But also as a Palm Pre owner, I’m annoyed to see the better features in the
The Palm Pre Plus (
The biggest visible change is that the button on the
front of the Pre is gone, replaced by a touch-sensitive slice of the
casing on the Pre Plus.
It gives the Pre Plus a more streamlined look and feel, although the original was already fairly sleek.
A less obvious hardware improvement is a doubling of
the Pre’s RAM. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean apps open any quicker.
Launching the e-mail program still takes a second or two longer than it
should, for example.
The additional memory does come in handy if you want
to run several apps simultaneously, but most users probably won’t ever
have more than two or three going at once.
The biggest addition to the Pre Plus is the Mobile Hotspot app.
This program lets you essentially turn the Pre Plus into an instant Wi-Fi hot spot for up to five devices.
It’s a painless program to use, although the
However, stand-alone 3G-to-Wi-Fi devices like the MiFi cost
Otherwise, the Pre Plus is a straightforward port of
the original model. Even the webOS operating system has been ported
over almost verbatim. That isn’t a bad thing, since webOS is still one
of the most intuitive and visually appealing mobile platforms around.
The keyboard — which many hate but which doesn’t bother me — is still small and rubbery.
The slider mechanism for extending the keyboard might be a bit more solid than on the original Pre.
Honestly, I’m surprised Palm and
The Pre is a half-year-old phone now, which is definitely middle-aged in phone years.
It’s about time for Palm to be crafting the Pre 2.
In fact, given that
The Pre is a great phone, and the Pre Plus is a bit of extra polish.
But I’m ready to see what Palm can do for a real encore.
Palm Pre Plus
Pros: The Pre Plus fine tunes the original Pre, and the mobile hot spot app could be a big attraction to road warriors.
Cons: Rather than additional memory, the Pre Plus
might have benefited from a faster processor to make programs actually
launch faster.
Bottom line: The Pre Plus is a great phone. You might want to wait and see what
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(c) 2010, The Dallas Morning News.
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