Using the App Store

Okay, I had played around with most of the standard features of the phone. I had gotten frustrated with some, found some nifty solutions and all in all was really enjoying my interactions with the phone as a useful productive tool. Now I needed to extend that into the realm of time-killing. It was time to navigate the app store in search of new applications.

First of all, there needs to be more choices. Only 30 apps are in the store at time of writing. Once Palm really opens up their SDK to third party developers that number should explode, and I cannot wait. The applications run smoothly on the Pre and there is a whole host, as we have seen with the iPhone, of opportunity out there to create a very rewarding user experience.

In testing out the ease of the app store, I settled on my first app being Pandora, the online streaming music service.

Download was a breeze, I just selected the Pandora app, hit the download marker at the bottom of the screen, and then after it had installed, tapped it again to launch. I really liked that music from the app keeps playing even after switching cards. Pandora is a well done app and furthermore the entire app store process was such a breeze that I already look forward to wasting tons of hours paging through future applications.