I decided after about a two months of using the Pre, I’d write up my thoughts for what it’s worth.

I’m not a Palm fanboy, I’ve owned a few Palm Pilots, an Treo 700wx and the 800w, which I liked, but were missing something, also on the last two, I don’t care what you say, windows mobile sucks.  I should never have to open a task manager to close an application.  This review might be a little slanted because I am a bit of a Linux fanboy, only because it works and works well. Disagree?  Well it’s taking over the server, internet appliance and mobile device market fast that’s for sure.

The Palm Pre is a great little device, I say device and not phone, because it’s more like 5% phone and 95% awesome.  It’s beautiful and feels great in your hand.  I have a protective plastic case for it, but keep taking it off because it kind of ruins the feel of the phone.  Sure it has it’s quirks, like the battery life sucks, and the slide out keyboard is a bit small for me and has some wiggle to it  I deal with the battery by plugging it up to my computer, wall charger or Motorola P970.  WebOS is very user friendly and intuitive, it runs on top of linux which allows for a lot of hacking and tweaks, such as the latest Virtual Keyboard patch.  The folks at WebOs Internals have been doing a great job of finding all kinds of things to do or change on the pre with patches.  Then you have all the Home Brew apps from Precentral.com with their Home Brew Catalog, Pimp My Pre with their preload application.  Filecoaster rocks Preware rocks even harder with the ability to add and update apps from the Home Brew Catalog(Which after the lastest update Filecoaster can do also), Pimp My Pre, and WebOS-Internals, as well as add some tweaks like the Virtual Keyboard, using your camera flash as a super bright flashlight, viewing sms,email, pdfs in landscape mode, and more..  With the latest build of WebOs Quick Install you can add most of these tweaks with a click of a button.

As of this post there are 193 apps in the Home Brew Catalog on Precentral.net when I bought my pre there were 20 apps, not to mention the Home Brew catalog also reached one million downloads (since they’ve been counting).  Just in the last two days it’s been reported through a leak that the 1.2 update, 1.1 came out right after I got mine, that led notifications are coming, which means no more turning on your screen to check for new notifications.

Because I’m a linux guy, I love that I can ssh into my pre from any where I get an internet connection, over the Pre’s Wifi or EVDO connection.  One of my favorite Home brew apps is My tether, sure it requires rooting your Pre, but then you have a phone that can double as a Mifi and that’s just LEGEN…wait for it!!…………DARY!!

Preware: A mojo app with backend plugin to run ipkg and fetch over the air installs and updates from the Preware ipkg feed.

Here are a few more screen shots, of Pre update(which is kinda pointless now), wifi, and what happens when an application eats memory, you get the “Sorry too many cards” error.

So leave your restrictive iphone that you have to jail break, instead of just entering the age-old Konami Code to unlock it, or your android that is worse on battery life and seemingly slower, and by a Pre, sure it’s not on GSM yet, but when it is most of you will be in luck.

Tags: 2009, Code, im, Life, palmpre, phone, webos