On Tue, 1 Mar 2011, Jeremy MountainJohnson wrote:

> The text retrieval information was very insightful, thank you for 
> posting this.

Thanks.  I've been working on improving the code for extracting text 
messages and I'll post that later this week.


> I had the first generation Palm Pre about two years ago and I remember 
> that there was a 3rd party Terminal application that allowed you to play 
> around in CLI on the phone itself. One could also install and use ssh on 
> the phone- very cool.
>
> The phone had a lot of potential running on Linux, but like you 
> mentioned, the limited resources bring some weak performance (although I 
> hear the later generation phones were beefed up a bit). I sold mine 
> after 6 months of sub-par performance and went back to my 10 year old 
> Samsung clamshell :)

I had my Pre in the shop about 5 times and probably replaced it three 
times.  They released it on June 6, 2009, in a mad rush to compete with 
Apple's iPhone which was just finishing its second year, so contracts were 
expiring.  It definitely was not ready, but they had a pretty good system 
for upgrading the OS, and it kept getting better while I owned it.  For 
example, it couldn't record video when I bought it, but months later, it 
could.  I think they didn't capture the interest of developers to the 
extent they expected.

One of the big problems I've had is with synchronizing.  The earlier 
PalmOS devices would *fully* synchronize with a PC, so you could toss the 
device, replace it, sync, and you would have absolutely everything the 
same as before.  The Pre does not sync text messages, system settings, 
ringtones, or really anything.  They want users to sync with "the cloud," 
but they don't sync much.  They won't even do it in-house:  If you need to 
replace your phone, they won't move your text messages, call records, or 
anything else to your new phone.  Things like contacts are stored in the 
cloud -- for me it's Google -- and that is nice.  It does interact well 
with Google's calendar, gmail and contacts, but interacting well with 
Google can't be a good selling point when you're competing with Android.

One reason I went with the Pre was that I had a Treo 600 for about 6 years 
of consistent performance and I use Sprint.  So I thought the Pre would 
give me some continuity and my old stuff could run on the new device. 
Well, I never got around to porting my old PalmOS apps to the Pre and I 
really don't love Sprint, so this June, or soon afterward, I am pretty 
likely to try something else.  Maybe Android.

Mike