Gadgetory

hey guys its brand emitted from pocket now calm I've been waiting for a long time for AT&T to pick up a webos device finally last week the palm pre plus was announced and it's coming out in early June on the carrier I've been using it as my daily driver for a full week now and I just wanted to report back with a few different aspects of the palm pre plus having used it for seven days now so in this video we're going to cover ergonomics and gestures performance productivity and battery life let's take a look ok so let's start off by talking about the hardware the ergonomics as I mentioned in the hardware tour video I don't like the keyboard particularly much on the palm pre plus I find that it's sunken in and it's difficult to use unless you're using sort of the fingernails on your thumbs and after using this for a week I still feel this way I thought that perhaps that after a while I would get used to it but that's not the case if you want a really really good keyboard the palm pixi in the palm pixi plus is in my opinion one of the best keyboards of any mobile phone out there and of course the palm pixi plus is coming to AT&T in the near future so if you're on the ATT network this may be the better one to get except this is the palm pixi plus and the palm pixi are underpowered compared to the pre which is really unfortunate so let's talk more about the ergonomics on the palm pre plus on 80 I find the device to feel overall numb there's no there are no buttons on the front there are only buttons on the sides here and there is a standby button on the top so none that sometimes I take the phone out of my pocket and I don't realize which way I'm holding the phone because it's all the same the only way to tell if you're holding the phone right side up is to look at this little chrome strip up here but if you're feeling for your phone you're trying to do something really quick a lot of the times I've taken the phone out and I'm like oh this is the wrong way so I flip it over whereas on other devices like the hd2 or any other phone there are hardware buttons and you can feel for them and you know okay I don't feel hardware buttons therefore I am on the top or I feel hardware buttons therefore I'm on the bottom and on the palm pre plus it's just not that easy so I feel that it's overall a bit numb the device is also thick paired to other devices I know it as a slide-out keyboard and it's about as thick as the HTC touch pro2 but I think because it's small because it's not very tall not very wide it just feels like a little brick it's not that heavy but it definitely has some thickness to it so let's talk about the gestures webos has so many gestures built in that you could probably write a 10-page book about them so let's go into them now so I'm going to unlock the screen I guess that could be considered one gesture but I'm not going to call it won the first gesture I want to talk about is a notification gesture I think webos is one of the best notification systems of any smartphone operating system it's very unobtrusive and it's very easy to action on so perfect i have two notifications here i tap down here and here are the two different notifications that i have i can tap on either to read it fully got a text message and an email where i can swipe them off the screen if i don't want to see them anymore and then it goes back to the full screen view and again these notifications can pop up while you're working but they don't pop up in front of your face like you'll find on the iphone or other smartphone operating systems so that is a look at one gesture another gesture is the simple gesture to go back to the home screen and I thought for a very long time that to go back to the home screen you tap on this capacitive area and that will work but I'm actually wants you to do it a different way they want you to swipe upwards to get back to the home screen and I think that actually feels a little bit better if you swipe up one more time here you'll get your program list we're going to talk about that in a minute if you tap and hold on your cards you'll get the zoomed out card view although for most people you probably won't need to use this and what it lets you do it's rearrange the cards because you're probably going to close the cards when you're done with them unless you're using an application a time like email or Twitter so you'll leave them open all the time but even then you probably don't need to rearrange the cards I've never run into that situation so let's go back in and we'll go back to another application now another gesture you can do and this one helps tremendously when you're trying to get to an application that can only be found in your application tray is to drag up and you get the sort of favorite you get your four favorite apps and on the right you get your full application tray so you don't have to bounce back to the home screen to jump to the next application which is really nice and really helps a lot with productivity another gesture that you can use to switch aptly switch between applications is the right to left swipe so i can actually shuffle through my cards like so and it actually looks like you're shuffling through cards so i have three applications open instead of going back to my home screen I don't even have to leave the app and this is kind of like doing alt tab on the computer if you're using a Windows machine just a really convenient way to cycle through the open windows that you have so I'm going to go into the web browser and show you one final gesture that really helps a lot with navigation so let's go into the web browser and I'm over Wi-Fi network so let's load pocketnow.com the browser is good it's not great i think the browser on android and on the iphone and even opera mobile 10 on Windows Mobile is better but it's definitely capable so here we have pocket now that come loaded you can scroll down and sometimes it lags a little bit it's not very responsive to the touch and you get the checkerboard pattern if you zoom down very fast but the gesture that i want to show you here is that you can actually use the capacitive area on the right to scroll which is just a really good idea this way you're not having to put your finger over text you can read everything it just works very very well and it goes one notch at a time so it's not too much it's not too little and you can see the little lights sort of transforming as I do the gesture so really cool thing that I think helps a lot with getting around a web page and back to the car view we go okay so let's talk about productivity for me productivity on a mobile device is very very important I want to be able to multitask I want to be able to jump around from application to application without too much difficulty so let's go into say the web and let's say I want to load this link right here and all the while I want to open up my email so I'm going to swipe over to my email and it looks like i just did a back gesture so if you don't do a full swipe if you do like a half swipe you're actually going to use the back function in webos and this is a problem in webos I think because it's kind of annoying to have to use the gesture pad to move back and in a program like Twitter and thuy free you really notice this another great thing about webos is that as an application is loading you can flick it off the screen to close it in other operating systems you have to wait until the application fully loads before you do anything but in this case if you open an app and you say Oh on second thought I don't want to use it you can flick it right off the screen and there is no hiccup in the device so what it login to twitter here and show you this back gesture because this is actually one that i forgot and so let's say that I tap on John for lakers here and I want to go back to the previous screen I have to swipe back and you use that a lot and I find it to be so annoying I just want a hey bag button a hardware button that I can click that I can find very easily I don't like this gesturing and so if you do a full swipe then you get the ability to switch between applications but only if you do a full swipe you can see how your thumb is going to get a lot of use in webos so we were talking about productivity and how the ability to switch from app tap is very very important and as I mentioned web post give you a lot of different ways to go from app to app of course we have this that we just talked about we have the full swipe to go back and forth we have the home screen view which lets you switch between applications so in terms of productivity I find myself to be very productive using webos it just works very very well and speaking of applications I like how the application tray is set up in webos so let's go into there it's comprised of three different screens which is different than other operating systems where maybe you'll have a very very long list of applications like in windows mobile or you'll have screen after screen at the screen of apps like in iphone in the case of webos you have three screens one two and three and the way as I think about it is that the center screen is what I like to keep where I like to keep the things that I use the most often and webos actually remembers which screen you're on so if i end up with this screen the one on the left and i go back into I'm taken to the one on the left so with that in mind I keep all the programs that I like the most in the center and you can tap and drag anything from the other screens to another screen to populate it with the things that you use the most which really helps a lot so that you're not having to flip through a ton of application lists and screens and other things like that so for productivity webos gets really high marks I've really enjoyed using webos on the palm pre plus on ATT for that now let's talk about performance you see that I have a lot of cards open right now and I'm going to open up even more and really try to toll the platform I'm going to open up an additional card and the way you can do that is go up to this drop-down menu which I also don't like too much and I can click new card and let's go to say engadget com yep there we go hand click enter by the way while this is loading something that I do like about webos is the is the menu in the upper right corner so you can toggle between off very easily this way we're just leaving on all of the time and you don't have to go into a separate menu to see the the networks that are open it's kind of an overlay in the upper right corner so that's pretty cool i like that but again i don't like this menu in the upper left corner because you have to be very precise with your finger to open it up so here we are we've got to web web sites open although this one turned blank on me for some reason up there comes so we'll go back to their so now we have two web browsers we have twitter email calculator and photos let me open up a photo let's open up the strawberry picture and as you can see it's blurry right now and it's going now it gets clear webos takes a long time to clear up pictures which I don't like particularly much and so we can swipe to the right or to the left and see it's lagging right now it's starting to get a bit slow and I'm going to pinch to zoom in a second so you can see what that looks like pinch to zoom is very good on webos it's very precise let's go back to the home screen we've got a ton of things open let's see if we can make this thing get really upset and close on us open up Google Maps while that's happening I'm going to open up another application let's say open up the camera and you know what's going to happen in a second it's going to say out of memory which is fine webos does a really good job at managing memory and for the most part you don't run into the to the notification where you're running out of memory that much and I am actually quite impressed this is a this is a lot of applications that are open right now and it's still performing decently well they've made a lot of improvements in webos to get it to perform well with multitasking they've doubled the ram in the palm pre plus vs. the palm pre which as you can see helps a lot I wish there was a way to close all of the apps at one time but you're probably not going to have that many open at one time anyway and finally I'm going to talk about battery life battery life on the on the palm pre plus is a lot better than it was on the sprint palm pre I get through a day usually with no problem right now I've been using my device a lot it's about 147 in the afternoon and again these notifications are sometimes tough to press I'm trying to see my battery life percentage I'm at sixty-two percent it's going down a little bit fast today I think tonight before i plug it in it'll be about twenty five percent which is pretty good a lot better than many other smartphone operating systems out there before I give some final thoughts I'm going to wrap up and talking about the app catalog which is of course palms app store for webos I have a certain suite of applications that i like to download there's about six or seven of them I have them on the iphone i have them on android because those are both mature application marketplaces but i can't find most of those applications in the webos app Cadillac it's just not variant there's not enough developer support for the palm app catalog which is very unfortunate because a lot of the applications that you can get are pretty high quality there are some really fantastic racing games on here there's applications for Twitter of course there's always applications for Twitter but there's also a lot of junk a lot of these little applications that aren't so great but I guess you'll find that in any sort of the more open application marketplaces but in terms of the app offering it pales in comparison to what you can get on Android or the iphone so some final thoughts there are two things that are keeping me from loving the palm pre plus on AT&T but I already like it I really like the software i love the way that you can multitask switch between applications handle notifications use gestures organize your applications i love it all it's a very very productive friendly operating system if you're a business user or someone that likes to get a lot done it's a great operating system but there are two big problems one I don't like the hardware at all I don't like this keyboard I don't like the overall feel of the palm pre I never really did they really need to come out with some more form factors and number two the application selection is just not there yet I don't use a million apps i only use a couple but those those few that i do use I use a lot and I can't find them for webos so I'm very much looking forward to the AT&T palm pixi plus because that will solve at least one of these problems of the hardware but it won't necessarily fix the shortage of apps in the App Catalog that's it for now if you liked this video it was helpful for you please be sure to thumbs up the video and subscribe to our channel that's it for now