I got my Pre

Marv's Palm Pre

So a couple weeks ago my e-mail client on my Treo 700p died. It would send the Treo into reboot hell whenever I launched. In the four years or so prior to that, it was probably the best mobile e-mail program I could ask for. But, there no point to naming names now, since the makers of that software sold out to Palm and are no longer selling new licenses.

Anyway, I got in line just in the nick of time on Saturday. Turns out the Sprint store had 25 units in stock, I was the 24th in line and one of the guys ahead of me bought two.

After my first 36 or so hours with the Pre, I feel comfortable enough that I will keep it. The only really big concern of mine was the battery life. On Saturday, I ran the battery down from 90-ish percent down to below 50% in two hours while I was setting it up and trying out everything. This morning, I intended to buy a spare battery and another charger. However, I decided that I would try to get through one day one a single charge just to see if the battery could be coaxed into making it through the day.

I charged the Pre overnight and unplugged it from the wall around 7 a.m. As I write this it is now around 11:30 p.m. and the battery is at 57%. Admittedly, I used the Pre rather lightly today because I expected the battery life to suck. However, I am now confident that the Pre will survive my normal work day.

I configured my Pre to extend battery life without too many tradeoffs.

  • I disabled wi-fi and bluetooth.
  • I left location services and GPS enabled. But only because I forgot to disable them. I will likely leave these enabled in the future, it doesn’t seem to be too much of a drain.
  • I set e-mail to only check for new mail once per hour

During the course of the day, I checked e-mail about a half dozen times and I left Tweed (the only WebOS twitter client so far) on in the background. Although Tweed was running in the background, I don’t think it queries Twitter’s API unless it is in the foreground.

So bottom line, battery is suitable for every day use if the above caveats are acceptable to you. I’ll probably get another battery just for those rare occasions when I use the phone a lot. Well, that’s a lot to say just about battery life. It is 11:30 so I’ll leave the rest for another day.