Last night I was helping a friend with a dead cable modem/sick kid/puppy drama.  I had a BRIEF 45 minute chat with Comcast and I used the Pixi. The call was clear.  It was comfortable to hold. I was able to use the speakerphone, which worked out well. I even used the mute function! ;)  All in all the phone portion of the ‘smartphone’ was pretty good.

The Pixi has also been my primary media player. I haven’t loaded any MP3s on it yet, but Pandora has sure gotten a workout.  The great thing about WebOS is you can run multiple apps at the same time.  So while Pandora is cracking out the tunes, I can be chatting away on gTalk.  I usually have it patched into my car stereo.  The audio quality is pretty good.  It doesn’t lag at all and the app pauses when you get a call or if you unplug the headphone cable. Which is good in my book. Nobody needs to know I was listening to Metro Station.  Another cool feature of Pandora on Palm is the song title and artist are displayed on the lock screen; so you don’t have to unlock the phone to see who you’re listening to.  I imagine this is part of the SDK. Alas, the is no last.fm client for Palm. Sigh.

The only minor issue I’ve run across this far, is when you’re in 1x data service the phone gets really warm…which means it’s using more power…which means the battery is going to die quicker…which means I’ll be a sad panda. Verizon says they have the largest 3G coverage are, but most of the length of Wisconsin 29 I was in 1x data.

More on coverage area tomorrow.

More on Pre tomorrow. (promise)

Cheers,
Breon

Blogged with my Android powered HTC Hero (ironic)

I’m a very lucky boy.  Yesterday, I picked up two shiny Palm devices; The Pre Plus and Pixi Plus.  Both are brand new and are available on Verizon Wireless.

I’ve only had them for a short time, and the batteries were almost dead when I got them.  But I was able to monkey around with them for a couple of hours.  My initial thought: Wow. Why haven’t I considered Palm?

Over the next few days, I’ll be tweeting, posting thoughts, comparisons,  videos, pictures (of and taken by) and I’ll wrap it up with a  full review.

I want to thank Albert Maruggi from Provident Partners and Karen Smith from Verizon Wireless for hooking me up.

Cheers,
Breon