Playing with the Pre and 3GS

I've been so busy with moving and everything, that I'm not on top of my gadget fondling. Well, I cut out of work on time today, and went to the nearest Sprint store, to spend some quality time with a Palm Pre. And then after dinner, I ambled over to the Apple Store in the Marina to play with an iPhone 3GS. And I have to say, at this point, I have a pretty tough decision ahead of me.

First, the Palm. In the Sprint store, the two Pre's that they had on display were annoyingly tethered -- while it was possible to pick the device up, the tether wanted to pull it back to earth. Annoying. Even more annoying, the demo units were running some sort of special demo software, which was supposed to highlight the features of the Pre. But in reality, all it served to do was get in the way -- it kept popping up and annoying me, and it continually ran in the background. I'm wondering if that application caused some of the middling performance that I observed while playing with the Pre:

A Palm Pre, smudged by countless hands (mine included)...

Nevertheless, the Pre is pretty cool. I was actually hoping that it would be a lot faster than my original iPhone, but in side-by-side tests (with Daring Fireball loaded in both browsers), scrolling speed & wait time for the phone to catch up was about identical. And the keyboard seems like it is OK, not great. I was able to type accurately, but slowly. I'm sure that I could get faster with practice, but as of right now, I'm really hooked on side-typing on iPhone 3.0.

I will say that the "card" interface on the Pre is pretty cool. I liked being able to re-arrange cards, and swipe them up to close the application. The metaphor seems strong, and I think will serve WebOS well into the future. And the "hidden gesture area" is neat as well -- it actually has little lights that show that the phone recognized your input (which I just have missed in the 3 or 4 reviews that I read).

I followed-up my Pre experience by spending some quality time with the new iPhone 3GS at an Apple Store. And the experience here was just much better, all the way around. Apple has a bunch of iPhones that you can play with, and they're all loaded up with applications, music, movies, etc. There is a demo movie that plays when the iPhone is idle, but once you start playing with it, you are never pestered.

And the speed. The speed is quite impressive. I did several side-by-side tests with my original iPhone and the iPhone 3GS (dual-wielding, if you will). Since Apple runs an open WiFi network in their stores, I was able to have both phones attached to the same network. The iPhone 3GS wasn't much faster in my Daring Fireball test, but it absolutely blew away the original iPhone in the New York Times test. I mean, it's not even funny. With my current iPhone, I have whole list of websites that are "mobile friendly" that I visit when using Mobile Safari. It seems like with the iPhone 3GS, you can just visit any website -- so long as it doesn't have flash, the enhanced processor in the iPhone 3GS will make the site usable.

In fact, the iPhone 3GS brought a smile to my face several times when I was playing with it, which the Palm failed to accomplish. I like the weight and feel of the iPhone better than that of the Pre (although I think I still prefer the original iPhone with the flat back). And I could definitely use a boost in storage capacity the the iPhone 3GS affords over the Pre. But I do like the idea of being able to write web apps for my phone, and the Pre does have some interesting innovations over the iPhone.

I think that my 2 year contract with AT&T is up this Friday, so I'll have some more pondering to do next week.

-Andy.