I've had my Pre for nearly two weeks now, and so I figured that it was time to give another review of the overall experience now that some of the immediate, out-of-the-box sexy factor has worn off. Don't worry, I'm not all blase' about it yet, I've just had some time to use it and allow it to take over the role that was previously held down by the Centro.
Overall, I really like the device as a whole. The app store is coming along, and hopefully soon there will be a lot more useful applications to put on the phone that don't necessarily require internet access (for those dead zones like interior bathrooms in office buildings where no cell signal can survive). I love the gesturing and the touch screen, and the apps are pretty well laid out and thought out in how they interact. The flippable web browser is everything I've dreamed it could be. I'm totally in love with Tweed, and looking forward to giving Spaz a try in a bit.
I've pretty much come to grips with all the idiosyncrasies of the thing except for one - the dismal,abysmal, and just downright terrible cellular reception of my phone. It seems like the antenna is just woefully underpowered and unable to maintain a solid signal in any location other than a completely unobstructed outside setting. I've been complaining that this new apartment is terrible for Sprint reception ever since I moved in, but now I literally have to go outside on my porch to take calls and even then there's no guarantee that they won't be dropped. I'm finding the reception to be as equally terrible inside office buildings (I got one bar inside the client site this week) and restaurants (my reception yo-yo'd up and down the spectrum while in Pluckers). I'm finding the phone alerting me of voice mails for calls that never came in, text messages that show up hours or days late, and an overall inability to maintain connection to any online services without wifi being enabled.
It is really, really frustrating to have a device which performs the way I want it to in just about every other way fail at performing the single most important and basic function for which it was designed. I want a communications device and this one seems pretty incapable of doing that reliably unless I'm able to use a wifi connection (and that means that I pretty much have to keep the phone plugged in while it's on because the wifi connection can drain the Pre battery in less than a day). The Pre is just like the little girl with a curl from the old nursery rhyme:
"There was a little girl,
With a little curl,
Right in the middle of her forehead.
When she was good,
She was very, very good;
But when she was bad,
She was horrid."
There was a WebOS update released this weekend (Palm WebOS 1.0.3) that had some minor fixes in it but none of which seemed to be related to the reception or antenna quality. Note to Palm: Please, please, please fix this soon. I want to love this phone completely. I want to give myself over to it and commit to the long and happy relationship that I know we're both dying to have. But I can't do that if we can't communicate, and so I need your help. Please fix the reception problems! Help me help you by being able to give the Pre all the warm fuzzy reviews that I possibly can...and mean them!
I'm not alone here. Gizmodo posed the "how good is your Palm Pre signal?" question a few days ago and out of 4100 responses to the survey at the bottom, 41% of them (1666) at the time of this writing list their signal as poor. If you look at the picture of the Pre in the article, my reception bar looks like that on a good day at home.
