Mobile Info Planet

During my trip to Madrid, Spain, I had the chance to play around with the Palm Pre for a while (yes, I try out phones even on my vacation if given the opportunity!), and here are some of the impressions I was left with.

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• Build quality did not seem very good. I handled a total of 5 different units and a few of them had some play in the slider, and the power button was very mushy on some units, while on others it felt OK.
  
  
• The usability is very good in general, though there are some actions (="swipes") that a completely new user might not be able to discover for themselves.
  
  I am not very fond of the swiping needed to move between the open apps in the card view though; imagine if you have 8 apps open, that's a lot of swiping to go from the first to the last app (and I am aware of that you can minimize the cards even further by tapping anywhere on the home screen, outside of the cards). I think there should be an option to always display the open apps as tiles (e.g. 3x3), instead of as horizontal cards.
  All that might be a moot point though as many users claim that 3-4 apps is the most you can have open simultaneously without running out of memory, or suffering a noticeable loss of performance...
  
  
• The biggest issue though was the performance. There was a slight lag in most actions, and worse, all animations were choppy even with only one app open. Overall it felt slow.
  
  

Though I had "tried" the WebOS UI on my computer through the emulator offered to developers, it was fun to try out the Pre in person. But I must confess that the overall speed was disappointing.
Granted, all units ran the older version 1.2.1 and many users have reported that the version 1.3.x is generally faster, so I am not sure how much of an issue the bad performance is a at this point. But it was a rather underwhelming experience which confirmed my earlier assertion: WebOS is a few versions away from being an interesting choice for me right now. Perhaps the upcoming version 1.4.x, which reportedly will bring a lot of improvements (including Flash support), will change my mind...

UPDATE
PalmInfocenter have published a small preview of the Palm Pre Plus, and their major complaint with the device echoes my own experience with the Pre: the poor performance.
They say:

'After a few hours with the device, "tap and wait" became quite tiresome.'

I would agree almost completely with that statement, except that I'd say it doesn't take a few hours for it to get tiresome, but only a few minutes.