jm tosses

received a mail from palm today inviting me to download some electronic arts titles for free. after palm had removed all the us titles from the german store, I hadn't spent much time in their 'app catalog'. it's full of apps again and some of them seem to be worth a look.

what strikes me as odd idea is that still everything there is for free. either palm doesn't yet have a payment-model for their platform or it's just not yet switched on. I don't get that. from my point of view this is going to annoy customers in the long run because as soon as they switch on payment, the old customers won't buy apps because they already have what they need or just don't see a point in paying for things they used to get for free. the new customers won't pay either because why should they pay for apps other got for free? when we look back into the history of radio and tv, that's what happened there - and that's what made it so very complicated for pay-tv to get their business going - at least where I live.

anyway - I'm downloading tons of apps right now, so the 'freebie' newsletter worked to get me into the app catalog again. we will see if this is going to be enough.

while I'm at it, I must admit that web os has gotten better with the latest update (1.4.0). also some of the shipped apps have improved a bit so the palm still is a valid alternative to the iphone as well as android phones. I like the new camcorder option in the camera app and all those little tweaks, fixes and features palm added to the phones's current software.

syncing over the air is still missing - I don't understand why that is. it would be easy to add some rsync-based service via samba or sftp - why doesn't palm add such a feature? it's nice to charge the palm wirelessly so there should be an option to sync it the same way, too.

the only thing I don't expect them to fix via software upgrade is the messy touch display. it just cannot compete against apple's device. but from what I know - nobody else offers a display coming even close to what apple sells.

what still doesn't seem to work is the task synchronisation between zimbra and the pre. tasks I add on the pre find their way to the zimbra desktop but what I add to the zimbra desktop sadly doesn't show up on the pre - interestingly apple's mail.app won't show zimbra's task but the one of the pre. but tasks I add in mail.app won't show up in either the pre or the zimbra desktop. besides that it's taking ages for all the tasks to sync - this is just not ready for prime-time.

what really anoys me most on the pre is that it's localization is all wrong. when I set my pre to 'english' I expect it to speak english and get all the apps in english language - but it doesn't. at least the electronic arts apps are partly in german, partly in english - this is really poor performance. oh - a propos performance - it doesn't quite make a good impression if your game stops playing music or doesn't continue loading the menues after a game of need for speed - since I dind't have to pay for the app I don't mind too much but as a paying customer I'd expect flawless game-design customized to the very abilities of the palm pre - at least my pre isn't strong enough for need for speed - not even in single-tasking mode.

I'm still considering to sell the pre but since it sells for only €250 used I guess I can just keep it and watch it to further develop into the iphone killer it set out to become ;)

Faulbaer (not really.)