This phone should appeal to students, Moms and business people alike. The screen is vivid and bright. The colors are very rich. The games are addicting to play if you buy any. My sons play 3D Need for Speed and love it. I play the matching games, checkers and loaded an aquarium on mine that are fun. I keep my shopping list now on this phone. I can surf the web, read my e-mails, get e-books, get on Facebook and text message a lot easier on my Palm Pre Plus than on my any of my Windows Mobile phones.

I have not had the battery issues others worry about. Palm just updated the phone which allows the applications to open really fast and which extends the battery life. Plus, by tweaking the brightness of the phone, etc., I get my Palm Pre to run all day long. I also bought another battery and a car charger just in case I need to use it for longer. Also, other phones have battery issues as well. My son’s iPhone battery runs out often too. If he watches too many videos, his iPhone needs a recharge every 3 hours. The batteries from many phones need to catch up to all the ways people use their phones now.

I also got this phone because it has a physical keyboard. I got tired of the touch virtual keyboards since it’s too easy to make mistakes with them. The Palm Pre Plus’ keyboard is comfortable and easy to use, I find.

The only warning I have is that this phone is touch screen to the max, which makes it either super fun to use, or will make you super frustrated. There are no buttons, balls or scrolls to navigate with this phone. The stylus found on other Palm devices is gone. You touch, swipe or pinch the screen to open and close your apps, but it takes half a day or so to get use to the feel of the phone. It’s not intuitive. At first when you get the phone, you’ll feel that anything you touch opens up. That will annoy you at first until you get use to the phone which is why I gave this phone a 4 rating instead of a 5. Palm does include a quick user’s guide on all the ways to touch the screen. In addition, one can not easily edit documents with the Palm Pre software, but a new application might be developed soon on this, I hope. That being said, people who want an alternative to the iPhone would probably be very happy with the Palm Pre Plus.

The Palm Pre Plus has been overshadowed by the iPhone and Droid. I was an original Palm user when the Palm Pilot first came out, and then switched to the iPhone, Blackberry Storm and Windows Mobile (Samsung Omnia and Motorola Q). My opinion is that the Palm Pre Plus is the best for my money and for my needs. I would highly recommend the Palm Pre Plus, especially after the new upgrade, if you are looking for a fun touch phone. In fact, I think Palm should use their WebOS to design a touch tablet or netbook too.

New Update: Now Verizon is offering the Palm Pre’s mobile hot spot for free. This is like $49 a month in savings! It’s a huge feature where you can connect your phone to your laptop and browse the internet or send e-mails no matter where you are.

Rating: 4 / 5

However, I have been reading about the Pre for over a year. I looked at the first one on Sprint but decided to wait for the next generation to come out. Now I have the Pre Plus and I can tell you. It’s Great! I love it. You can open so many different apps and have them running in the background. You can listen to music while still using other functioins.

The charger rocks also!

Hello Pre, good bye iPhone
Rating: 5 / 5

I was like all other lonely schoolboys out there on the playground albeit I wasn’t out on the playground and I’m 35; hardly a schoolboy. But like the others, I was waiting in vain for my “New Every Two” discount to kick in so I can finally venture into the 21st century with a Smartphone (cue fading echo: phone, phone, phone…). I had done tiresome and extensive research on the “Big 3″ that Verizon had to offer: the Motorola Droid, the HTC Droid Eris and the Palm Pre Plus (not big on Blackberrys; too yuppy/primitive/not me). My research included watching way too many videos of these phones on youtube (unboxing, walkthroughs, hacks, Chocolate Rain cameos, etc.), reading far too many blogs to mention and actually fiddling around on the phones. Using the phones. How novel. I’ll make this simple:

The Motorola Droid I found to be too bulky, far too heavy for a mobile device, suffering from “only child” syndrome and, from the research I did, the touchscreen was WEAK. W. E. A. K. That is problemo numero uno. Next.

The HTC Droid was very high on the “Me want, me want” list. I did like the touchscreen response, fairly attractive OS and it is backed by Google which I use religiously. The strike? I was coming from a standard slider phone and doing text messages with a standard phone keypad. Going from that to QWERTY in itself is a big step. Add onscreen-only and you’re asking for some serious aggravation, anxiety and frustration. What else we gots?

So the Palm Pre had been getting press on it’s “revolutionary” webOS and that it was coming to Verizon in January. I was only familiar with it because I would watch youtube reviews and visit the Palm website. I do have to admit that once I played with the Palm Pre I was quite enamored. The shape was ridiculously comfortable. The tactile keyboard was small but, surprisingly, my fairly nimble fingers were able to adjust with ease and the touchscreen was absolutely mind blowing. This is the ONLY phone that Verizon offers where I felt as comfortable using it as I did on an iPhone (which all touchscreens try to rival in terms of responsiveness and illuminosity).

When the time came to purchase my new device, the Palm Pre Plus was at the top of my list. I had to lure my girlfriend into the depths of geekdom and let her know how great this phone was too. She relented and now she is truly addicted to this phone.

One great, huuge surprise I had on this phone was the multi tasking prowess this has on it. On my second day owning it I used a GPS tracking jogging app and listened to some music on my Bluetooth stereo headset. Now I know an iPhone can’t do that all at once.

I can’t really say enough good things about this phone. I really hope the best for Palm and if you do get one, you’re going to see the huge underground following/cult of Palm Pre fanatics that just can’t say enough either!

Rating: 5 / 5

Not a complaint, just some advice because Palm has ALWAYS been the best at contact/calendar management. No one else comes close. If you like the way PalmOS has always sync’d directly with your PC (Outlook, Palm Desktop, etc) – you will need to buy a 3rd-part application to do that with the Pre or Pixi. Palm has dropped support for that. It can synch with an Exchange server like a Blackberry (my company won’t support it) or with Gmail (I will never share my contacts with Google, Yahoo, or any other public site). Most of these apps come with a trial period. I recommend that you have it installed on your PC before you do any contact sync or email set up. It worked flawlessly and it’s just like I’ve been doing it with Outlook for many years. When setting up your Pre for the first time, skip the step to set up e-mail so you can synch your contacts with a third party app first. IT’s much less confusing.

Oh, and DON’T sync with more than one 3rd party app, because you will duplicate every contact. The Pre is able to see the duplicates and show them as a single contact (sort of) but I tried it with more than one, and I had to do a hard reset and then sync with only one 3rd party app to de-dupe the contacts. PocketMirror does wireless sync, but it is VERY slow with my 3,000 contacts. It’s a litte faster via Bluetooth. CompanionLink is much faster, but requires a USB cable.

Ok, for those who don’t care about contact/calendar sync, or who get one of the 3rd party apps, here is my summary of the Palm Pre: FANTASTIC!

It is very close to the iPhone in ease of use, innovation, etc. Each has a few unique advantages. But, the Palm wins on the stuff I care about – multitasking being a major item… I can listen to music AND surf the web. Can’t do that on an iPone, iPad, or any other iDevice. That’s huge.

The ONLY complaint I have is battery life, which is non worse than an iPhone. Palm has made major improvements with 1.4, and needs to keep working on it. Battery drain goes down after you have had it a few weeks, because then you aren’t playing with it 7×24. 3G access is what uses the most battery, just like the iPhone. I bought a Siedio extended battery from Amazon.com to provide some improvement, and reducing screen brightness also helps. But, if you are doing a lot of web browsing, tweeting, etc… it’s going to drain about 10% per hour – but no worse than the Motorola Droid, by the way. I get about 8 hours of heavy web use, once you’ve charged the battery for a few cycles.

So, carry a spare battery (another great feature the iPhone doesn’t have – you can quickly swap batteries) – or get an extended life battery like I did. Other than that, I also wish it had a soft keyboard and a few things that would make it easier to surf and text in landscape mode…

If Palm would add a few refinements like better landscape support,it would be a perfect phone.

And the icing on the cake? The network, of course! The Pre+ runs on Verizon, and not AT&T. That drives all my iPhone fanboy friends crazy. It was well worth the wait for Verizon to get this phone. I recommend this for everyone… I especially recommend this phone for iPhone users so they can get off the AT&T network…

Now Verizon can say “there’s an App for that” as well as “there’s a map for that”, and that, my friends, makes this a terrific phone!

EDIT: Palm recently released version 1.4 (which auto-magically updates your phone over the air) and it has improved battery performance greatly. They also added the ability to take movies and edit them right on the phone. Perfect for putting videos on facebook and twitter, etc.

Folks, you REALLY need to try this phone.
Rating: 5 / 5