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Final Post: Looking Forward

Thanks and what I am looking forward to with my on-going Pre experience.

Catherine Gouge
4 min read
In this final post, I would like to say a little about what I look forward to in my Pre experience and express my appreciation for this opportunity to share my experience and ideas about the Palm Pre.

What I Look Forward to Most

As I have said and implied in many of my posts, I love my Pre. I have had mostly positive (mostly very positive, actually,) experiences with the phone since I got it. It works with me seamlessly for the most part and has allowed me to stay in contact with the world in ways I either could not or could not enjoy with my Blackberry Pearl. I am thrilled to be a Pre user now, and I expect many positive future Pre experiences.

Like any good consumer of technology, however, I am always looking forward to the next fun technology-mediated experience. So, in that spirit, I would like to note a few, as yet un-had, experiences I am looking forward to with my Pre:

External Notification Light

The feature I think I would most like to experience on the Pre in future is being able to tell that I have a message without having to wake up the phone to check over and over again. Ideally, the home button might light differently for different kinds of notifications--for example, blue for voicemail, red for SMS, and green for email--but I would be thrilled if it lit up at all to indicate there was a notification I needed to review.

Visual Voicemail

I hope this is in the works 'cause this would be a great feature on the Pre--one I have have only heard about as a cell user and never experienced except for my limited experiments with Google Voice. The Pre is a phone that already excels at messaging and notifications in many ways, but without visual voicemail and (another missing feature I mention below), there are limits to how excellent the phone can be for messaging.

Forwarding SMS/MMS Messages

As it is, I do a lot of SMS and MMSing and I love doing both of these on my Pre, but I really look forward to being able to forward SMS/MMS messages.

Copying and Pasting More Easily

Yes, there is a way to copy/paste currently. But it doesn't work in all fields (received SMS's, for example) and it's kind of a pain to have to hold two keys down and drag. I don't do it very often because it's a bit too complicated, but I would do it a lot if it was made more easy. WebOS 1.1 has apparently got an easier method enabled in Memos--a way that involves some tapping for whole word and paragraph selection. This is the kind of thing that qualifies as "more easily" for me.

Capturing Video

This feature falls into a not-necessary-but-would-be-nice category for me. I would use it, but having had it on my BB Pearl, I can say that I would probably not use it nearly as much as the above. Still, it would be a very nice feature to have for those times when what you need to capture an important life "moment" is a way to capture a series of moments (a.k.a. video).

Being Able to Enter Text in Landscape Mode

As I mentioned in a post earlier this week, I hardly ever use landscape mode on the Pre for things like Web surfing (though I would like to) because there is no way to enter text/interact with pages other than tapping (don't get me wrong, I like the tapping--but sometimes it's not enough). I have read some about whether or not it's feasible, given the screen space available to have reasonably sized on-screen keyboard, and it seems uncertain as to whether or not it is. I'm willing to accept it may not be technically feasible, but if it is, I thnk it would add a lot to the phone.

Enjoying More Applications!

I knew when I made the decision to get the Pre that it would be a while, and I know that lots of people (at Palm and independently) have been hard at work on this, so I am really, really looking forward to it!

If you are interested in what other Pre users have on their wish lists, check this out.

Thank You!

And finally, thank you to Sprint, Palm, CNET, and readers of this blog for giving me this opportunity to share my experiences with and thoughts about the Pre. Thanks also to the writers, editors, and users who post at PreCentral.net for providing me with such a great base from which to write here. Many of my posts were inspired by things I read at Pre Central and, subsequently, tried on my phone.

I genuinely love my Pre, and my depth of experience with the Pre this past month has been so much more for my participation in these online communities of Pre users and the opportunity to blog about it.