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01/17/2010, 12:09 PM
#2124
Soccerlsc11, I can certainly understand the lack of confidence you are feeling regarding your phone at the current moment. If my first Palm (PDA) or my first Treo (smartphone) had the sort of issues that the Pre has had, I would not be the "Palm fan boy" that I am today. As I alluded in my last post, the biggest problem is that Palm and their contract manufacturer haven't managed the manufacturing process to reduce variability to an acceptable level. The design of the phone itself (except for the slider) is superb. The manufacturing process needs to have mechanisms in place to catch each possible defect at the time of introduction. This might double the manufacturing cost of the phone but (even triple) that cost would be dwarfed against the "cost of non-conformance" that they have now. Like you, I write here because I believe intelligent people from Palm read this forum. I've seen many of my suggestions implemented in later Palm products (including the introduction of the economically priced "centro" smart-phone line). I've never seen the issue/workaround regarding the USB on your 2nd Pre ever reported here, and given that other users often experience the same problems, just saying that (and some of us reading that) will likely help other users down the road here. That distinguishes you from users who "just come here to vent". We get so many of those that oftentimes we just want to ignore such posts. Just like you, we come here primarily for answers and ideas to make our lives better. As humans, we sometimes dismiss experiences that are dissimilar to our own. We shouldn't, but we are human!
Regarding insisting on a new vs refurbished phone, I think the best strategy is to read up on how to evaluate a replacement phone before leaving the store. While customers shouldn't have to learn how to do this, it will be in your best interest in the event you find yourself needing to accept another replacement. You are probably about 3/4 of the way there already. Given that you are a busy single mom, finding a thread on this and knowing the steps in advance will save you time if you find yourself "in the Sprint store" again. In addition to what you know, you need to learn to check for dead pixels, uneven backlight (rare and just cosmetic), and a poor battery connection (a past problem, but might be possible in a refurb). There also is a program on the phone that lets you test lots of things (including screen colors and that all the keys/buttons are working). Out of curiosity, you'll want to check the build date. Older builds aren't necessarily bad, but they might clue you in to check for some of the older, now more rare, problems. You should do all these checks on your current phone (and when it passes, your level of confidence in the phone will go way up).
There are other fun things you can learn about here and do with the phone. The most useful is to set your phone up so that you can install and use "homebrew apps". You might even want to learn this before learning how to evaluate a replacement phone "in store". The easiest current route is to install "WebOS quick install" on your home computer and use this to install preware on your phone. From there, you can use preware to install just about any homebrew app and some "patches" that customize the way various WebOS programs/apps behave so that they will be more useful to you. Stay away from themes (at least at first). I've found that some themes do not fully uninstall and this becomes a problem if you install another theme when a first one is not cleanly installed. Going down this road right now will simply reduce your confidence in the phone at a time when you don't need such hassles. In case you are wondering, themes are just things like changing the appearance of the phone without changing functionality. These appearance changes might be around the theme of a movie or a sports team. Whenever a WebOS update comes out, it is safest to remove all themes and patches before applying the update. There is a special patch in Preware (called "Emergency Patch Recovery", abreviated as "EPR") that does a good job of removing all patches/themes and that's the method I use. After applying one or two patches, you should do a "fire drill" to make sure you know how to find and run this patch. Often when WebOS tells you it has an update, if you say "no" (which I read as meaning "later"), that later happens faster than you would intuitively think it will. The phone waits until you plug it into the charger and the it installs the WebOS update (often without you even realizing that this has happened). I've had that happen twice so far with various patches. I forgot to remove my patches before WebOS did it's update thing. Usually running EPR from Preware after the fact fixes things. In recent WebOS patches, they changed some of the layout of files on the device, so a new program (similar to EPR) called "EPM" (or "Emergency Patch Migration") was written. It gets run the same way as EPR. I guess if you decide not to do any homebrew, you won't need to learn what I've written about in this paragraph, but in my opinion, the subject of this paragraph is well worth the effort!
Well, I'm hoping that I've "fully indoctrinated" you by now. Most likely I've just added a new level of confusion onto your already busy plate. Just remember you don't have to do any of this unless your current phone starts to show problems. Two paragraphs back will help you if it does, and one paragraph back will help you to get much more out of the phone itself. More and better programs are coming out on WebOS every day and these are exciting times. Welcome to the PreCentral community!
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Originally Posted by Monsterj3033
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