The Sprint Palm Pre vs. the HTC Evo 4G — 2 Guys, 2 Phones, 2 Decisions

Pre

EVO

Don: Certainly the Pre was a vast improvement over PalmOS devices.  I can count on two hands the number of resets, and that was with a heavily patched Pre.  I unpatched it completely before getting the EVO, so I’d have a fairly generic Pre to compare to the EVO out of the box.

Don: Only time will tell on the EVO, but HTC has a good reputation in this area, and so my expectations are high.

Craig: My Pre has rarely “locked up” the way old Palm OS devices did.  Slow-downs, where the system gets to the point where a reset is the only thing that would restore usability, are not uncommon.  This is better in the Pre Plus, but that’s not the model Sprint users can buy.

Craig: Android seems very good at isolating and shutting down an app that’s having problems (a “force quit”) without compromising the rest of the system, so that’s excellent.

Don:  An update on Day 5.  First lockup today.  The thing just became non-responsive.  The display was dark and would not come on.  Waited patiently for a couple of minutes and then pulled the battery.  Everything came back, but strike 1!

Craig: If there is one issue that frustrates me about my Pre, it’s the persistent lagginess. Yes, even at 800MHz, my Pre often leaves me unsure whether it’s thinking about doing something I asked it or whether I should repeat my input (it’s usually the former).  For example, the camera on my Pre takes anywhere from 5 to 30 seconds to be ready to take a picture after I launch the app. On the EVO, it consistently takes about 2 seconds.  When you’re trying to take photos of little kids doing something funny, even 3 seconds can make the difference between a nice pic and nothing at all.

Craig: I’m still not sold on the whole “inertial scrolling” approach to user interfaces.  There are times when I miss my Treo’s d-pad and the ability to scroll down a fixed amount of content with each click.  That said, jerky, uneven scrolling is just terrible, and I agree with Don; the Pre seems to suffer on this dimension as well.  The EVO, on the other hand, seems to scroll effortlessly…the 1GHz Snapdragon definitely seems to be up to the task.

Craig: I tend to get a day and a half out of my Pre with the Seidio 1350 mAh battery, unless I spend a lot of time in a low cellular-signal-strength area (which really sucks down the juice). The 800MHz patch didn’t change that very much at all.

Craig: I’ve been pretty impressed!  Here, on my 2nd day with the EVO, I’ve gone 16 hours of moderate-to-high use with a mix of Wi-Fi and EVDO (I’m not in a 4G area), and I still have about a 1/4 battery left.  After the battery breaks in a bit, that should improve.  For a device with this much sheer hardware muscle to get that out of a 1500 mAh battery is impressive.  Don, you might look into getting a Seidio 1750 mAh battery if you’re concerned about making it through a day with juice to spare.

Don: Absolutely!  I’m on my 4th Pre in a year.  I had a Pre Plus briefly and that seemed much more rugged, but still with the same thin plastic outer casing.  The “Oreo effect”, wherein the display section and the keyboard section of the device can rotate in opposite directions enough to feel “loose” or “flimsy” is in full effect on my Pre.  I always keep it in a leather case that encloses it, and in my pocket.

Don: Yes, it certainly feels solid. And with InvisibleShield on the screen, darned near scratch-proof!  I ordered a side-opening leather case, just because that’s what I’ve used for devices for so long it seems like that’s what the EVO should live in.  We’ll see.

Pre

EVO

Craig: The Pre gives decent, but not great, voice call clarity, although max volume is often still too low in noisy conditions.

Don:  Yes,  yes, yes!  Why can’t these devices deliver enough volume that I occasionally want to turn them down!  I know the answer:  lawyers and insurance companies.  Remember the person who sued Apple because s/he claimed that the iPod damaged his/her hearing?

Craig: I’ve not had that complaint.  Voice call quality seems very much on par with the Pre: good, but not great, with noticeable digital compression (probably a network artifact rather than a phone issue).  The EVO’s earpiece is quite a bit louder, so that should help when it’s noisy.

Don: In my area (60 mile radius around Denver, CO), Sprint is the best.  That’s not common, I take it, but T-Mobile and AT&T just suck, and Verizon, who, by all accounts, has better coverage than Sprint, just doesn’t have it here.  

Craig: Since getting the EVO, I haven’t been somewhere where the Pre had no coverage, but I’ve noticed that the EVO seems to indicate a higher strength signal than the Pre most of the time. Without some more use, though, it’s hard to say if either is better, but it appears the EVO is not significantly worse.

Craig: I’m not totally familiar yet with all the various features of the call log, and the phone function in general, in Android — it’s certainly not as simple and straightforward as webOS is — but it appears to have all the bells and whistles.

Don: For sure!  Not only can you assign people to the keyboard keys, but those you assign to the keys that correspond to the number keys on the keyboard can be dialed by the old “hold the number down until it dials” speed dial mechanism that’s been in cell phones forever.  

Don:  Yep!  There are so many options in so many different part of the contact management app that it appears to have been put together by different people, with different ideas of how things should be done.  It’s powerful, but “chaotic” is the right word for it!  Just try, for example, to get a contact into the dialing widget, make the image that shows up there be the one from your address book rather than Facebook, and have it dial the number you want with one tap.  You can do it, but you have to go to about 4 different types of preference screens/menus to make that happen.  With the folder of dial shortcuts alternative (pretty much the same as LaunchPoint, but built in) things are simpler, if still a bit inflexible/unfinished.

Pre

EVO

Don: The Pre is very easy to use.  Once you get used to the gesture area and what swiping and tapping mean, it’s very consistent throughout.  The built-in functions are very simple (a little too simple for my taste) and easy to understand, generally.  As a charging technology the Touchstone charger is simply elegant and addictive.  With the Pre off, put it on the Touchstone and the desk clock comes on.  If the Pre is on the Touchstone and the phone rings, tap the answer button and it switches to speakerphone automatically; pick it up off the Touchstone and it switches to the headset.  Very nice.

Craig: Android is complex at first, but it’s really pretty consistent in its organization.  I don’t mind my phone being structured like a computer, as I’m already very familiar with that paradigm; learning a new paradigm just isn’t high on my want list.  That said, Android + Sense is markedly better than plain Android; whether that’s still true in Froyo or beyond is up to HTC.

Don: Yep, separate sounds and vibration control is rudimentary at best.   It got better with successive releases of the OS (which have slowed in frequency, as of late), with the introduction of some basic customizability.  My primary beef here is that there are two great models already out there for how to manage this – PalmOS and BlackberryOS – and Palm chose to ignore both and just go very basic.  The practical effect of this is that one cannot, say, customize the number of and interval between vibrations to be different, say, between the phone and the calendar.  On the Treo the phone vibration pattern was a rapid, insistent pulse, and the calendar vibrated more sedately.  With the phone in my pocket I could tell the difference without looking or bothering anyone. On the Blackberry, I had complete control over as many unique and distinct profiles as I wanted, and so could control these things very precisely.

Don:  True that.  The built-in alarms and sounds are very basic.  This is what I alluded to above, though:  I think I will be able to customize it, but I don’t have to if I don’t want/need to.  I get the starting simplicity with a great deal of customizability.  I haven’t delved into this much yet, and so I still don’t know for sure.

Don: I like the Pre notification scheme, but would like the ability to have notifications show up just on the small bottom row, rather than, by default, first showing up across the bottom 8th of the screen or so, which, yes, can disrupt what I’m doing at the time.

Don: I like it too, unless I’m on a Bluetooth call, during which the proximity sensor is inexplicably left active.  The sensor is right above the window shade, and each time I move my finger to swipe it down the screen turns off!!  Perhaps there’s a “Turn proximity sensor off during Bluetooth call” setting somewhere.  To be fair, turning off the proximity sensor on the Pre during Bluetooth calls has drawbacks as well, since one could accidentally do something on the screen while on a call.

Particularly so in light of the fact that Palm inexplicably failed to include anything even close to the Favorites feature on the Treo/Centro, necessitating the creation (using Launchpoint after trying several) of launcher icons for contacts: one page of frequently-called people; one page of clients; one page of “other”.  That’s three screens, if you’re counting.  So I installed the patch to allow me to add more launcher pages, and one to show 4×4 icons instead of 3×3, and one to always return to the first page, and one to always return to the top of that page.  That’s 4 patches to do something that the Pre is already capable of doing, but doesn’t do.

Craig: About half of the patches/mods I’ve made to my Pre have to do with making the launcher more functional.  As is, it’s barely adequate for even the least demanding of users.

Craig: Oh, how I love the widget paradigm of Android!  That, plus HTC’s wealth of nifty and useful add-ons really makes this a tweaker’s dream.  Sure, I’ve spent like 4 hours playing around with widgets and getting everything on the EVO’s 7 home screens organized, but it now feels like a phone I could really live with…and that’s nice.

Don: Multitouch is very handy in many apps.  It would be more handy if more of the apps rotated to landscape.  

Don: I hadn’t noticed that, but would have.  Pan and Zoom together would certainly be a good productivity boost here.  My daughter’s Droid didn’t have any multitouch at all initially, if I recall correctly, so perhaps this is just evolving.

Don:  Yep!  The Blackberry keyboards with discrete keys are still the very best; Treo 755p is probably second best, and the Centro and Pre are a fairly close third (with the Pre Plus being slightly better – almost as good as the Treo).  The raised border surrounding the bottom and sides of the Pre keyboard, and the closeness of the top row of keys to the bottom of the display, make typing on other than interior keys a bit difficult at times.

Don:  Agreed, agreed, agreed and agreed.  I “practiced” on my son’s iPod Touch for a couple of days prior to the EVO release to see if I could really stand a virtual keyboard, and decided that even with that (relatively small) one I could learn to live with it.  The EVO keyboard is better, bigger, and I think it won’t keep me from keeping the EVO.

Craig: I just realized that the virtual keyboard does give you dedicated @ and . keys when it thinks you’re entering text into an email field, but not at other times. This would be a good user option, IMO.

Don: As would adding a row of numbers atop the qwerty keyboard arrangement, obviating the need to switch back and forth between keyboards with the little 12# key.

Don:  Yep, to all of that.  One other annoyance with the Pre’s web browser is that pages have to get reloaded when you return to them after looking at something else, even if nothing on the page has changed.  

Don: One additional note (and yes, I agree with Craig on everything else) is that the EVO’s browser reflows text columns to fit whatever zoom level (via mutltitouch or double tap) the user selects.  Makes it very easy to read text on web pages without scrolling back and forth as required on the Pre.  This is very nice for someone whose eyes don’t focus as close as they used to.

Craig: Ah, yes, the automatic reflow of text is wonderful…it was one of the features of the old Palm OS browser (Blazer) that I found I missed terribly when moving to webOS.

Craig: Right…being able to search the web from anywhere is nice, but IMO not worth losing the ability to search my calendar, most of my contacts’ information, or tasks & memos. Why this was removed I can’t imagine.

Craig: The output is a little chaotic, but it does find everything.  So, in that regard, I find it preferable to webOS’ approach. Being able to search at any time via a dedicated button is no less convenient than webOS, too, so I think this is a clear win for Android and the EVO.

Don: Yep, that sounds small, but I’ve noticed several times that on the EVO I don’t know where I am, and with the Pre, I always do!  OK here’s another small one:  when setting a contact picture on the Pre I can not only position the little viewfinder on the part of the picture I want, but can also zoom (with multitouch) in an out, sizing the selection.  Can’t do that on the EVO!  Pan yes; zoom no.

Don:  Yep!  The Pre, limited though it may be in other areas, shows a great deal of thought when it comes to little touches in the user interface.  

Craig: If I could just toss both webOS and Android into a blender, we might have the ideal mobile OS.  Maybe that’s what Matias will be doing at Google.

Pre

EVO

Don: I agree on the elegance of the interface (as with most of webOS), but since I never used IM on the machine, I didn’t ever notice the snazziness (is that a word?) of integrating chat and SMS.  The Pre’s threaded conversations for text messaging was nice to have after the awful implementation on the Blackberry.

Don: Yes, curious.  Should be a configurable option.  

Don:  I haven’t used that function in the near-year I’ve used the Pre.  

Don:  Without integration, the EVO’s IM function is inferior, yes.  I don’t use IM apps on the mobile device – too frustrating to try to type much very fast on the mobile keyboard.  Then again, if I start using IM to allow clients to reach me, I might start using this, and it would be nice to have an integrated view.  Perhaps there’s an app for that? Perhaps 2.2?

Craig: Right, although multi-Exchange handling is an increasingly common feature. Email on the Pre is adequate, but only barely. One of my complaints is that you cannot set it to go to the next (or previous) message when deleting the message you’re looking at — it always takes you back to the list view.  If you have lots of email to get through, that’s a lot of wasted time and pointless effort.  You also can’t process multiple emails at a time…deleting, filing, etc. is done one message at a time.  webOS is designed for simplicity, not efficiency.

Don: Agreed about the integrated mailboxes, although in my case I funnel everything into Exchange so the merged inbox view doesn’t really make much difference to me.  The email app is very functional though, and perfectly adequate for my use.  One thing here that points out the relative maturity of Android over webOS:  the email app auto-rotates to landscape – something one has to install a patch on the Pre to accomplish.  

Craig: I just discovered one aspect about the EVO’s email app that totally blows away that in webOS: email sorting. The EVO allows you to sort an Inbox by almost a dozen different criteria; with the Pre, it’s newest first only.

Pre

EVO

Craig: I minded. One of my constant complaints about webOS has been the movement away from the “Zen of Palm” that had guided Palm OS apps to be incredibly efficient (minimizing taps, etc.) yet reasonably full-featured.  webOS somewhat compensated for that with the magic that Synergy brought, but the daily annoyance of extra screen taps tends to pile up over time.  Google and Exchange integration work very well for Calendar & Contacts, but Tasks & Memos are just shadows of their former selves.

Don:  I minded too, actually.  And still mind on Android (and every other platform but PalmOS and the Blackberry).

Don: Hear Hear!  I think it’s not just lack of attention – I think there’s a fundamentally different way of viewing these things that some people (notably in Google and Apple) are trying to push, and the world is pushing back, so they’re evolving in the right direction.  I’m heartened by this, as long as they continue to evolve.  The world shapes things, given time.  

Don: Again, PalmOS set the bar VERY high here for efficiency, if not aesthetics.  webOS’s calendar is beautiful and somewhat intuitive, and yes, requires many extra steps to do the same thing, when compared to PalmOS.

Craig: Right. Two features that webOS has that Android does not are (a) the ability to move events between calendars (e.g., something comes up on my Exchange calendar and I want to move it to Google…this is trivial in webOS), and (b) the ability to change the colors assigned to different calendars (again, trivial).  Call me shallow, but those are really handy and important to my daily use (OK, well, not the color issue, although I do seem to get bored with my calendar colors fairly often…I wonder if there’s a name for that mental illness).

Craig: Those two things I mentioned that Android can NOT do may sound trivial, but once you get used to being able to do them, not having the ability is very frustrating. Plus, added to the color selection bug I mentioned above, the EVO’s calendar is adequate, but not stellar.  Also, the EVO’s calendar doesn’t offer the same range of repeating event options that webOS does (or that’s available even via Google Calendars’ web interface, which I find odd). On the other hand, one capability it has that webOS doesn’t is being able to add participants to events (something a lot of people rely on).  

Don:  Yep.  One thing I’ve seen repeatedly in the “literature” is that Froyo (2.2) will address at least the recurrence pattern limitations.  We’ll see how much, I guess!

Craig:  Oh, one other issue:  what’s with the use of scrolling wheels to pick numbers for setting the time on events?  Both webOS and Android do this.  Talk about inefficient!  I wish they’d just pop up a pick-list of times so I can get the number I want in 1, maybe 2, taps instead of having to spin through a wheel…I feel like I’m on Price is Right (and not in a good way).

Craig: I LOVE Synergy. I have had zero complaints about how it merges records from different sources (e.g., Facebook, Google contacts, LinkedIn, etc) into unified contact profiles.  In fact, if I could name one killer feature of webOS, this would be it…it really is stellar.  It handles duplicates with aplomb, merging most into single profiles without my intervention.  While it doesn’t remove the duplicates, it does hide them, and I’m not OCD enough to care beyond that.

Don:  Here’s why I don’t like Synergy, in a nutshell: 1) I keep all of my contacts in my Exchange account.  Can’t really imagine it being efficient/effective to do it any other way.  Yes, there are technically “contacts” in my Facebook account, but that’s not where I keep information about them, and 2) I have multiple entries in my one address book with the same (usually work) phone number.  Synergy always tries to merge these into a single contact view, so I’ll end up with six people from the same company, with the same phone number, merged together.  It also merged my sister and my brother in law, since they had the same home phone number. Not at all what I want, and I have to undo this every time I reload the address book from Exchange (as when I received my second, third and fourth Pre due to hardware product quality problems).

Craig: I find Contacts on the EVO to be a bit like a less well-thought-out version of webOS’ Synergy. You can merge a person’s records from different sources, but it’s mostly manual and doesn’t seem very smart about it. One advantage (to me) that it offers is the ability to include Twitter friends in your contacts, which is something webOS can’t do (although there’s no reason Synergy couldn’t). But, again, there seems to be no real effort to make contacts management a powerful ability on the EVO…it’s there because it has to be, but wading through my contacts reveals a hodge-podge mess of records from various sources with lots of duplicates.  In the end, I use it the same way I do with webOS…that is, to ignore it and just call up people’s records as I need to contact them.  But, if someone was really obsessive about managing their contacts, this could get ugly fast.

Don: The Pre is the only device of which I’m aware that seamlessly syncs tasks with Exchange over the air.  This is nice!  If you’re a person who uses Tasks (as I am now that I found Mark Forester’s Autofocus system) this is a nice thing.

Craig: Or they just put it in Calendar. 😉

Don:  True, that, but if one puts something important on one’s calendar and then doesn’t do it, there it sits, in the past, not staring one in the face, no longer a call to action.

Craig: Meh. It looks pretty, with the little Post-It theme, but it’s rudimentary at best. My wife just moved from Palm OS to webOS and her only major complaint was how poor the Memos app is on her Pixi.  I don’t even use it any more, it’s so pathetic (I’ve also started relying on Evernote instead).

Craig: There’s a Notes widget available from HTC available as a download, Don…you might want to check that out. Also, there are several free and highly rated memo apps in the Android Market.

Don: Interesting!  My priorities for the Notes app, though, are: 1) usable, 2) allow at least some form of rich text (if not tables) and 3) Sync back to somewhere where I can get at ‘em on my laptop.  The Treo and the Blackberry can do this.  The Pre and EVO can’t.  So:  Evernote!

Don: So, I just downloaded the EN app on the EVO. Very rudimentary. I can capture new stuff, but can’t see any of the stuff that’s already there?  Yikes?  Lame!

Craig: Dude…remember to hit the Menu button…lots of functionality buried in that on many apps, including Evernote.  Everything’s there…all the functionality you want…it’s all good… 😉

Don:  Hey, Professor, did you call me Dude? (inside joke).  I pressed Menu and found, I thought, buttons for Pending Notes, About Evernote, Settings, Sign out.  What I failed to see was a huge button at the top of all the other buttons that says “Notes”.  It looks like a title, but it’s a huge button.  There are all my notes!  User interface, user interface, user interface.

Pre

EVO

Craig: Given the EVO’s big screen, I could finally see the potential in pairing it with a Bluetooth keyboard and getting some actual work done.  At a resolution much less than the EVO’s 800×480, I just can’t see enough to want to do serious document creation.

Craig: I simply don’t understand why there’s not a decent scientific calculator included with any smartphones.  It’s not like it would be that hard to code up, and, since math ain’t changing any time soon, you could re-use it on every device on that platform.

Craig: RPN? You are weird.

Don:  No question about it!  However, I started sing HP calculators 40 years ago, and I really like RPN!  That said, I typically just use the regular calculator.  Point is:  no calculator needed when I have my EVO!

Craig: Don, one big difference is that Google Maps on webOS doesn’t offer verbal instructions, whereas the Sprint Nav app does.

Craig: To be honest, if I’m venturing somewhere where I will have no data service at all, I’m going to have my stand-alone GPS with me…and some paper maps…and probably some survival gear (have you seen the teeth on a bear?!?).

Don: It’s fine, and with cover art, it’s pretty!

Craig: The Pre handles just about any audio format anyone cares about (sorry Ogg fans).  While it claims to natively handle MPEG-4, H.263, H.264 video formats, I’ve struggled to get Handbrake to output something it’ll play, so the stock player must be rather finicky. It’s really begging a much more complete (format-wise) media player app.

Don:  Music has been fun on Pre, and the player works very well.  I must admit to being a little behind the curve on putting media on the device(s).  On the Pre I just worried about filling up the 8gb of memory, half of which I’ve already filled up by putting a small fraction of my music on the device.

Craig: I’ve not yet done much with the media player on the EVO, but since all my music is in reasonable-quality (for me) MP3, I’m pretty much guaranteed it’ll play fine.  On the video side, I was (again) disappointed that none of my library, which is a mix of Xvid and H.264, would play on the EVO.  Looks like there are some 3rd-party apps in the Market that may work.  Also, I just read that Froyo (Android 2.2) will include support for Xvid, which is 90+ percent of my catalog, so I might just need to wait a bit.

Don:  I’ve not gotten too far into the video side of this.  With the power of the EVO, and with the 32gb card i’ll inevitably buy,  I might!

Craig: Right, when the camera works, it takes decent photos.  In my opinion, they are overly sharpened and post-processing obliterates fine detail, but they look pretty on a small screen.  I wouldn’t ever consider the Pre’s camera as a replacement for even a modest pocket digital camera…the optics and sensor are just so inferior.  Plus, there are nearly no options to set on the camera…you’re stuck with a set image size, contrast, etc.  I do like the fact that, even though there’s no dedicated shutter button on the Pre, I can use the space bar as one.

Don: The camera starts and operates much faster.  The picture quality appears to be great!  Need to experiment more.

Craig: Yes, I’ve played with it a bit and the configurability is amazing!  Focus can be a little slow, especially in low light, but that’s not surprising.  I definitely do NOT like having to tap the screen to fire the shutter…a dedicated (or assignable) hardware button is now part of my gold standard.
Don: I experimented more.  It’s a really good camera.  My frame of reference are a Nikon DSLR (D70) and a Canon SD-1100IS point and shoot (among the best in their respective categories).  I took just the EVO with me on a recent trip up Trail Ridge Road (highest continuous paved road in North America – quite fun!) and here’s a sample.

Craig: Wow! Those are nice!

Don:  Thanks!  One additional note here, and I must admit sheepishly (but with finger pointed at Google):  it took me a long time to figure out how to just get to the place where one can look at all the pictures on the device.  The app is called “Gallery”.  I was expecting, and looking for, something like “Pictures”.

Don:  The Pre video capabilities, which were (finally!) added recently, work very well.  Editing videos (trimming the ends, actually is all this will allow) works well too.

Craig: Yes, it’s very fast. I didn’t notice an option to edit videos like the Pre can (now) on the EVO…may have to dig around some more.  I also noticed that you can record video in 3GPP and MPEG4…only a geek would care about that…and I love it. 🙂

Don: No editing (trimming, really) capability that I’ve seen.  The quality is pretty good, though!  Here’s an early sample, which may or may not be able to play on your computer, depending on whether or not your computer knows what to do with a .3gp file.

Craig: It was inadequate for anything beyond a daily alarm.

Don: There is a Desk Clock which does a nice full screen clock/weather, and has buttons for either a deskside (brighter) or nightstand (dimmer) simple day/date clock.  As with the Pre, the dimmer nightstand version is still a little bright for my taste.  

The interface for setting and using alarms on the EVO is not quite as streamlined as on the Pre.  For example, the only way to set an alarm “just for tomorrow” on the EVO is to uncheck all the days under the Repeat section. The kickstand allows the Evo to function on my nightstand about as well as the Pre does on the Touchstone.

Craig: The EVO’s Clock app is really nice. It combines all the time features you’d want: clock, alarms, stopwatch, countdown timer, and a world clock.  I don’t have the same beefs as Don does as I rarely use my phone as an alarm.

Craig: The lack of something this basic and fundamental gives me pause about the entire platform.  It’s a phone…it has a freaking mic…why can’t I capture sounds??

Don: Yey!  A voice recorder!!  Haven’t used it yet, but am comforted that it’s there!  The Voice Dialer, on the other hand, from what I can tell with just minor use, and put very politely, sucks.

Craig: Yes…a voice dialer is one of those things that I think works better in theory than it will ever work in practice, but it’s one of the few science fictiony things I’m a skeptic about.

Don:  Well, yes, that.  But on my Blackberry Curve (ancient as that device seems now by comparison) the voice dialer worked nearly flawlessly.  

Don: OK I just had to put this in here – IT’S SO COOL!! (yes, I was shouting) The new TiVo machines (Series 3 and Series 4) support remote network access/control.  The Android market has a TiVo application that controls TiVos remotely via Wi-Fi.  No line of site needed.  I have a Series 3 in the home theater in the basement and a Series 4 in the family room upstairs, and I can control them, with NO LAG at all, using this app from anywhere in the house. It crashes frequently, but reports the error information (after asking politely) to the developer, so I assume he/she will address this over time.

Craig: [Bolts for the Android Market to get this].  On a related note, I found a decent controller app for managing our network of Logitech Squeezebox music players…no more running upstairs to get the remote control!  If they make one that controls Pandora, too, I’ll be all set.

Don: Nice.  I also found Andronos, an app for controlling my Sonos system in my house.  What will they think of next??

Pre

EVO

PalmOS Treo Favorites: the functional gold standard: 5 screens of 14 shortcuts each. It’s plain, but it works so well!

 

Craig: Right…I was an ardent SplashID user on Palm OS, but have been going without since moving to webOS.

Craig: We can only hope.

Craig: Palm’s Facebook app for webOS was pretty decent, actually. I really don’t do much with Facebook (except block apps…I’m a pro at that), but it was decent for commenting and posting updates and photos.

Craig: It’s actually not as well-thought out as on webOS, I think.  Maybe I’m missing something, but the HTC widgets and apps are not well done.  The official Facebook app for Android is similarly meh, but I don’t mind so much…it’s just Facebook.

Don:  The various Twitter apps for the Pre work just fine, but I’m not a frequent user, yet.

Don: I haven’t messed with this, yet.

Craig:  I love Flightview…it’s saved my bacon on more than one occasion.

Craig: I haven’t scoured the Market for something like this yet, but if I can’t find it, I will be a sad monkey.

Don: Me too!  I was out at an art market yesterday and a friend needed to know the status of a flight.  EEK!  I didn’t have Flightview!  However, I just typed “Frontier flight status” into the Google widget on the EVO, and Frontier Airlines link was topmost.  I selected the sub-link for flight status, and ta-da! I was Mr. Techno Genius Go-to Guy once again.  Flightview would’ve been easier.

Don: There’s an app for that!

Yep – works well.  Now if it could just get those stocks to go up . . .

Don:  Big discussion topic in multiple discussion groups.  Sprint missed the mark, IMNSHO, by pricing “up to 8” device connectivity at $30/month.  What I need, and I suspect what many people need, these days, is *occasional* short-term use of tethering when wifi is not available for my laptop (iPad, etc. etc.).

Don: MyTether works just fine, eventually.  Required a bit of work to set it up!  Of course, the Pre Plus gets FREE tethering supported by Verizon.  “Free”, or course, in the context of costing more than the Pre does on Sprint.

Craig: Yes, I’ve used MyTether a few times, but setup is a pain and it seemed like I had to reinstall it after every OS update. Not a solution for the masses.  The fact that Verizon Palm Pre Plus users get this for free in addition to all the stability bonuses of more RAM reminds me of the pain of being an early adopter.

Craig: Having the option of using my smartphone as a cellular Wi-Fi router is wonderful for the occasional traveler. I think Sprint is charging a bit too much ($29/month) given that there are free solutions for geeks and Verizon offers this for free.

Don: PDAnet appears to address this requirement, although flying under the Sprint radar has a reputation for being a dodgy practice.  We’ll see.

Craig:  Yes, since the EVO’s built-in USB tethering has been disabled by Sprint, you can always opt for the PDAnet option.  At $20 or so, it’s cheaper than a month’s Wi-Fi Hotspot service, but only gives you connectivity for a single PC at a time. At least you have a choice.

Don: The real solution here would be a $5-$10 per month option to allow just one device to tether with the EVO.  I’m very skeptical about how many people will really use more than that, and Sprint should take that into account.

Craig: Sprint lets you turn on and off the Hotspot functionality as you need it and will bill you on a prorated basis.  So, that’d be just a dollar a day.  At around $8 for a week’s use, that’s far cheaper than hotel Wi-Fi, and you’re not going around the system.

Don:  Good thinking!  I shall have to see how easy it is to turn on/off (for billing purposes and for use).  If it’s granular enough and quick enough, this might be a better option than I thought initially.

Don: I was excited, some nine months ago, to see the App Catalog start to grow with new apps appearing all the time.  My enthusiasm flagged a bit as time went on and there were seldom “oh my gosh!” apps in there waiting for me.

Craig: Flipping through the Android Market for the first time on the EVO is like wandering into a Costco…there’s just so many options for everything.  Sure, there’s a lot of garbage, comment spam, and the whole place is a bit unruly, but it’s vibrant and the quality of the free offerings is truly amazing.  Being able to sort, or filter, by user rating within one’s search results would be a nice improvement.

Don: Yep!  Like Costco and Best Buy and more, mostly for free, and often for $0.99.  I’ve already bought a couple of things.  Fun!   I also like the Report as Spam thing I can do to the user comments about apps.  The immediate effect is that the comment on which I take that action disappears.  I assume that somehow on the back end my action causes someone to look to see if the comment is really spam and take appropriate, permanent action.

Don:  Whether on the Treo/Centro, Blackberry, Pre or EVO, my gaming is pretty basic – bubbles, brickbreaker, Boggle.  Doesn’t take much horsepower on the device.

Don:  I try to keep games my kids like OFF of my device – difference having older kids, perhaps? – since I’d rather have them drain their own batteries!  My daughter has an iPod Touch and a Motorola Droid; my son has an iPod Touch, a Samsung Reality, and every “real” gaming device known to mankind – so they’re well cared for, gaming device wise!

Don:  Never having had a wifi mobile device other than my laptop before, I didn’t have anything to which to compare the Pre, but find it to be pretty good at hanging on to a wifi signal.  The WRT54G2 router from Linksys that I prefer has tremendous range for a retail wireless router, and so in most of my house the Pre has a good wireless signal.  It’s a long way from corner to corner in my house, and unfortunately the wireless router is in one of those corners, so this is impressive!

Don:  I haven’t pushed this much, but sitting here in one of the other corners of my house, my laptop has 4/5 or 5/5 bars and the EVO has 0 or 1, and shows 11mbps with signal strength “Poor”.  

One can’t expect very good wifi reception with these teeny (relatively speaking) devices, but the Pre does seem to have the edge here, when one would think the advantage would go to the EVO!