Why my Palm Pre is still a great phone!

I’ve been meaning to post something about my phone for a while and now that I have time off for the holidays I can!! 

The phone I use and love is the Palm Pre.  It’s a great phone but sometimes it seems I’m the only person that has one, which I suppose makes me part of an elite club right?!  Ya, that sounds good, I’ll go with that.  I’m part of an elite club of Pre owners! And to help other members of my elite Pre owner’s club I’m going to make a guide of apps and settings that I think make the Pre the awesome phone it is!

First off I’ll address the biggest problem with the Pre - battery life.  It sucks.  I’m told that other phones, mostly Android phones, have similarly bad battery lives so I don’t feel too bad but still, that doesn’t change the fact that the Pre’s battery life sucks.  To remedy that niggling issue I bought a Seido Innocell 1350 Extended battery for the Pre.  It costs $44.95 and will help your Pre last a whole day, which is nice.  For those interested you can buy yourself one at the precentral.net store.  It fits in the same space as the original battery but has more capacity and thus lasts longer than the original.

Next up are apps.  Most phone platforms boast about how many thousands of apps they have in their app stores.  HP-Palm doesn’t.  That’s because they really don’t have that many, about 4,000 or so.  
As a result many find the app store lacking but I’ve discovered that I only really use a handful of apps anyway so 4,000 is plenty – assuming they have the ones you need.  In my case they do (mostly).  Here are the apps I use and the tweaks I’ve done to make my phone awesome;

Messaging & Email:  I’m not going to go into detail about how the messaging and email apps work, if you have a Pre you already know how awesome they are and if you don’t there are plenty of websites that will explain the sweetness that is “Synergy”.  The tweak I’ve done to the built in Messaging and Email apps is change their rings so that I know if I received a text message or an email and in which specific email account said email went.  To do this, simply launch the app (Messaging for example) hit the top-left corner and select “Preferences & Accounts”.  Then hit the “Alert” dialogue, pick “Ringtone” and set whatever ringtone you like, you can even download and use custom ringtones if they’re in an mp3 format by plugging your phone into a computer and dropping the files into the “ringtones” folder. Do the same set of steps for each of your email accounts in the Email App.

Dropbox: Unfortunately Dropbox hasn’t made an app for the Pre but they have made a mobile website which works perfectly on the Pre.  There is an app called Dropboxify but it doesn’t allow you to save images and stuff in a way that can be accessed by other apps on the phone so if you wanted to save a Dropbox-based picture to use as a wallpaper for example you can’t with Dropboxify.  Not so if you use the Dropbox mobile website.  Simply navigate to m.dropbox.com login and you’re good to go!  Also, if you want an icon on your launcher simply hit the top-left of the screen while on the Dropbox page, select “Page” and then “Add to launcher” and you’re done!  You can even get the cool Dropbox Icon you see in the screenshot of my launch at the top of this post by just moving the little icon box over to the Dropbox icon!

Evernote: Evernote was nice enough to make an app for the Pre and it’s great!  They’ve even updated it recently to add more awesomeness. You can do things like select specific notebooks, change views and of course you can post directly to Evernote with text and pictures.  Everything is stored in the cloud so take a picture of something or write an idea in Evernote while out and about and it’ll be on your computer when you get home!

Weather: WeatherIcon is an app that does something that even people with iPhones can’t do.  It shows up-to-date weather information based on your current location right there on the launcher screen through it’s icon!  You don’t even need to open the app to get an idea of how cold it is and whether it’s raining or not.  For more detailed weather information you can of course open the app but I prefer to use the mobile version of the WeatherNetwork website for that.  I did the launcher icon thing with the WeatherNetwork site for Ottawa and it’s great!

Engadget: The folks over at Engadget made an app for the Pre way back when the Pre was still a new phone and it’s been a great app right from the start!  It’s slick and loads fairly quickly and is just like reading the Engadget website only perfectly formatted for the Pre.  What more could you want?

Timepiece: I downloaded timepiece when it was still a Homebrew beta and have used it ever since.  I think it is the best clock for the pre and I use it daily as my alarm clock to get me out of bed in the morning. It even has support for Pandora although that service is not yet available in Canada for some ridiculous copyrights BS reason. It works in both portrait and landscape mode and is dimmable.  Perfect for the touchstone!

Mileage Monitor Plus: I’ve used this app since day 1 and it’s been fantastic.  So good in fact that I paid for the “Plus” version.  I log every fillup and it keeps track of the details.  Notice how the last fillup in the screencap is much higher than the lifetime?  Ya, that’s what happens when your car battery dies and you can’t turn off the car until you get a new one!  Hopefully the next fillup will show lower numbers.

Twee: I don’t use twitter often, but when I do I use Twee.  It’s simply the slickest Twitter app on the Pre.  It easily lets you do things like see you’re @ mentions, check your Twitter mail, look at trending topics and of course search.  It’s a great app, now if only I can figure out the point of Twitter we’d be good to go!

Facebook: The Facebook app has always been great and I almost prefer it over the website version on the PC.  A recent update has added “Places” functionality and some other improvements.  As you can see it looks great and it’s really nice to use.

Kobo: I don’t often read eBooks on the Pre but the Kobo app makes it way more likely.  As you can see I just downloaded War and Peace and because Kobo has a ‘whispersyncish’ type thing going on (ie it’ll sync your bookmarks a-la-Kindle) with other Kobo reader apps on other devices I’ll be able to start a book on the Pre and finish it on my iPad.  Since Amazon doesn’t have a Kindle app for the Pre, Kobo is it!

CBCRadio: CBC was out early with their App and it’s a great app!  It lets me listen to the best internet radio station of all – CBC Radio 3!  It even shows the title and artist of the current track, just put your Pre on the Touchstone and listen away!

XBMC Remote: I use XBMC on my media PC that’s hooked up to the TV so I was pretty excited to see that they made an App for the Pre.  It took a little finagling to get the XBMC server thing going but once you set it up it works like a charm!  It’s like having a remote control for my computer!

Angry Birds: on the Pre, ‘nough said. (Yes I used Engadget’s Angry Birds picture – sorry Engadget – my screencap thing didn’t work in Angry Birds for some reason.)

Netstat / Bell Self Service: Netstat is a great little utility that comes out of the Homebrew community so it’s not available through the App Catalogue.  It tells you all kinds of important stuff like how much data you’re using over the 3G network vs. Wi-fi this month.  Bell Self Service does much the same thing and then some, both are good apps for this sort of thing.

And those are the apps I use most on the Pre.  See?  Only a handful!  With these apps I’ve pretty much covered everything I need my phone to do and then some.  There are many other apps of course but these are the ones that I think are most important and use all the time.