lots of good apps are available for download. I particularly liked Vlingo for doing voice-only texting/searching/e-mailing while driving.
- Bluetooth Support: Spectacular. Not one vehicle had any issue accessing the phone book and/or connecting.
- Additional Notes: The LED is something you get addicted to. When the phone is blinking red lights it means that you have e-mail that you haven’t read. This is really handy because it means that all you have to do is glance at the device to know if you have e-mail, no opening of apps or waking of the phone is required. As well, the Bold had weird full OS crashes every few days that I often did not discover until I found that my phone had not vibrated in a few hours for e-mail notifications… the recent OS seems a bit flakey.
Palm Pre:
- Typing: The physical keyboard is easy to use but smaller and a bit awkward to type on. Very little thought was put into the act of sliding the keyboard out and as a result it always required a bit of pulling, pushing and occasionally inadvertenly hitting screen buttons to get it opened. Having the slide keyboard was generally nice though because it allowed me to use the entire screen for reading/browsing/etc..etc..
- E-mail: Sorry Palm but the e-mail application falls woefully short. Setting it up took me hours. It may work well for consumer users who use popular ISP’s (gmail, yahoo, hotmail) but if you use a custom IMAP or Exchange solution it is painful. The initial setup assumes that if your e-mail is john@somewhere.com that you must be using a host of somewhere.com to retrieve your e-mail. SSL certificates that are not signed by a well known authority are not supported even if you import them physically, so I had to have our webmaster set up a Godaddy certificate just for e-mail. Not a big deal but still, 20 bucks just to make e-mail work was adding insult to injury. Once e-mail is set up it checks at intervals, no push.
- Calendaring and Contacts: Easy to set up. Worked out of the box with Google and most popular providers. Nicely laid out. Palm has a really great calendaring app. Didn’t seem to have CalDav support.
- Web Browsing: The Pre uses the mobile webkit platform which is the same platform the iPhone uses. Browsing was easy, everything worked wonderfully. The palm shined here.
- Phone Calling: Mediocre. Often when the phone would ring, I would push “Answer” but it would not quickly answer leaving me pushing other buttons hoping to not miss the call.
- Battery Life: Extremely good. On the EVDO network I could go a full 12-14 hours of e-mail, web browsing, texting and perhaps 30-45 minutes of calling per day. By the end of the day the battery was still strong.
- Alarm Clock: I gave up on the alarm clock.
- Customization: The “card” concept is a bit of getting used to, there is no “home” screen, just whatever app you last used. Palm could benefit big time from some sort of “Today” screen with a few pushable icons to launch e-mail and calendar. Their “App Store” is a bit comical, I think it had 10 apps to download, no good IM apps… and seriously Sprint… I know you sponsor Nascar, but forcing every user to devote a portion of their screen real estate to your Nascar app is ridiculous. The number of search results for “remove palm pre nascar” is staggering. While you can indeed set a custom background, you’ll never see it unless you choose to stare at your phone without touching it.
- Bluetooth Support: Most major profiles supported, I tried a variety of vehicles and had no problems connecting it to any of them.
- Additional Notes: The Pre goes into sleep mode nicely in order to prevent inadvertent touches on the screen but getting it to come out of sleep mode requires a very awkward push of a button on the top right corner of the device. The reps at Best Buy couldn’t even figure out how to wake the device.
iPhone 3G:
- Typing: The on-screen keyboard takes a bit of learning and teaching the dictionary which words are not typo’s. Once you get used to using it, the screen is nice although depending upon the app it can react slowly to touches at times causing you to wonder if your touch registered properly.
- E-mail: At our office we use Mac servers and I was a bit suprised when I found that while Push e-mail is available only on the upcoming snow leopard os, via mobile me, or via exchange only. I thankfully use mobile me so my personal address was instant to set up. Our office e-mail was another challenge altogether, while it did work out of the box, my office e-mail is the one I need to receive immediate notifications of. I embarked on a 48 hour long journey of configuring z-push (an open source solution) to provide IMAP to Exchange compatibility. Once I got it set up, e-mail for both mobile me and our office IMAP is now real time push. Thumbs up to the guys at z-push.
- Calendaring and Contacts: Instant setup for both office and home, works perfectly, supports CalDav standard and allows me to subscribe to my wife’s calendar as well.
- Web Browsing: Same engine as Palm so speed is easy, the wide support for the detection of the iPhone useragent means more sites offer built in iPhone versions of their sites and the OTA syncing of my bookmarks gives Apple an edge over the Palm.
- Phone Calling: Ok. Signal is just not great in places where other devices have good signals and the “bars” are basically meaningless, 4 bars can result in a failed call, 0 bars never result in a successful call.
- Battery Life: Poor. On 3G I could go a full 8 hours of intermittent e-mail, web browsing, texting and perhaps 30-45 minutes of calling per day. By the end of the day my battery was dead.
- Alarm Clock: The alarm clock works, it wakes me up but the screen does not offer any “clock” functionality without waking it up so it could not totally replace my bedside clock.
- Customization: Easy. Wallpapers, ringtones, ordering of apps, all very simple.
- Bluetooth Support: Mediocre, a few of my cars had issues syncing phonebooks, one could not connect at all because Apple does not support RSAP.
- Additonal Notes: None.
Discussion:
The Blackberry Bold has a special place in my heart because of the LED, fantastic alarm clock functionality, and ease of setting up push e-mail. The inability to easily browse the web left me wanting more.
The Palm Pre has a great interface, the cards are a neat concept but the learning curve on the special swipes, combined with the pain of waking it up with an awkward button left me feeling like it was beta quality.
The iPhone made me jump through hoops on e-mail and the lack of an LED along with the mediocre alarm clock left me hoping for improvements in future versions, but the ease of use and integration with common open standards made it pleasant to use.
Conclusion:
The iPhone wins this competition. Once I got push e-mail working on both personal and corporate e-mail it really left little competition. If they add an LED for notifications along with some sort of night-clock I will never consider another phone as a business user.
The Pre has a lot of potential but the OS should not be 1.x, it should be considered Beta at best. When they revise with a 2.x release I will give it another try.
The Blackberry has so little screen real estate, crashed so frequently, and had such a crummy browser that I found myself needing another device to surf the web.
So without sounding like another Apple fanboy, the iPhone wins this competition for the most overall useable device for both business and pleasure.