Gadgetory

hi this is adam lane with pocket now calm and where I'm take a look at the palm pre's user interface and more specifically the task manager this is probably the best feature of the palm pre tom has never been one for multitasking or task management it was always you open a program and use that program and that's it you can't really switch the webos on palm pre has totally changed that in it I think it's the best task manager around on mobile device first off you have your home screen and you have these four icons at the bottom now a swipe from the bottom up we'll bring you will bring those four icons up with your finger and you can scroll across them and then you have a little tooltip telling you which one does what which is great and one thing you may not notice you can just go like this and swipe it right off the screen and that'll activate those the icon on the right so you don't have to look at it the screen to do that so that's pretty nice I do it with the other hand it goes straight to the phone doing do you have to kind of do it a little slowly for it to catch up so this is your application launcher you can scroll up and down we can also scroll side to side that was a little bit confusing because you have three pages to the left and right and you also scroll up and down so it's kind of hard to find applications sometimes however there's an easier way because we minimize our current program we have a keyboard so when I'm on this home screen and the applications are minimized like so I can just type and then I press ENTER because that's program that I typed and is selected and it instantly opens that program really really great Universal Search feature for finding the program's you want to get back to that I have to minimize that again and then i can type another program and as long as it's selected right there i just press enter and it comes up now if i don't type that much we also get contacts and now if i type tap in the background we get smaller program thumbnails that i can scroll through quicker but if they're this size i can swipe one at a time so that's pretty nice and closing them I just flick it off the screen and that's others obviously not intuitive because you know how would you know that there's nothing in the interface indicating that that's how you would close the program however you probably went through the tutorial at the beginning when you first boot it up the palm pre and that would've taught you how to do that so very nice now if you get too many of these programs opened and you try to open another program it's going to tell you that you have to close some of these cards compare that to Windows Mobile which would just kind of try to close the least used open application by itself and maybe that will slow it down maybe it'll freeze who knows so the pre is really putting task management back into your hands now these four icons are customizable so if I tap on it hold it I can move it around and if I remove one of them I can put another one in I kept an old there we go again not intuitive but a nice little way to move things around come back here I might email back all right one thing that is kind of annoying if I'm in the email program say I you know type the email air and I hit enter now you know normally I hold the phone like this would keyboard but now I can't do anything with the keyboard I can't access the menu I can't scroll to my inbox I can't open it all in bucks you really have to take one hand off keyboard and go up here and tap it with your finger so that can be kind of knowing because you also have to do that in all your applications if you want to do anything even a great new message now you gotta tap there you have type and you know I want to get down to the message body but I got to move my hand again sat down there so that's kind of like let's take a look at how this interface compares with the treo pro windows mobile also capable of multitasking usually your recent programs are up here so that's a pretty quick and easy way to access those and what's nice about the treo pro is we don't have to move my hand to access those I can do everything with keyboard and we also have our customized program icons are hardware buttons so those are always there unfortunately it doesn't have the nice universal search for finding programs but everything is still controllable by the keyboard without touching the screen see all my my hands are stay in one place so that that's the nice feature of windows mobile and go back to pre that was an appointment there's my trios just talking to me it's made an announcement and read it to me that's another thing that I miss on here free no no text to speech and no voice control so you just hear a ding and then you have to go find your phone and look at it and read it kind of pain but the notifications are nice sit down here and it kind of minimizes the rest of the screen and we can tap on them to read them so overall love be task management here close programs really nice and easy switching programs again great so that's it for now