Has anyone else watched this commercial thinking it was a Palm Pre commercial?  I did, only to find out that Palm hasn’t ditched the creepy aesthetic; but that there is another phone out there intent on killing the iPhone 3Gs: the Droid by Motorola.  Their advertising is to-the-point (much more so than Palm’s ads with the awkward blonde), but a little late.  Palm’s webOS already handles almost all of the Droid’s iPhone killing claims:

OK so the Palm Pre doesn’t include a 5-megapixel camera. This sounds impressive, but what really matters to taking camera-quality pictures isn’t the number of megapixels, although camera marketers would want you to believe that this is the most important spec to watch, it is really the lens that makes good looking pics. Other than that, the ‘widgets’ claim and the ‘iDon’t customize’ claim, whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean, Palm Pre seems identical to these claims, so I would submit that so far Motorola is not making any paradigm changing claims with this commercial.

Looking beyond the commercial, the Droid is actually cooking up to be a pretty awesome looking phone.  I’m always game to see another phone with a real keyboard compete, hopefully it will be a little better made.  I’m liking the reports of the giant responsive keyboard with feedback.  I look forward to playing with one soon and comparing it to the Palm Pre.

The brass balls of audacity’s spawn has looked classic technology square in the face and laughed by creating the ever convenient and ever so cheap (free) tip calculator. Now I won’t have to carry around my Sharp Wizard and my Palm Pre, but just my Palm Pre.

Yes, Azoombi is the ship of fools going headlong into battle with the goliath conglomerate that is Sharp electronics. The Wizard has been the most influential piece of consumer electronics since the walkman, determining tens of hundreds of fair tips around the world every year. It was even at the center of the controversy when Kramer tried to buy votes to elect Jerry Seinfeld’s father the President of the Condo Association by distributing Wizzards to the key decision makers. The extra ‘z’ proved to be their demise, as they turned out to be cheap knock-offs… a cheap knock-off of a tip calculator? Seems about right.

Tip Em does its job quite simply, you just type in the amount of your ticket and it will tell you what 15% of that is. I guess that is the bare minimum for tipping, but if the tip is up close to the $40-50 mark I start backing down to that 18-15% range myself. Hey, I live in Utah; that’s generous for here. There aren’t too many other features other than the check splitter calculator that can split the check evenly in as many as 8 ways or more. It isn’t that often that when I go out with a bunch of friends we split a check exactly evenly all ways. There’s always someone ordering the Fajitas-for-two platter and racking up $29. So not that useful.

So I’m still not seeing how this isn’t basically a super limited calculator with a cute coffee stained skin. I don’t mean to hate, it achieves what it sets out to do, just not much more.

It’s true, the dot game and other games previously thought to be categorized as ecologically harmful to the planet (such as tic tac toe, hangman, or any other game that wastes paper and isn’t really that fun to play anyway) are making their way to devices like the Palm Pre, saving the planet one unused piece of paper at a time.

So my memories of the dot game mainly take place in a chapel on Sunday mornings when I couldn’t pay attention, thus resorting to this mindless lesser of two boredoms. It’s just a matrix of dots that cover a piece of paper, and each player must connect each dot together for each turn. If a player completes a box, that player gets a point; whoever has the most boxes at the end wins. This version of dot game does not allow you play another person on another Pre somewhere, but it does allow you to pass it back and forth to play your neighbor, thus saving the planet (unless you were just going to use the back of your church’s services program, in which case, do what you will).

The Palm Pre’s dot game also allows you to play the computer if you’re going to church stag. It has an easy-to-hard difficulty scale. Just start at hard, easy and medium are a joke (nothing like the dot game to get my intelligence all riled up and offended). The computer moves fast but it lets you know where it moved last by circling the latest move. It is a little strenuous to aim at the little tiny space with your finger where you want to drop the line.

One annoying thing about the game is that it defaults to not allow you to move where you want if there is a box somewhere with three sides that needs completing (this is called Require Box in the options which I missed at first). Part of the game is to pay close attention so you don’t miss opportunities, it shouldn’t default to this, but at least you can turn it off. It just makes your first game annoying.

You can play the game with several different aesthetics, I like crayon best; it makes you pretend that you are really saving the planet. Now start paying attention to the sermon you dirty hippie treehugger.

Snake is a game where you control a ravenously hungry snake that for some reason will only eat little yellow balls (aka “noms”) (he must have been raised in captivity). This snake will also get bigger and faster after every meal, so my estimate is that every second of playing the game equals roughly 3 months of real snake raising time.

The Palm Pre Game App is the all too familiar game to the generation that grew up before the birth of the smartphone. So if you grew up during those short 6-8 years during the reign of black and white cell phones, this should be one of your first app downloads. Since this game accurately recreates that great feeling of wasting time in the year 2002, I give this app an EPIC PASS (on a scale from epic pass to epic fail).

In this version on the Palm Pre you can control the snake with touchscreen swipes or with the keyboard, both of which I wouldn’t say is super easy, but I found the keyboard to be more accurate and less exhausting (we’re wasting time, not doing finger gymnastics, of which someone also ought to make a game app). To use the keyboard, use W, A, S, and D (or I, J, K, and L) to control the red headed serpent (which I think looks like a rare yellow breed of corn snake perhaps).

The snake can do that trick in Michel Gondry’s great movie “Human Nature” where Tim Robbins’ character tries to leave purgatory by leaving out the door on the right side of the shot, only to re-enter simultaneously through the door on the left. Unless there are walls (which appear in level 2) you can do the same with the snake. If you make it past level 2, you need to either get a job, or start doing your job before you get let go. It’s a tough economy, what can I say.

If you are able to beat the game, it’s rumored that the makers of the game will send you a beautiful pair of shoes of the style and size of your choice made out of the snake.

My Palm Pre over the last several months has been experiencing a touchscreen black out due to a bad connection. At least that’s my theory, the problem was very peculiar. I went on a trip to China recently and when I arrived in Hong Kong, the screen suddenly began to become yellow as if your cheap VGA cable had a kink in it. It continued to get worse until the screen finally became completely black. A couple weeks later I arrived back in the US to find that my phone had magically revived itself as I was walking through the airport. So naturally I thought it was a simple and mild case of SARS.

It blacked out again recently, first doing the yellowing and darkening as if the three colored lights in a 3-light projector were going off one by one. Curiously, when I would allow the phone to charge for long periods of time until it became nice and warm, the screen would briefly come back. Perhaps the heat allowed a loose connection to connect momentarily, but to no avail, I took it to my local Sprint store.

I have to say, my local Sprint store here in Orem Utah took pretty good care of me. All they needed was the phone and my phone number, and they asked me to come back in 15 minutes. I did so, at which time I waited nearly an hour to be helped. This was really the only low point of the visit. I walked off happy with a new Palm Pre, or at least a Palm Pre that was new to me. It was mysteriously wrapped in a different kind of cling wrap unlike new units, and was taken from a different pile of units than the new units, so said the cashier. So I’m thinking they’re refurbs.

That’s OK. My phone looks great and new and everything and I’m very happy to have a working unit.

Transferring the Palm Pre to me was interesting. It took a very long time while I sat at the desk, but it didn’t really work out ideally. The folks at Sprint apparently have the ability to take all of the data from your previous Pre including which Apps you had, and even the notes you have on your “stickies”. Kind of freaky. They didn’t however have any of my images, which were really what I wanted anyway, so I lost those. I suppose that would be a larger intrusion of privacy for Sprint to back that up for me without me knowing so I can understand that.

Overall I’m impressed with the willingness of the Orem Sprint folks to exchange the unit without asking questions and the overall non-hassle of the experience.

Leave it up to the Chinese to achieve the impossible: remix a product that is only rumored to exist in the first place.

Actually, it is pretty common for knock-offs to hit the market before the real deal, suggesting that the iPhone Nano is under production. This shouldn’t be a shock since Apple filed a patent for the iPhone nano a couple months ago.

All that being said, I’d like to confess my obsession with silly knock-offs. This one isn’t terrible in some respects, and pretty terrible in others. Let’s have a look shall we?

Bottom Line:

You really get what you pay for with this phone (about $400 RMB which comes out to around $60 USD). You are probably not going to want this as your main phone because of how unresponsive and inaccurate the touchscreen is. If you type anything wrong, you’ll have to start over and delete the whole thing because you’ll never be able to drop the cursor down in the right place with your finger. Functionally, not a great phone. Souvenir-wise, don’t know if I could have asked for anything better.

Palm Pre Email Error Messages We’re treating today:

“Service Method Exception: java.io.IOException: Unable to make space in FileCache”

“Download of the message body timed out. The system will retry soon”

There is (was) a serious problem with my Outlook email recently. I sync to Microsoft Exchange Server and it’s really important that I’m able to both read emails at any time of day, and to send them as well from my Palm Pre. For the last several weeks however I’ve been getting the below errors:

So, to sum it all up, the fix is strange and easy. Simply remove your battery for a few seconds, and reconnect it. It might have something to do with the Palm Pre not fully resetting when you turn it off, so removing and reconnecting the battery is the only true hard reset, thus fixing this Exchange email bug.

To Replace the battery:

Taking off the battery cover the very first time is more difficult than it will ever be in subsequent times.

1. First, push the small button down at the bottom of the phone. It’s the little rubber button that would be facing your chest if you were holding the Palm Pre flat in your Palm. It’s small enough that you’ll need to use the edge of a fingernail perhaps.

2. Next, lift up on the bottom half of the battery cover. It should begin to peel off but not entirely. It will feel like you’re bending your about to break it. Don’t bend it that far, but bend it enough to get the edge of a fingernail along the right side of the Palm Pre, sliding it up the crack you are making as you peel the cover off.

3. Sliding your finger through the slit should eventually pop the top off. A black tab allows you to pull and disconnect the battery. Disconnect it for 10 seconds, and replace it, simply slide it back into place.

4. The battery cover should pop back on and slide a little into place quite easily.

Screwing up the craigslist app is kind of like screwing up canned stew for dinner: nearly impossible. I mean, sure, you can over cook it a little if you aren’t careful. With a concept and execution as simple and elegant as craigslist, making the app isn’t fois gras science (get it? fois gras is like the rocket science of food? its a stretch). I give the mCraig app for Palm Pre an epic pass.

There was really only one annoying thing about the app or maybe just Sprint’s service: the mCraig app will search all craigslist cities in the US unless you set your position, and if I try to automatically set my position using GPS, it never can find what city I’m in. I’m assuming that this is Sprint’s super spotty GPS coverage, pretty much the worst thing I’ve experienced so far on the Sprint Everything Plan. One quarky thing that is mCraig’s fault however is that when you realize that Sprint’s GPS coverage sucks and you want to switch to setting your location manually, that little button on the top right of the app labelled Set Location is not in fact a button. To set location, you have to open the drop down menu. That location that looks like a button is really just the status bar for GPS tracking. Weird.

Other than all that, mCraig is an epic pass. Its simple to find categories and browse, or just use the search (after you set your location), which is just as powerful and convenient as the website’s search utilities.

Palm’s stock price has soared in the last 6 months. Early January’s price was around $3, which exploded to over $7 by the end of the month after the Pre was shown off at CES in Las Vegas. Today it’s lingering around $15. This is all occurring while Palm keeps the public relatively in the dark about Palm Pre’s unit sales trends. Barron’s reports the guerrilla data acquiring techniques of the wireless consulting firm iGR has yielded some data that might allow us to circumnavigate Palm’s unwillingness to divulge specific bits of data. You can read the whole article here, but I’ll break it down for you in really simple terms:

In an iGR (hired by JNK securities) report given this week, 50 Sprint Stores were visited.

1. Zero of these stores were sold out of the Palm Pre
2. 8% of stores sold out last week, 28% the week before that, and 38% in the first week of sale.
3. None of the stores who were willing to discuss sales sold more than 30 units in the latest week.
4. iGR also tracked App Catalog downloads of popular apps like Pandora and Accuweather and say trends have slowed down, but no specific data was given.
5. JRPG estimates Palm has sold 84K units in the first launch week, and 200K-250K units by the end of the first month.

These estimates don’t appear to support any iPhone killing claims.  Palm certainly did not decide to take the approach of reducing production to increase sell-out rates.

Palm Pre on Holiday in Europe

I don’t want to put a huge damper on Palm stock (I delude myself that I have any influence over such matters), so here’s some good news to counter balance.  O2, a British mobile provider has officially announced that they will be carrying the Palm Pre exclusively and will have it by the holiday season.  Jolly good then, another cup a’ tea gov’nah, let’s celebrate.

The handset software company Handmark Inc. has created a well crafted app called Express Stocks. It’s a pass (on a scale of epic fail to epic pass), and almost approached epic pass were it not for how obtrusive and ugly the constant ad for Bank of America is, that essentially makes the app’s entire header. I’m sure that an ad for Bank of America would be necessary as I’m sure they bank-rolled the project, and its probable that they negotiated such an extremely loud placement of the ad, but seeing big letters telling me to sign in here when I don’t even have a BoA account is a bit over the line. They also start you out following BoA stock, big surprise.

The Express Stocks app will pretty much do everything you’d expect a stocks app to do on a piece of hardware that is virtually never shut off from the internet: everything short of actually trading online (but wouldn’t that be nice…). It lets you see stock prices in your entire portfolio in a view that is easy on your eyes upon opening, including the day’s movement in percentages. The app also features up to the minute stocks news, and even the day’s biggest movers (up or down). Adding stock is easy, taking one out of your portfolio is similar to deleting a text message (flicking it off the screen and confirming the delete). The app is obviously well thought out, and the colors make quick portfolio checks intuitive and easy to look at.