Living with the Palm Pre

Following on from my earlier article (Feeling somewhat surprised by the Palm Pre), I am planning to live with the Palm Pre to see if it can win me over, as I hope it can, and I will post updates to my adventures here. First off, since the last post I have learned a few things about editing fields using the Palm Pre:

• To move around in a field press and hold the orange button on the keypad then swipe your finger left or right across the screen to navigate (thanks to Angela and E for that one).
• You can copy and paste too (thanks to Nick for this tip) by navigating to the text you want to copy, press SHIFT on the keypad, slide your finger left or right to select text. Then put a finger on the gesture pad and press either C to Copy or X to Cut – move to where you want to paste the text then rest your finger on the gesture pad again and press V.

In using the device I went about setting up the various services - instant messaging was first. My little used AIM address was simple enough to configure, so too was Google Talk. A built in Twitter connection would be a handy addition to this list – not that you could really call it instant messaging of course. In the meantime I am quite happy using Tweed for Twitter and I am also giving the LinkedIn application a go – hopefully this will bring most of my business contacts all together for the first time.

The next step was email, and configuring my general Google Mail address was very quick and painless. Things got a little hairier when I planned to add my Google Apps email addresses. I have my Google Apps and Mail set to use my main domain name but trying to add this under the Mail accounts resulted in the “Unable to sign-in message” leading to a new Manual Set-Up button. I fiddled around with the settings for a while then found the WebOS support article on Google. In a nutshell it basically says add your Google Apps address through the Contacts tab and not the Mail Accounts tab – this automatically sets everything up and it worked fine for me.

Something I really like about the Palm Pre is the ability to set up all my different mail addresses which gives a single place to check for mail and I can see at a glance how many unread mails are waiting in each account. I wrote about this some time ago on another site and I’m glad to finally see it in action. A useful tip is that you can easily change the title of each mail account listed on the mail tab – touch the top tab (Email) then touch Preferences & Accounts – each account is listed in this section – just touch on the account you want to rename and change it in the Account Name field.

I am still waiting for the webOS update to 1.2 (UK) and still can’t find the Amazon MP3 store – but at least I have managed to put some of my audio books onto the device. By the way, If anyone knows of a good mobile RSS feed reader for the Palm Pre please let me know – in the meantime I am using Google Reader which in fairness does a pretty good job.