Doug Dalton

So after doing everything I could to get my hands on a palm pre, my friend Hooman came through an landed me this awesome device. My initial thoughts were around Sprint. This phone comes tethered to Sprint, which isnt a network that has the coverage I am used to. I must say in the 2 days I have been using the device, the voice quality is great and the network speeds are good. Back to the Pre, its a nice feeling device, it sits in your hand easily, its very sleek, but that will get old soon if it doesnt work well. The speed of the UI is impressive. I am a tough customer, and this device doesnt take long to boot up apps, its very easy to shut them down as well. Everything is just a gesture.

Phone

This is one of the coolest parts of the palm pre. With most touch devices, you "butt" dial or turn off features with your ear while talking, the palm pre included a proximity feature that allows your phone to sense when its in your pocket or next to your face and turns off the screen, eliminating accidental "touch" dialing or hanging up by ear. The rest of the phone is pretty standard and works well. It has a slide to unlock feature which is very good.

Messaging

Lets face it, texting is a key feature for any phone, and this phone does it very well. It combines all of your account messagers into one thread, so for example you can AIM someone then switch to sms and this all appears as one seamless thread, very impressive. I am a little disappointed with the configurations on this phone. If I just want to display I have an SMS, Email or MMS it should say so, but it shouldnt display all the info in the sms or email to prying eyes when my phone is laying around. So you either turn you notifications off or have the contents exposed when then phone is locked, there is no inbetween.

Web browser

No flash support but everything else works very well. It uses multitouch to zoom in and out on pages and renders very quickly. With Sprints 3g network there is almost no delay. Not much more to say here. Sprint defaults to a bookmark page where all your favorites are listed, which means it two keypresses to get to your default homepage but a nice interface.

Camera

This is biggest oversight on this device or lacking feature.. no video. I dont know why device designer skip this? As for the camera, the quality is good, 3.2 megapixels, the flash is ok, but no zoom.. overall not very much here in comparison to better phone implementations.

GPS
This phone has a fast gps radio, so location based apps work quickly, and a nice implementation

Applications

The app store is new, and has only a few apps, not much there. I am not sure if you can add your own app but it doesnt look that way, this is a big downfall. I should be able to install an app on my device even if palm doesnt want it on the webstore.

It does come with great apps like google maps and a youtube app and you can download where and pandora.

Keyboard

The palm pre has a slide down keyboard that is easy to use with both hands, I have large fingers and have no problems using it.

Battery life

It seems like power users will drain their device in a day, otherwise it should be fine for light users.

Cables

It uses the less common Micro USB as apposed to the very common mini usb, very lame choice, it might as well be a proprietary cable. Mine came with an induction charger as well, which is very cool. just set it on the charger, no cables.

Summary

Pros
For a pda that does your basic communicating, this is a great device, Its fast and easy to use and it has all the core features you would want.

Cons
lacking notification options, no video, no micro sd, and no non palm store applications.. This phone is probably not for a power phone user at this point, but with some os changes it could possibly be.

Put this in your crontab -e:

* * * * * /user/cron.sh

then in /user/cron.sh put

#!/usr/bin/bash
TEST=`ps ax | grep firefox | grep -v grep | grep -v /usr/bin/firefox | wc -l`
if [ $TEST = 0 ] ; then
/usr/bin/firefox &
fi

and make sure it is set to chmod 755 /user/cron.sh

If you have ever setup an asterisk box then you know some changes are in the configuration. One of those challenges is being behind a nat or router. The issue usually arises when you use the ivr and you dont receive DTMF tones to your ivr. I use ViaTalk for service and their support staff clued me into the problem. I had to externhost=my.dyndns.com in your sip_nat.conf does not solve this problem, or at least didnt for me so I had to write my own dynamic dns update script using php only because it was quick but you can do this is bash probably just as easily.

First off you are going to need some things:

-Utorrent here
-IMG burn here
-The OSX86 driver disk for the m1210 (only if you plan to upgrade to 10.5.3) Download file
-Kalyway OSX ISO 10.5.2 Download file
-Kalyway Combo Update 10.5.3 (only if you plan to upgrade to 10.5.3) Download file
-Your Vista install dvd

Things you should know now before starting...
-Scary things will happen (drives will have problems, but hopefully this will walk you through that) but you should be fairly os savvy before using this, I dont go into a mass of detail but if you email me I will add more
-if you have the nvidia card, your computer or monitor cant go into sleep mode, it just wont work
Check this blog for update on Nvidia (Nvinstaller.com)
-if you have the 1394 wifi card you will have to follow the iwidarwin project (iwidarwin) which had stopped as of the time I wrote this , I recommend the Dell 1390, it works out of the box
- this process causes osx to load by default, if you dont want that, dont follow this ( I will work on a fix for this but I dont have one yet)>
- Audio does not work without a different how to

often I have to rename a whole set of files that have not processed correctly, to do this I rename them with Bash, a simple script to do this is :

for f in *_3; do mv "$f" "${f/_3/_0}"; done

this renames all files ending in _3 to the same filename but now ending in _0

I recently ended my contract with Verizon to get a new PDA phone from AT&T. I wanted wifi and a touchscreen, but unless I wanted to carry a brick, I mean the tilt, i was SOL. I decided I would look at the Moto Q9h or Global vs the Backjack 2. The blackjack 2 was the first I tried. I am going to keep this simple:
The are both 3g, no wifi, 2.0 megapixel cameras and bluetooh

So I have noticed that from time to time the /usr/ports/lang/php5-extensions versions get out of sync, to fix this its as simple as just removing the config (make rmconfig [only if you want to add more modules]) and rebuilding make install -DFORCE_PKG_REGISTER