August 22, 2009 :: Posted by - Josh :: Category -
Tech
We know that webOS and the Palm Pre are 1.0 1.1 products, so we’re going to cut you some slack for now. But that slack is starting to run out, and looking at the competition there are some areas where I think you could improve the Pre to both catch up to and leap frog over iPhone and BlackBerry and Android. So here’s what I’d like to see in the way of software updates before that slack runs out and the real complaining starts.
My list is after the break, and it’s by no means comprehensive. Feel free to sound off in the comments if there’s something you think should be added in!
Oh, and Palm, this isn’t an ultimatum or anything. It’s a wishlist. Of stuff I want. So consider it a shopping list, and you’re the grocery store. Some things we can do without, but others are staple items that we need to get through the week, and if you don’t have it, we might have to go across town to the other grocery to get it. After a while, that can get kind of old and we might consider just going to the other store. We don’t want to, as it’s simply not as nice, but they have a lot of what we need.
Alert Tones. I can only take so much of “da-ding” before I lose my mind wondering if it’s an email or a text message or a low battery alert or… we need the option to change these tones. And not just “pick a new alert tone,” no, the ability to pick different tones for different alerts. And like we can assign specific ringtones to individual callers, the option to assign a tone to an email account (X for Gmail, Y for Exchange, etc) would be great. To a specific contact, even better.
App Catalog. As your posting of the Mojo SDK and anticipated expansion of the App Catalog would seem to indicate, you’re on your way to getting a full-on developer community going. That’s all well and good, but your application store needs some serious work. First off is speed: while once up it works just fine, the load time is interminably long for something that is more or less just a specialized web browser. Second is content: we seriously need more applications. Yes there’s side-loading homebrew fun, but for 90% of your users the App Catalog is going to be their primary source of apps.
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