Palm Pre Plus review – WebOS brought to AT&T
For:
Great for multitasking and managing contacts, ships with back cover for TouchStone charge, QWERTY keyboard is improved, excellent photos and videos by the 3 MP camera.
Against:
Palm Mobile Hotspot app is not supported, expensive, low battery life.
The Whiz Kid Speaks:
Palm Pre Plus is 2.35 inches wide, 0.43 inches deep, 3.95 inches high and 4.89 oz in weight. This phone is based on WCDMA (UMTS) / GSM and supports WCDMA (UMTS) / GSM 850/900/1800/1900 band. Additional features include AGPS, USB, EDGE, and GPRS. The phone is based on Palm webOS and has 16 GB user memory.
Messaging services include AOL Instant Messenger Service (AIM) and Yahoo! Messenger. Supported email protocols are IMAP4, POP3. Messaging / Data features include Microsoft PowerPoint support, Microsoft Excel support, Microsoft Word support, XHTML Browser, and Mobile blog. Supported video formats are H.263 video and AMR audio, MPEG-4, H.264.
The handset has three megapixel camera. The LCD 3.1 inches big and has resolution of 320 x 480 pixels. It supports 16.7 million colors. Supported audio formats are eAAC+, AAC+, WAV, MP3, AMR, and AAC. Connectors include Headset jack – Mini-phone 3.5 mm and micro-USB. The rated talk time is 300 minutes and standby time is 350 hours.
Razzle Dazzle:
Palm Pre Plus look quite a lot like Palm Pre. Both have the same pebble like shape, slider design and also have the same 3.1 inch HVGA multitouch screen. There have been some changes made to the latest iteration in order to improve the feel and look of the device.
Inside Dope:
Palm Pre Plus is from AT&T and we first saw it in CES 2010. It will be available from May 16 and it doesn’t have tons of surprises inside since this phone is quite similar to the one we had to Verizon model. The software and hardware is pretty much the same and the only difference is that this phone supports services of AT&T. We would have loved if this phone came with some new hardware but AT&T customers here can use the WebOS’s great capabilities. The multitasking abilities too are impressive. The feature set is well rounded and the interface is easy to use. We will call this one of the better phones from AT&T in recent times. Before this, we had Motorola Backflip which didn’t do too well in the market. HTC Tilt2 and LG Expo were also there but those two were targeted at business men. We think this is a great alternative to the iPhone but it is priced a bit high. Cost of this phone is $149.99 and you have to sign a two year contract with the service provider. AT&T throws in a free Touchstone dock but this is for limited period only.
Keyboard
Palm Pre Pluss keyboard is revamped but it is still small. People who have big thumbs will have issues of typing on this keyboard. The travel space between the keys has been increased and the keys now give better tactile feedback. Pre, as compared to this, had gummy keys and the better keys help a lot while typing. We didn’t have the draggy feeling when moving through the keys and we could type our messages faster; with less mishits. We asked some of our friends to try this out and they did feel the difference.
Call quality
Palm Pre Plus has a good call quality. We didn’t have any problems at all while talking to our friends on the phone and there were no dropped calls either. On their side, friends told us that the call quality was good but not as good as landline. Some ends of our sentences were cut off during calls. Sound quality overall was quite satisfactory. Speaker phone calls sound a bit soft even when the volume is cranked up to the highest limit. For Bluetooth calls, we used Motorola S9 Bluetooth Active Headphones and Logitech Mobile Traveller Bluetooth Headset and didn’t have any problems with the quality.
3G quality
In our area, the 3G signal was quite strong and network gave us good speeds. It took about 28 seconds for a site to load fully and the mobile versions turned up in about 12 seconds. A track download from Amazon store took about a minute. Downloading and installing Asphalt 5 free version tool about two minutes and 26 seconds when we accessed it through the App Catalog. When we tried to stream videos from 3G, it took a few seconds for buffering but once the clips were loaded fully, the playback was smooth. We will recommend you to use Wi-Fi wherever you can. You can be on a data connection and talk on the phone at the same time unlike the Verizon’s model.
Battery
The Palm Pre Plus comes with 1150 mAh lithium battery which has rated talk time of five hours and standby time is 14.5 days. We haven’t conducted our battery drain tests but we will do it soon and update this section.
Performance
Palm Pre Plus has the same processor as its predecessor but the RAM is doubled so we got around things quite fast. Transition between the menu screens and cards didn’t have much lag and the phone refused to slow down even when we started lots of apps at once. But there a bit of lag when apps were getting launched.
Camera
Palm Pre Plus comes with the same three megapixel camera as its predecessor and the picture quality too is great. There is absolute no difference in the results. Quality of video too is decent and we really liked the simple editing process. For storing photos you get 16 GB of memory out of which 15 GB is available for use.
Verdict:
We loved the great WebOS capabilities and this is one of the better AT&T smartphones but you might be turned off by the big price tag.
