Taking flight: why the iPhone still beats Pre for air travel

Palm's new phone is great for keeping you connected while on the road, but you can't do cloud messaging when you're physically in the clouds. You also can't play games, because there really aren't any, and in fact the Pre doesn't offer much in the way of sheer fun (unless your idea of fun is tweeting about the lack of available apps in Palm's store). Ars reports from the road.

If you're one of the handful of people who follows me on Twitter, you know that I (plus wife and eight-month-old baby) was stuck in New York's JFK airport for two days with no luggage, no laptop power cord, and a Palm Pre. Because I've now spent lots of quality time with the Pre in airports and on planes (some of them grounded on runways for hours), I can now report with authority on what it's like to travel with Palm's newest phone. What I found is that the Pre is a pretty boring travel companion who tires way too easily.

The first thing to note about air travel with the Pre is that airports are very iPhone-friendly places. You don't notice just how many shops and electronics vending machines have iPhone accessories—chargers, battery extenders, external speakers, etc.—until you've rejoined the ranks of the iPhone-less. So, when traveling with a Pre, you need your charger with you at all times; if you've left it behind somewhere, don't expect to walk into some random shop and find much in the way of charging options. (Though I imagine that at least one of the iGo attachments would work, if you can find it.)

Speaking of not being able to buy things for the Pre, Palm seriously needs to get its App Catalog in order. Compared with the iTunes App store, with its tens of thousands of diversions and amusements, Palm's App Catalog is a barren wasteland with only about 30 titles currently on offer. As great as cloud messaging is, its entertainment value is limited, and even if you're a complete messaging addict you still can't do it in-flight.

You also have to be careful how much you message on the ground, since doing intensive e-mail and IM seriously drains the battery. After a full night's recharge, I picked up the Pre and began doing e-mails and IM over breakfast. By the time I was on the shuttle back to JFK an hour later, my battery was down 30 percent. Ouch. If you are going to sit and tap out one message after another on the Pre, make sure you've got access to a power outlet.

There is one diversion on the Pre that's really great, but you'll definitely want to be plugged in while you use it: Sprint TV. The live TV streaming to the device works quite well, and I got a huge kick out of watching ABC News and some reality TV shows on my phone. But I estimate (I haven't formally tested) that I could stream about 30 minutes of TV to the Pre before completely nuking the battery.


It's the battery software, stupid
You'll notice a theme in the comments above, a theme that's familiar to all smartphone users nowadays: battery life, or rather, lack thereof.

My gripe isn't so much with the Pre's battery life, though I wish it were much better, as it is with the fact that webOS doesn't give users nearly enough easy control over the software and OS side of battery optimization. Sure, I can turn off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, but why can't I also temporarily disable Synergy? Even better would be the ability to temporarily disable messaging services that might be operating in the background and that I don't need—maybe I want to retain the ability to see incoming SMS but I can do without Gtalk and AIM. Indeed, Palm should include a "just a phone" mode for those times when your battery gets down to 20 percent and you really need to retain the ability to make and receive calls. Conversely, it should also include a WiFi-only mode for when you just need to use the data services and don't need to make calls.

My other suggestion would be to include all of the battery optimization tweaks on a single card. Screen brightness, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth enable and disable, airplane mode, e-mail message polling intervals, and any other battery saving options could be pulled together under one card for me to access if I need to focus on power conservation. In short, doing manual battery optimization on Pre is a huge pain with the existing options, and it could be made much easier with a centralized interface and some preset battery profiles.

Ultimately, traveling with the Pre made me want my iPhone back, because while the Pre keeps you connected, when you're stuck on an airplane you often just want to watch a TV show or play Field Runners. But hopefully the App Catalog-related gripes have only a temporary shelf-life, and Palm's store will soon be overflowing with games, puzzles, e-books, and other downtime-killing distractions. Once that happens, and if Palm puts the battery situation more under the user's control, it will have a much more travel-friendly device that will keep Pre users from wishing the Best Buy vending machine sold the iPhone 3GS.

http://arstechnica.com/