First Impressions: Palm Pre

I waited in line this morning for about 45 minutes and managed to be number 2 in line. This is a drastic difference then my experience waiting in line for both the iPhone and the iPhone 3G. That said, once in the store the process took about 40 minutes to get me going from start to finish, including buying the Pre and then going through the mandatory tutorial.

I managed to get about an hour of playtime with the Pre before it had to be recharged (it comes charged with about 45 percent battery life) and have detailed my thoughts below.

Setup
Getting the Palm Pre up and running is very straight forward. It requires you to have an e-mail address to work, though, so make sure you know which one you want to use. From there you can setup whatever accounts you want and they magically appear on the Palm Pre–at least in theory. I thought I had setup Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Contacts but really only Gmail ended up working right. For some reason my Calendar was setup but wasn’t populating in the Palm Pre and my contacts haven’t all appeared yet.

Interace
As for the interface, it’s just as I remember, though a bit snappier. It’s very easy to navigate, though I did find myself getting a little lost in some of the menus. I also found that the e-mail program was pretty to look at but a bit too unfamiliar to interact with out of the box. Again, I only had about an hour with it so far so I’ll write more when I have had more time to play around.

I also looked for a Facebook application so that I could reply to some comments and it was nowhere to be found, but I was able to enter my Facebook information and see it start populating and syncing on the Palm Pre.

One thing I have noticed is the poor battery life. After only an hour of use it was all drained. We’ll see how it does on a full charge later but I believe the battery life is definitely gong to be an issue, especially since the sales associate at the Sprint store recommended that I buy the car charger since the battery is “really bad”. It does run out of power eloquently, though, with a little reminder that it’s about to shut off and then a complete shut off.

Keyboard
It’s still too close to the bottom of the Palm Pre’s touch screen, and makes it a bit awkward to type on. I also noticed that it feels a bit “sticky” to the touch, but I’m sure that will wear down as I use it more.

Mirror
Palm put a mirror on the back of the slider so that you can see exactly what you look like, as opposed to using one of those little circles that you find on most cameras that claim to be a mirror.

Purchase breakdown

I bought the Palm Pre and all available accessories and here’s how it broke down:

• Palm Pre 100 - $299.99
• Leather pouch - $31.99
• Palm car charger - $25.59
• Palm Touchstone charging dock - $55.99
• gross receipts surcharge - $20.68
• Total (including tax): $464.64

I should also mention that because I bought all of these things I got 20 percent off each accessory. There’s also a $26 activation charge, which my rep waved.

More to come on the Palm Pre as I have more playtime. So far it’s an interesting experience, but not as simple as I had expected it to be, and certainly much worse battery life than I had expected.

Update: I had a chance to take the Pre outdoors to a soccer game. The camera interface is fantastic and it takes great pictures, too. More to come but check out the one below to see how well it handles itself outdoors.