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 Originally Posted by minister
But that's the main thing I'm looking for is a good calendar function with notifications, etc. Does that mean I should steer away from the Pre?
Sorry, missed it yesterday.
The calendar is unusable in a business context. It's just fine if you're sitting and deciding what you're going to do next week, entering an event here and there, and sync with Google. Not a problem.
But when you're facing someone and you are both trying to decide on a series of upcoming meetings or reschedule existing ones, that's where problems begin.
People say it's slow, and others say, so what, it's all relative, just take it slow. But here you have to keep up with another person, and they may be talking to you on the phone and cann't see that you are struggling to enter everything that's being discussed and are falling behind. And worse, you enter wrong dates and hours, which is very easy to do on the Pre. The widget that selects the date and time does not show you day names, only numbers, and you cannot preview what a particular day looks like, and the Pre does not warn you of conflicts (you may even have a conflict with a calendar that's currently hidden). And paging to individual days is very slow.
Further, the date and time widget has scrolling wheels that are "physics enabled". That is, they have inertia, even though the number of items in them doesn't justify it. Those scrolling wheels are very fiddly and error prone, you barely touch them and they roll past your day, and then you try to swipe down, and again miss until finally you snag the entry you wanted.
All this can be done with some practice and patience, and some may think that the inertia on the scrolling wheels is slick. But in a business settings, you simply cannot sit there in front of other people and fumble around. It looks unprofessional, and doubly so if you enter the wrong date and miss an appointment.
So we have a UI that's too slow for moving between day views, and too fast when selecting with scrolling wheels. And it's just maddening and makes you look bad. I've had a person who writes everything down in a notebook email me later with the list of meetings we agreed on, "just in case", because they saw me get it wrong before with the Pre.
Then there is the matter of notifications and alarms. They mostly work, but not always. They may not work occasionally, but these are things that have to work always in an organizer.
The worst example is setting your alarm clock, only to wake up in the morning and find that it didn't sound off because it's still waiting for you to dismiss a notification first (an SMS or email that came through the night). There are more problem with the alarm, this is not the only one.
When you are at a meeting that you entered as a recurring event, and need to update the same meeting (that is, while the event is in progress), the Pre goes nuts. It will start ringing all the reminders for the new event time, in a series and in random intervals, as if you were late to the new date. First reminder, which BTW, is obnoxiously loud and non-configurable on the Pre, is forgiven by others in the room. Then another comes, and another and finally you just turn the ringer off (you don't want to, because the Pre vibration is barely noticeable) and everyone is wondering what the hell are you doing with the phone and why are you interrupting everyone. It looks unprofessional.
And you can't undo edits. I was trying to copy someone's address and accidentally hit V (paste) instead of C (copy) and the address was gone. I did this so I can enter it into the Sprint Navigation app (which cannot access your address book!). So now I was on my way, with no address and no navigation, and I arrived late.
They say that update 1.2 will fix many of those problems. I hope so. Maybe you should wait until it's out and reassess.
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