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11/21/2009, 03:07 PM
#1663
My daughter gave me a Palm Pre for my birthday. It apparently cost about $395 at Sprint. By the time I got rid of it and got a phone it cost another $195. So to start with it is was the $580 PDA from hades. I was cautioned by the ladies at Sprint that this can be a challenge to use and not everyone likes them. (Wow -- is THAT the truth!). Well if you put the Palm Pre under your pillow and have a heart "problem" at 2 AM ... you will never get 911 in time to stay alive BUT you can take beautiful pictures of your death. (so see, there are pros and cons.
To get it to turn on you have to screw around with a switch on top of the Palm that does not exactly work (well) -- so it's anyones guess how long it might take to actually power the Palm Pre on (especially in the dark). Thirty seconds to a minute.
So that also means you cannot answer the phone before it becomes a missed call (and you have to return the call). So right off 100% of the incoming calls are missed calls. You must unlock this and flick that and pinch other things .. and ALL calls go into missed status. Now outgoing requires that you get the little bugger turned on and unlocked ... not a simple task. HOWEVER, there ARE two $25 books for Dummies (so actually this is the $630 phone from hades)
Now you must read them constantly and it tells you step by step how to turn it on and click and flick and pinch until it is ready to make a call. But there is a lot of stuff and a lot of reading (studying actually -- as for a midterm -- well, cramming)(except you can actually pass a mid-term).
If you try to call anyone from your "conacts" database you will invariable call the contact above or below the one you were trying to call .. so it is actually better to just memorize important numbers and dial them from a keypad of sorts .. you have to press a red key and then a number .. in the dark at 2 AM while having a heart attack. (as the ladies said "it can be challenging.") Well, how badly do you want to live??
Another kind of tricky thing is that after you enter something as a memo or a to-do or a calendar date you cannot find it again without reading the two Dummy books some more (well, a lot!). At long last you find the calendar but you have missed your meeting or your plane while reading -- but you are getting your money's worth reading Dummies (hate to waste the $50)
Well in time .. took me three days you realize that IF you actually want to receive calls and talk with other people (i.e., make calls) you will need to get a phone. This, after all, is actually a PDA and if you wanted a phone you should have asked for a phone. Dummy (read your book). Well the new phone will cost $195 and they cannot refund the PDA since Sprint did not sell it. (so both the $395 AND the $195 somes out of your pocket). And Sprint does not want your books and neither does Palm ... so you lost the $50 (Dummy). But they told you that you would find it challenging .. so they did not lie.
Now to be honest IF you have a lot of time to read and experiment -- in time -- it ought to get easier and easier to use. I suppose that in time you could make phone calls and receive phone call -- non-emergency phone calls of course. In time you could get the contact list and the calendar in the same half day you needed to use it. But I have no idea how much time that might be since I did not have time for that learning curve. It cost me five days without a phone (lots of missed calls) and in-the-end I got a phone that is a lot like the one I replaced.
It's just a very challenging piece of over-engineering and under-documenting that needs a lot of your time. Time is a resource. In my singular opinion it was the PDA from hades.
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Originally Posted by klbjr
