I recently published my review on the Palm Pre 2 and offered the verdict that it was a $199 feature phone with great font rendering (which is really true!). I acquired the phone in early July and went to sell it in late July and held off publishing my review until it had sold to give me time to play with it and really think about the harshness of my words. I went to sell the phone on Kijiji, a service similar to Craigslist but is heavily used in Nova Scotia, for $200.
Weeks went by. I got a few offers: “$100 if you deliver it to Cape Breton” (an eight hour drive) Nope… “$100 in Halifax” …. Nope! So I reduced the price to $175 and finally got a reasonable offer: “$175 in Halifax if it can run on Koodo.” Koodo is a cellular brand owned by Telus Mobility which operates on the shared Bell/Telus HSPA+ and CDMA network. By virtue of the shared network it uses the same frequencies as Bell and Telus, who chose to use the North American standard AT&T bands for HSPA+. We’re in luck! Rogers also uses the exact same frequencies so the Pre can work in theory. After intent Google’ing I discovered people have had success unlocking their Palm Pre 2s and running them on Bell. Awesome! I replied saying that it was possible and that it would need to be unlocked, a process I’m unfamiliar with. He said he could do that himself.
When I met the guy to sell the phone I discovered he was a Palm Pre (original) user. After some talking I’d had all my fears quashed that the buyer on the other end may have mistakenly thought the Palm Pre was an Android phone, a reasonable fear given the vast fragmentation in the Android handset marketplace. He said how he’d been an avid Pre user (on Bell, CDMA) since 2009 and loved the look and feel of webOS except that it was slow on the original 2009 Pre.
I got a sinking feeling. The Palm Pre 2 does have much more hardware resources than the original Pre but it is still incredibly slow compared with the Nexus One, iPhone 3GS, and even my Blackberry Bold. It’s by far the slowest phone I’ve used since my early days on a feature phone (the LG Keybo for what it’s worth).
I booted the phone up and he marvelled that it boot up so quickly. And applications open so fast. And typing is much more responsive. And card view is much more fluid. And you can open Google Maps, Music, a browser, email, and messaging cards and the phone doesn’t pop-up to say that it’s out of memory. Wow.
It then dawned on me that to a fish the world is wet. From the perspective of an original Pre owner the Pre 2 is a logical successor and is so much faster. If you’d entered the smartphone world through webOS and never left then you’d only see the Pre 2 as fast and shiny.