Dear Palm: What I’d like in the next update
We know that webOS and the Palm Pre are 1.0 1.1 products, so we’re going to cut you some slack for now. But that slack is starting to run out, and looking at the competition there are some areas where I think you could improve the Pre to both catch up to and leap frog over iPhone and BlackBerry and Android. So here’s what I'd like to see in the way of software updates before that slack runs out and the real complaining starts.
My list is after the break, and it’s by no means comprehensive. Feel free to sound off in the comments if there’s something you think should be added in!
Oh, and Palm, this isn't an ultimatum or anything. It's a wishlist. Of stuff I want. So consider it a shopping list, and you're the grocery store. Some things we can do without, but others are staple items that we need to get through the week, and if you don't have it, we might have to go across town to the other grocery to get it. After a while, that can get kind of old and we might consider just going to the other store. We don't want to, as it's simply not as nice, but they have a lot of what we need.
How is webOS 1.1 Treating You?
Here at PreCentral.net we all cheered for the much-improved Exchange support and revived iTunes syncing baked into webOS 1.1.0 for the Palm Pre, but as it turns out the extra baking burned the OS in a few spots, creating new bugs and glitches in various apps.
We’ll start off on a positive note by pointing out one of our favorite undocumented features in webOS 1.1: text selection in Memos is improved. You can now double tap on a word to select the entire word (or tap-tap-hold to select more words), or triple tap to select the entire paragraph; this functionality does not appear to have migrated to any other apps. Only problem is, a single tap results in no cursor placement – you have to do a slow double tap (about half a second) to place the cursor. This, of course, makes moving around slightly more difficult, and updates aren’t supposed to make things more difficult.
Of course, many homebrew hacks were broken down, including the extra launcher pages, universal search additions, and persistent landscape email mode. Most can simply be reapplied, but when the underlying application is updated, the hacked/modified files will also be overwritten. There’s a growing list of affected hacks over in our forum, and the homebrew community has been updating their patches and apps to work with 1.1.
Something about the update also temporarily crippled the WHERE application, though they quickly worked with Palm to push out a WHERE update a few hours after webOS 1.1 landed.
Whether this was a bug or a choice on Palm’s part, the notifications display method has changed. When the device is active, a new email or message just bings and puts the requisite icon in the notification bar instead of a temporary large heads-up bar with a preview of the notification. While this may be good for battery life, this somewhat deflates the unobtrusive part of the notifications by making me stop what I’m doing and tap the notification bar to see more than just “you have a new email.” At the same time, some users are receiving notifications of new emails already received when viewing that same email, which is frankly just odd.
There are also reports of now-poor battery life, though the majority are reporting similar or better battery life than their pre-1.1.0 phones. And of course, there are the scattered cries of bricked Pre phones and some stuck in an infinite reset loop. If that’s you, our heart goes out to you, we know all too well how much being there sucks.
That’s some of what we’ve noticed and heard of so far. How is webOS 1.1 treating you?
