Results tagged “review” from BrainDrain

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.

I was able to finally acquire the latest object of my irrational obsession, a Palm Pre, on Tuesday. I have only desired two other things in recent years as much as I desired this Palm Pre: my G35 and the original Treo 600 when it was brand new. Well, now that I have one and have done pretty much nothing but play with it for the last four days, I thought it was time to give my initial impressions.

So, the quickie review. Overall, I love this phone and it is quickly becoming the best personal electronic device I've ever owned. It's almost that Hitchhiker's Guide device that I was wanting. Here are the salient points:

Pros

• It's an iPhone for the Sprint set, which is awesome


• Highly intuitive WebOS interface - the "activity cards" totally rule


• Twitter client at launch!


• 3 megapixel camera with auto-flash


• Slide out, physical keyboard


• GPS and WiFi enabled, as well as EVDO network support


• Integrated contacts are huge - phone, email, IM all in one contact location with context-appropriate launching of desired communication method


• Content constantly syncs with Google, Microsoft Exchange, or Palm for integrated, available-everywhere PIM activities

Cons

• Dismal battery life when using GPS and WiFi


• Cell reception is pretty bad (at least in the cellular black hole which is my apartment)


• Memory doesn't seem to purge sometimes- "closed" cards may still actually be taking up memory


• No zoom on the camera, and no video


• No MicroSD slot for memory expansion

Note for owners of a current phone that Sprint considers "smart" (Palm Centro, Blackberry, Treo, etc.): If you purchased your smartphone less than 22 months ago, Sprint will not consider the Pre as an upgrade and will therefore NOT give you the $250 off the $550 cost of the phone as advertised. You will only get $75 off AND you will not be eligible for the $100 mail-in rebate (as you will still be under the original 2-year contract which got you the discount on your previous smartphone, whether you realized it or not). So, if you have "recently" purchased a smartphone, you will pay $475 for the Pre, not $299.

Hit the jump for my in-depth review of the Pre as I see it.

The new Star Trek is surprisingly good. I've communicated my distaste for "reboots" in a previous entry, but as Wil Wheaton said on his blog, "if all reboots were done this well, we geeks would never worry about reboots again." The new Star Trek is not just a new director's crack at telling the Star Trek story with hip, young actors but is a complete resetting of the basic storyline. This is done in comics all the time, but it has been historically disastrous in movies (at least in my opinion).

While the luster of JJ Abrams has started to pale for me (I've stopped watching LOST but still watch Fringe), he did an excellent job of resetting the Trek storyline with a believable plot line (as far as sci-fi goes) while still maintaining a solid link to the past and former storyline. I'm not going to get into details and spoilers here on the front page, but I really enjoyed the film and think that it's a worthwhile one to see and it's as good a reset as you're likely to see from all the nostalgia films this summer (including the cringe-worthy GI Joe). It was nice to see Karl Urban finally playing a role that doesn't require him to wear full body armor (e.g. the Lord of the Rings series and The Chronicles of Riddick) and also explores his acting ability as he aped Deforrest Kelley as the venerable Bones McCoy. My particular favorite, though, and the complete scene stealer of the movie was Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) as Scotty - the red-shirted, wise-cracking, Scottish accent never provided so much comic relief. For me, it was funny without being lame and I really liked Pegg's performance - in a cast full of young upstarts trying to fill huge shoes, Pegg seemed to fit his role the most naturally in my opinion and it felt to me as if it was a role that he was born to play (all deference to the late James Doohan). So, go see it.

Now, if you want my real review complete with spoilers, head on to the rest of the article after the jump. Otherwise, come no further.

***** SPOILER ALERT: Don't jump if you want to keep the surprise! *****

Let me just start this entry off by saying that overall I enjoyed X-Men Origins: Wolverine (I did give it 4.5 out of 5 stars in the sidebar, after all). There was a lot of fun action without devolving into too much "um.....what?" that left me throwing up my hands in exasperation. It hasn't been getting really good reviews from critics, though, so perhaps there's just a little ounce of fanboy leaking out.

I'll just say it now - I'm a Weapon X fan and the thought of having the alternate, "updated" Wolverine origin story made into a movie scared me. Hollywood has this irritating infatuation for taking classic stories and "reimagining", "retelling", or "updating" them in order to make a new movie or give the flavor-of-the-week director a crack at telling the story his way. I hate this idea...I consider it revisionist history of the highest order. The reason I come to see a movie is precisely because I like the original story and/or characters, and I don't want to throw out everything I know and start all over from scratch with a clean slate. So, any time I hear a stupid "this is not your father's {movie}" tagline in a trailer, or find out that Michael Bay is directing it, I die a little inside and curl into the fetal position expecting the worst. I know that they do it in comic books all the time, but that doesn't mean that I accept the practice - if a popular character already has an origin story, then leave it that way. I had a little bit of trouble accepting ideas like Logan volunteering to get the adamantium fusion (rather than being coerced) and the "X" standing for "iteration 10" instead of "experimental"... it was a small change but a nonetheless irritating one.

As an aside, the only "reset" that I've actually enjoyed has been the Chris Nolan Batman series, which is based on Frank Miller's version of Batman. I particularly like this version because Batman has always been made out to be a superhero when he's not - he's an anti-hero that just happens to be rich. He's the most flawed vigilante out there without superpowers and making him into some campy crime fighter just doesn't fit the bill. Not to say that the other superheroes out there don't have their own issues to deal with, but none of them have dark business like Batman. George Lucas, Michael Bay, and Ang Lee can keep their versions. I want the classics.

Anyway, I thought I was going to hate Liev Schreiber as Sabertooth, but he did a pretty good job and the interplay between Wolverine and Sabertooth was well done. I didn't really appreciate having all the extra mutants in the story because they served to dilute it a bit and were highly unnecessary, but I will say that their treatment of Deadpool (as the eventual Weapon 11) was kind of cool (even if I really hated the Sylar-like "supermutant" storyline). I wish that Deadpool (aka Wade Wilson) had been kept in his original form for more of the movie because I think that he was the only character really worthy of a showdown with Wolverine besides Sabertooth. My personal preference would have been to stick with the Weapon X storyline where Logan was an unwilling participant and had to fight to regain his humanity, because I think that is a much more compelling story.

That being said, however, showing Logan's "pre-indestructibility" story was cool, interesting, and also shed some light on the complexities of the Logan character. Seeing how he came to be such an angry, afflicted, and distant reluctant hero makes him a little more human and gives the viewer something with which to identify. Sure being indestructible and having claws shoot out from your hands is way cool, but at what price? In summary, I enjoyed the story and was glad that I went to see it, and I would recommend it to anyone who's a Wolverine or X-Men fan. In any case, it was way better than X-Men 3 - that movie was a total turd.