Umm.. yeah those $99 Pre’s were a mistake
It turns out that Best Buy wasn’t trying to take a haircut on their margins in order to drive more sales through their cell phone department. It was just a mistake.
They’ve change the price back to the $199 price and since they can’t make you pay more money anyone who got away with the lower price can enjoy the error in their favor.
Did anyone manage to get in on a $99 Pre? If so where did you pick it up from?
Palm Pre now available for $99 at Best Buy
A part of me just died today. I read over at Boygeniusreport.com that Best Buy is selling the Pre for $99. Even worst you don’t need to fill out any rebates in order to get this price.
Do I wish I waited? Read more
Why can’t I change my Pre to stay on for longer than 30 seconds?
I’ve been enjoying, well almost enjoying the new 1.1 webOS for almost 12 hours and I’m already pissed. Apparently someone didn’t do enough testing to make sure everything works the way it’s supposed to. I wouldn’t be upset if it were something small but it’s pretty big actually. To access my company’s email I have to use Exchange which now requires me to have a lock code on my phone. No problem – I accept that.
I went into “Screen & Lock” and changed the setting to 30 Seconds just because I wanted to save power last night before I went to bed. I woke up and now I can no longer toggle between the times. I’m only able to select 30 seconds.
I’m currently in the process of restoring my phone to see if going back to square 1 will allow me go undo this.
Palm…..please, please stop screwing you customers. I realize you’re righting an uphill battle but c’mon. I’m already stuck with the phone because I extended my Sprint contract to get it. The hardware is nice and the software is pretty slick too but these little gotchas have to go.
Palm Pre webOS 1.1 finally available
I’ve been going crazy over the last few days because my Pre turned into a dumb phone once I was no longer able to sync my corporate email. Every day on my way into work I’d go ahead and check and ever day it would taunt me and tell me that my phone was “up to date.”
Lo and behold, I make my daily run to Gizmodo.com and find out that 1.1 is available. Yup – the one day I don’t check I find out that it’s availabe.
Right now my phone is updating and I can’t wait for all of the goodies. Say what you want about Palm or the Pre but it’s great that you can get OTA updates to help fix really glaring issues. More specifically here is what 1.1 gives you:
New applications
NFL Mobile Live from Sprint
* Watch or listen to live NFL games right on your phone.
Feature changes to existing applications
Calendar
* For Calendar accounts you create on your phone, the default reminder intervals are 15 minutes for timed events and one day for all-day events. A few notes:
o This change applies only if software version 1.1 was on your phone when you bought it, or if you did a partial or full erase on your phone and signed in to your Palm profile again after updating to version 1.1. If you simply update your phone to software version 1.1, the default reminder intervals in Calendar do not change.
o This change applies only to Calendar events you create on your phone, not to events that are synchronized to your phone from an online account.
Camera
* The Photos application opens more quickly when launched from the camera.
Clock
* Enhanced support for time zones in Clock.
* When you set an alarm in Clock, an alarm icon appears in the notification area at the bottom of the screen. Tap the icon to display alarm details. Alarm details include the following:
o If the alarm is set for the current day, the alarm time appears.
o If the alarm is set for tomorrow, the alarm time and “Tomorrow” appear.
o If the alarm is set for any day other than today or tomorrow, the day of the alarm appears.
Contacts
* Friends added and deleted in Facebook on the web are now correctly added and deleted in the Facebook account in Contacts on the phone.
* As soon as you create or makes changes to a Google contact on the phone, the phone begins a sync to reflect those changes in Google on the web.
* When you set up an Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) email account, you can enter the mail server name as an IP address.
* Support for self-signed certificates with multiple common names has been added.
* When you reply to an email in HTML format using an EAS account, the formatting of the sender’s original message is now retained in the reply.
* Palm’s EAS implementation now supports several Exchange ActiveSync Policies, including the following:
o PIN/Password Required. IT administrators can ensure a password is assigned to the phone. Administrators can also specify the minimum length of the password.
o Inactivity timeout. IT administrators can ensure that an inactive phone goes into a locked state after a certain time period. You cannot set a higher timeout interval for your phone, but you can set a shorter interval.
o Remote Wipe. IT Administrators can remotely erase all data on a phone from their Exchange console. IT administrators can also have the device wipe itself if an incorrect password is entered more than a specified number of times.
Messaging
* You can enter emoticons in new text, multimedia, and instant messages. Emoticons also display in incoming messages.
* If you set the phone to use a 24-hour time format, the message times shown in a conversation appear in 24-hour time.
* If you go into an IM account’s preferences, all the options are available even if you are signed in to the account. You can tap Remove Account to delete the account, enter a new password to update the password, or tap Sign In to sign in with your updated password. Previously, you needed to sign out of the account before you could use these preferences.
* When you delete an IM account, a message now appears asking you to confirm that you want to delete the account.
Phone
* When multiple missed call notifications are displayed on the dashboard, the time of the most recent missed call is shown.
* When you slide the ringer switch off, a bell icon with a slash is displayed. Previously, the icon was a speaker with a slash.
* In Phone Preferences, the Show Contact Matches preference is now turned on by default. When typing on the keyboard in the phone app, the phone automatically displays both the numbers being entered and any contact matches for the characters entered.
System
* Improved functionality of person reminders. A person reminder is a notification that you create in a contact entry. The notification appears when you have a call or exchange an email, text, multimedia, or IM message with a contact.
* Resolves an issue preventing media sync from working with latest version of iTunes (8.2.1).
* When you enter a search term in Card view or the Launcher to perform a universal search, if you select the Wikipedia web search option, results are shown in the Wikipedia Mobile site instead of the Desktop site.
Web
* You can now use symbols from the symbols table (Sym Sym key icon + key) when you enter text into a web page dialog box.
* If you have a page open at a certain zoom level, leave the page, and use the onscreen Back Web Back button button or the back gesture to return to the page, the zoom level is restored right away.
* A new gesture is now available that works the same as the onscreen Forward Web Forward button button. To move forward through open web pages, make a short swipe left to right in the gesture area.
* When using the Wikipedia drop-down search feature in the address bar, results are shown in the Wikipedia Mobile site instead of the Desktop site.
* When you tap a link, the link appears highlighted to indicate it has been activated, even if it takes a moment for the linked page to open.
YouTube
* After you enter search text, you can tap the Search Search icon icon to perform a search. You still have the option of pressing Enter Enter key to perform the search.
With Mojo SDK available, will people start demanding games?
On July 18th, 2009 Palm made their Mojo Software Development Kit (SDK) available to developers. There’s has been a lot of pent up aggression from the developer community anxious to start making apps, showing off their coding muscles and hopefully making some cash in the process. The delay was never explained but there are a lot of tweaks which need to be made to a new mobile OS which is constanly changing and I’d imagine they wanted to prevent an even bigger blowback.
Now that it’s available, people who’ve looked at the SDK are finding a new thing to gripe about. The ability for the Pre to notice and track movement of the screen and have it reflect in apps isn’t as good as it could be. The feeling is that this will prevent killer game apps from being developed. This got me wondering if people are really so starved for ways to waste time that developers need to get this upset. To help me answer the question, I created a poll through Poll Daddy.
You can check it out here: http://poll.fm/12kq0. It’s one questions, three choices and will help the whole internet get a reality check one way or the other with this issue.
My own take? I don’t care. I love games like Tetris, or Bubble Breaker. These are old school games which can be rendered in 2D, adding 3D acceloration or anything like that is lost on me. If I want to play Madden or something like that I’ll fire up my XBOX. Besides with the battery being the way it is on the Pre and other smartphones I can’t imagine people are looking for new and exciting ways to drain their battery even faster. How do you feel?
Phantom Skinz provides clear protection for less
- Phantom Skinz
Once I got my invisbleShield, a lot of people asked me what it was and how much it cost. I was able to get a piece to protect the front and it ended up setting me back $14.95. It has paid off tremendously but a lot of people are just not willing to make that kind of investment for a small pice of plastic.
I can’t argue the logic, and if I wasn’t so afraid of my screen getting scratched I would never have taken the plunge. Phantom Skinz is great for people looking for a way to protect their Pre without paying too much.
Right now you’re able to get both front and back pieces for your Pre for $16.95 courtesy of Amazon.com. This is an 8 dollar savings over the usual $24.95 MSRP.
Once you get it, you can find a video showing you how to install it below:
Would roaming fix issues with Pre signal strength?
It’s become pretty obvious to me over the last month or so of using my Pre that GPS sucks the most battery, and browsing full websites is second. Since I’m waiting for WebOS 1.1 to come out so I can get access to my corporate email again, I’ve had to learn to live without email which has helped my battery life soar. In the middle of all this another thing I’ve been doing differently is enabling roaming to make sure I can get a signal whenever possible.
My money goes to Sprint, but Sprint and Verizon has a great deal. Sprint gets to add subscribers and Verizon gets to keep those people able to get a signal by leveraging their network. It’s hard for me to really call Sprint the Now network, it’s more like the I Wish You Were Here network but Verizon picks up the slack pretty well.
I say all of this to ask if anyone who’s been having problems with their, if you’ve tried to swallow your pride and turn roaming on. It doesn’t appear that it has a significant drain on power and would help to take some of the bitter taste out of your mouth. Has anyone given this a go and have something to share?
