My choice of carrier meant that the iPhone was out, though the lack of a physical keyboard took the iPhone out long ago. That left me to choose between a Google Android phone or a Palm webOS phone. With a keyboard being a requirement, I could choose from the Motorola Droid, Palm Pixi Plus or the Palm Pre Plus.

I spent some time with a Motorola Droid a few days after it was released, but I wasn’t awed by the user experience. The UI felt like it was cobbled together and the keyboard was… well, was it really a keyboard? It was harder to type on than those old Casio calculator watches that had the same flat grid for a keyboard. Sometimes I wonder… when taking the time to build a product, months are spent on engineering something but sometimes it’s obvious that very little time is spent allowing target users to touch the device. That Droid keyboard is one of these situations; call it user experience ignorance. Apple does wonderful things with their hardware with incredible attention to detail; take the headphone jack, for instance, that triples as a headphone jack, an optical jack *and* a headset jack. Why can’t other companies do the same? It’s not always about what device has the most features; a lot of times it’s better to just do one thing extremely well and leave out the rest.

So I guess that left me with the Palm Pre Plus as the only choice left. I did a lot of reading and spent some time with the Palm Pre Plus before I decided to buy it. I read a lot of mixed reviews about the product, some from angry iPhone users that didn’t feel the phone lived up to they hype, others on forums complaining about hardware issues and so on and so forth… I don’t tend to believe things until I see them, so I went to try the phone out myself.

The story that follows is quite an interesting one in several ways. I knew of the Palm Pre’s mediocre sales in the market and was always curious about why they were doing poorly. Perhaps it is because I was one of the many people who believed that the Palm Pre was going to be a dud when it first came out. I never had a good impression of Palm, their software nor their devices. The company has had such a fractured past with product development that I stopped caring about them. When a friend of mine purchase the Palm Pre from Sprint on release day, told me how much he loved it and showed it to me, I dismissed the phone without so much as a thought. It’s a Palm, I thought, how great could it be?

Fast forward a whole year and now I’m sitting here contemplating buying one. Many of the choices on the market just don’t reflect what I need, but this phone seems to have it all: keyboard, touchscreen, good form factor, clear screen, a selection of apps and tethering on steroids (it can act as a WiFi router). I went to a real Verizon store (not one of those lookalike independent stores) to try one out and hit my first road bump: the in-store demo unit was broken. It was stuck on the Palm loading screen. Not starting off so well, I thought. I asked the manager if he had one I could take a look at and his response was “don’t buy that phone, those guys are going out of business.” I guess he hadn’t heard of HP’s recent acquisition of Palm. A few questions later and it was obvious to me that the store was not interested in selling the Pre. I was given a variety of reasons to stay away from Palm, but the kicker was the redirect to their newest Droid Incredible.

I still wanted to try the Palm Pre Plus so I eventually found a store that had one. It was an independent shop and the guy selling phones had a Pre Plus strapped to his belt. He was kind enough to  allow me to use his phone as we talked about his impressions of the Pre Plus. “How do you like it?”, I asked him. “It’s a simple phone. I don’t mind it but I like being able to tinker with the settings.” He told me about the back gesture as he handed it over and it took me a few seconds to figure out the rest.

After spending an hour at the store with the phone, I decided to buy it. My impressions were positive overall then and two weeks and one application developed later, they remain the same now. The phone does have some issues, but they are problems that can be solved with software updates. Here are some highlights of the pros and cons from my last two weeks with it.

Palm Pre Plus Pros

• Great form factor, feels solid in hand. Most people I’ve shown it to says it feels heavier than it looks, but I like the solid feel.
• Very good screen and colors.
• Great voice quality and sound volume from on-board speaker (con: Microphone is off if normal headphones are plugged in. My Blackberry left its on-board microphone on when a normal headphone is used.)
• Great audio quality to headphones. I use Ultimate Ear SuperFi 5vis.
• Very good contact list integration. Pulls all my Google, Exchange contacts in without any fuss.
• Great calendar integration with Google and Exchange. (con: Where’s guest invites???)
• Great keyboard. It took a little getting used to, but despite its size and hard tactile response, I can type faster than I did on my BB. The selection of keys was made for web usage (@ symbol is a dedicated key).
• Excellent user interface interaction. The back gesture, couple with the concept and implementation of cards is flawless.
• If you’ve ever used Mac OS X Spotlight or Windows 7′s Start button search, Universal Search is really great. Type something in while in card view and the phone starts an immediate search of your on-board databases (Contacts, etc.)
• App Catalog. It has a smaller selection of apps, but the ones I use are there: Google Maps, Facebook, Web Browser, Pandora, Yelp, Evernote, Twitter, Weather. I liken the number of apps found in the App Catalog to that found in iPhone’s first generation phones. The number and quality will grow over time.
• Stable device platform. This is really important to app developers because the hardware and software platforms will be consistent and stable. Palm only has a handful of device types to support which means more focused engineering  and updates. Apple does this with the iPhone. They have 3 generations of phones and 3 generations of software updates to date; each update usable on the previous generation phone. If you buy an Android phone, the software updates have to go through each manufacturer. With the number of Android models out there, that means manufacturers have to make a decision on which phones to update the OS on and which to ignore.
• Excellent web browser.
• Great Contact List application.
• Settings are simple.
• Data backup to the Cloud? Awesome.
• GPS works well enough on Google Maps.
• WiFi works great at home and office.
• Mobile Hotspot mode is really awesome. Multiple users can log in to use it and I’m getting solid download rates (~250KBps). In fact, I’m using Mobile Hotspot to upload this blog post from a Starbucks right now.
• Camera produces better images than my Blackberry Bold. Easy to share single photos (con: hard to share a group of photos) to e-mail/Facebook with ease.
• It shoots and shares Video to Youtube/Facebook with ease. Allows you to clip and produces standard MPEG4 files.
• Tasks sync up with Exchange seamlessly.
• YouTube video player works well.
• Based mostly on Open Sourced software, which means smart people can tinker with it to make it better. This has already happened with the Homebrew and Preware efforts. You don’t have to “jailbreak” this phone. It comes pre-wired for customization.
• It views PDFs.

Palm Pre Plus Cons (and Complaints)

• The touchscreen requires slightly more pressure than an iPhone. Occasionally I need to tap twice if I didn’t apply sufficient finger-surface-area to the touchscreen. Note that the protective film that comes with the camera should not be kept on the phone. It significantly reduces the capacitance detected by the phone. I had a lot of trouble with the screen before I removed this film and replaced it with a specialized matte screen protector.
• Text selection really blows. It’s hard to get the cursor to line up just right. And on multi-line text fields, it’s a nightmare keeping the cursor on the right line. It’s a good thing I don’t use copy/paste much. Palm, if you’re reading, please study iPhone text selection.
• You have to type in your periods. My Blackberry would automatically put in a period when I hit spacebar twice.
• The contact list integration pulls in all or none of your Facebook contacts. I just want the contacts I have in my phone to be updated with Facebook information.
• The battery life is on par with an iPhone and my Bold 9000. Users need to be aware of the applications that run on the phone. The phone’s awesome multitasking abilities also make it more susceptible to shorter battery life. I’ve read about some poorly written applications that have quickly drained battery life.
• Long list browsing is a nuisance. I have 1,400 songs in my music player and I want to skip A-H so scrolling to I takes forever. Search doesn’t help me get to I any faster. iPhone does this right.
• Mediocre media player. It plays music, period. iPhone has a full-fledged iPod built in. Palm can do better by focusing attention to this detail.
• Scrolling action can be better. I can’t get it to scroll just enough for a page to go by in lists so I end up having to tap again to stop the scroll.
• Why can’t I end a call by closing my phone? This should be a preference.

I haven’t played a single game on my Pre since I got it. I use it mostly for email and business and it works like a charm for that. However, I read that it has a dedicated GPU for 3D graphics so games should be pretty impressive once the apps start rolling in.

Despite its inadequacies, I’ll be keeping this phone. It does the things I need it to do well enough to offset those things it doesn’t do well. Since Verizon is giving away the Mobile Hotspot for free, the cost savings from not having to pay $40/month for tethering will save me $480 this year and pretty much offset the cost of the phone and some service.

I have faith that Palm’s architecture and software roadmap around the phone is built in such a way that the concerns I have with it today will be remedied with a future software update. I say this because the open-source webOS movements (Preware, Homebrew) have already patched up many of the things they’ve found with the phone. If I wanted to fix the issue where closing my phone should end a call, there’s a patch for that. Palm just needs to take the time to LISTEN to its customers and developers and quickly incorporate those enhancements into the phone’s software.