What did you think about build quality? Also, where did you see the phone? At a dealer?

gestures = awesome... i agree with OP, I just don't know if I'll ever be comfortable with physical back buttons and such anymore... the iPhone feels confusing when trying to navigate without gestures... It's like being a playstation gamer then trying to use a xbox controller or vica versa(sorta)... The Hero will be a great phone though and I like seeing companies expanding the UI of Android

Yeah, they have the same resolution, but the Pre has 32-bit color and the Hero does not (no Android does yet, AFAIK). The Pre definitely has objective advantages over the Hero...no question about that.

But sometimes it's simply a question of tradeoff. The Hero screen is not as sharp, but it is slightly larger and has oleophobic coating. As far as the web browsing, I do believe the Pre browser is objectively smoother at pinching and zooming, but it lacks other competitive advantages like being able to see - much less play - Flash videos on Web pages. With the Hero, you can browse Engadget or Gizmodo or Cnet, and when they have a hand-son video or a review video, you can see it and start playing it fullscreen in the browser. With the Pre, there's just a blank space, so you can't even find the video in the YouTube app on the Pre because there is nothing to search for. Also, the Android browser doesn't have the stupid half-render bug that often requires you to switch orientation just to get the rest of the page to load.

This is another YMMV. I thought I would never like a virtual keyboard either, but I briefly had the Instinct S30 before the Pre hit, and I got used to typing on it in no time, and that was on a resistive screen with no real correction functions to speak of.

But I, too, am excited to see what Palm brings down the pike. I just can't keep the Pre as my phone long enough to find out. It still shuts down randomly with slider action despite me having stuffed a good wad of paper in the battery cavity space. The phone app is still too sluggish for me not to regularly miss calls. That stuff ranks far above millions of colors versus hundreds of thousands.

But I fully intend to check out WebOS 2.0 on a hopefully far superior piece of hardware.

Biuld quality was great, very solid, good weight to it. The screen just wasn't as vibrant. I can't say where I saw the phone at. But it was a final version of it.

Thanks. Did you try to adjust the screen settings?

the browser for android is the closest thing to the iphone. I think the pre can be better with some fine tuning.
half loaded pages and pics not showing up is unacceptable. I hope 1.2 addresses those issues.

The keyboard issue is a big one and will be most people biggest hurdle. A lot of people have never used android but are solely using youtube vids as their comparison. I am not pointing fingers, really I am not. Android is pretty cool but just klike webos, you have to get used to it. I am just happy to have so many options.

The hero is going to bring sprint a lot of customers and they know it. I think there will be a even bigger push for this phone than the pre. Price alone shows sprint is not playing around.

The screen being a little watered down is not that much of a difference. I notice the sprint hero has a more vibrant screen than any other android phone to date, except for the samsung models. Gizmodo said the same thing that it is more vibrant than the gsm hero.

You know, I have heard people talk about these problems but haven't seen them myself. Can you give me some examples of sites that don't work correctly so that I can try them with the previously "leaked" 1.2 version with my user agent patch?

Speaking strictly for myself, it's not a specific site that causes half-loading. It does it at random across a wide range of sites.

Im also thinking of going with the Hero. I like the looks of it. My Pre frustrates me at times. I love the OS. Love how it feels in my hand. But hate the slider. Keyboard isnt the greatest. And I still cant hear the damn thing sometimes. The volume just..well it sucks. One thing I did fall in love with is the roam only hack. I hope I can do that with the Hero also. It made my phone so much more usefull at work. Bring out a Pre with a slightly bigger screen, no slider, make it louder so my old ears can hear it...lol, and fix dialer lag , oh and maybe a light to notify me when its sitting beside me at work, and i wont go anywhere. Im not real picky like some of you guys. And besides a few websites I dont use it for entertainment much at all.

The screen is 65K colors like all the HTC phones. The Pre is True Color 16.7 million colors.

We are on the site that does it. M.precentral.net. Its not the only one but I use this site a lot. Happens only once in a while but enough to be bothersome. I have to go in landscape to see the rest of the page. Its like it loaded the whole page but I can't see some of the bottom of the page.

I'll take a screen shot the next time it happens. I am sure it will happen again before the nights up. I hope it doesn't but odds are it will. I have had 4 pre's and it has happened on all of them so I don't know.

For those who dislike the Pre's form factor, but love the OS and it's capabilities; then I suggest you wait for the Pixi as well and make a final decision. Once the holidays come around, Sprint users can have a variety of good phones to choose from. From HTC's Touch Pro 2, Palm Pre, HTC Hero to the Palm Pixi.

Great collection of phones Sprint has there.

said it before and i'll say it again in case the palm people are reading this. love the pre a lot but the phone software is awful. fix it and get a notification light in 1.2 or its hero time.

The way to fix that is to pinch out. The phone just thinks its zoomed in or something like that. A bug for sure but zooming out to fix the problem hasn't failed me yet.

Wait for the pixi!!!!! Are you kidding, that is more of a joke then then pre!!!! Palm contiues to shoot themselves in the foot. The pixi without wifi, what a joke. The pre will be a good phone someday....gen3 maybe, if palm can last that long. Sprint is really on a roll on the phones they are bringing in, and im sorry to say, palm will be out. I wouldN'T be suprised to see iphone on sprint within a year!!!!
AT&T ADMITTED THIER NETWORK CANT HANDLE APPLE. PRETTY SAD AND AT LEAST THERE HONEST!!! APPLE WILL WISE UP SOMEDAY AND GO TO SPRINT. WHAT ELSE WOULD THEY GO TO T-MOBILE...HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

No wifi was at the request of Sprint.

Thanks for the review.
I was thinking of buying the Hero before your review.
First I saw the Engadget review followed by Gizmodo's.
Both the reviews indicated that the Pre is more polished.
Then last week, two more reviews were done by engadget and gizmo.
They said the Hero was slow with a big lag when opening the APPS
on the updated Sprint ROM.
After your review I am convinced that the Hero is not as polished as the Pre.

I moved from an HTC Touch to the Pre... I like many features of the Pre but hate the lag time in initially opening an app... I wish it were peppier... I also have grown to hate the slide down keyboard... I prefer a Candybar (Treo-style design) over any slide down and I actually liked the Touch's on screen keyboard... at least at night my over 40 eyes can see the on screen keyboard while I have to squint even with glasses at the tiny Palm keyboard... Don't get me wrong, the Pre is a great device, but has some lackings for me

palm pixi

Right ON!