Today is my first day back in the U.S. since returning from a two week vacation in Europe. A lot has happened with HTC while I was out, but the biggest news is not HTC related. As most of you already know, Sprint launched the Palm Pre a few days back. We’ve covered it a few times already since it is going to be a major competitor for Android for quite some time. Over my lunch break, I decided to head down to the Sprint store and check the Pre out for myself.
Walking into the Sprint store, I was expecting to get hounded by a few sales reps, letting me know that the Pre has arrived. Fortunately and somewhat disappointedly, I walked up to the display unit and started going over the handset. After a minute or so, the sales rep sitting at a little desk across the store shouted out “Cool stuff, you like the new Pre?”
I replied to his question and focused back on the Pre. The first thing that I was excited about was the size of the device. It fit nicely into my hand, unlike my G1. The glossy plastic was covered in smudges and already has a scratch on it, but the nice shine shouted out “look at me!”
Having watched quite a few videos on the Palm Pre, I was fairly familiar with the UI and how it worked. I pulled up the launched and opened Google Maps. Palm has slapped on their own UI onto Google Mps, prominently displaying the address/search back overlaid in the top right corner, but I was really disappointed with the speed that the map tiles loaded up. I pulled out my G1 and did a quick comparison, typing in an address on both handsets and hitting search at the same time. It may have been the reception in the store, but the Palm Pre took an extra 5 seconds to return the Google Maps search results.
The browser produced much better results, bringing up web pages just as fast as the G1. I didn’t have a chance to do side by side comparisons of web page renderings, but I can say that Pre owners will mot likely be satisfied with their mobile web browser.
One of the only drawbacks that I encountered while using Sprints new Palm Pre was that the handset was significantly slower than all the videos and presentations that most of us have seen from Palm. It simply wasn’t as snappy as I had expected. Overall, the Palm Pre is definitely a promising device. We will need to wait to see if Web OS is as easy to program for as Palm says. If it is, we’ll be seeing a lot of new Web OS apps for the Pre hitting the market soon.
