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![](\"https:\/\/www.timothyhanson.com\/pics\/5myhcpif5.jpg\")
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"So let’s start with yesterday which is pre-day 1.<\/p>\n
I headed out to my local Sprint store (mini one not a super one) to check on availability and quantity.\u00a0 They said that pretty much all were spoken for but people might back out or not show up.\u00a0 The rep said that they’d be notifying us by calling later that night with more details. They apparently started the paperwork on new contracts and he pulled up my file.\u00a0 He asked where I worked and I told him and then I was told that I’m eligible for 23% off the rate. Later that night we got text messages that said it was first come first serve and we needed email addresses for phone setup.<\/p>\n
As an aside, in my head my math was this: $299 for the phone – $150 for renewing – $100 rebate ends up with $49 for the phone and the cheapest plan is $69.99 at only 77% rate is $53.89 per month before tax which is actually really great.<\/p>\n
So I head out today around 7:30 knowing they’re opening at 8am. I’m the 3rd person there but I didn’t want to get out of my car.\u00a0 15 minutes later like 5 cars pull up and so I don’t want to lose my spot (which I technically already did since one lady did actually get there after me and get in line) any more than I had to so I hop in line.\u00a0 Turns out they’re late opening the store, but they hand us all numbers, which as they were being handed out were not explained.<\/p>\n
So we all stroll on in and wait in the register line.\u00a0 There are 2 registers so I’m now 2nd in line as the first two people get helped.\u00a0 Unlike typical phones, they were unable to hard program the phones for activation, they sort of relied on the phone turning on and doing it’s magic thing first.\u00a0 This meant that the first two people took like 30-45 minutes before they were ready for the next set of people.\u00a0 It was doubly compounded by the fact that the network must be choking on the sheer volume of new Pre users in the area all trying to activate at once.<\/p>\n
I finally got mine and then we hit a problem.\u00a0 I was rung up at $299.\u00a0 This seemed off and when I inquired I was told the retail price was like $450 or something.\u00a0 Looking around the store later I realize almost all the prices were sort of marked up to include the “$150” off.\u00a0 So my grand dreams of my $50 phone sort of got dashed.\u00a0 I mean, at the very least I have the $100 rebate I suppose.<\/p>\n
Problem number two cropped up when I paid and I was put on a credit union discount instead of the corporate discount I was told of the day before.\u00a0 The difference was 10% vs 23% but I didn’t have to pay for activation or something.\u00a0 I suppose this was somewhat irritating because of the volume of people in a very tiny store coupled with this very hilarious incident.\u00a0 As I’m waiting in line someone calls the store.\u00a0 It sounded very definitely like an inquiry about how many Pres they had left and which we heard the number 6 thrown out.\u00a0 One person left, others let out disconcerting sighs.\u00a0 Then one of the employees asked us to sit down and get comfortable as they were going to help us out by number they handed out to us.<\/p>\n
Anyway, I didn’t want to take any longer than I had to, evidently adding the credit union discount was a pain and taking longer than the person who was in front of me, who by the way was still in the store because the activation system was being done in a sort of “Let me turn it on and see if it activates and when it does come back to me to finish setup” sort of situation.\u00a0 I didn’t want to be annoying holding up the line and I figured that it would be futile to sit and wait around this place forever, so I sort of found a point to ask if I could just leave and they said if I needed help I could come back whenever.\u00a0 So I went home and took a nap.<\/p>\n
I tried activating it on my own but I got stuck.\u00a0 It got to a point where it suggested I could activate it on my own but it required a phone.\u00a0 This was the funny part as my old phone was basically disconnected so I had no phone at all at this point.\u00a0 Anyway I took a nap and headed back out. And as all good plans, no one was around so I could be as annoying as possible.\u00a0 The employee still there said they sold like 20 phones today but that was a brain scratcher considering the phone call while I was waiting in line earlier was told that they had 6 left.\u00a0 So who knows.\u00a0 Anyway, it turns out they figured out how to activate the phone without waiting forever and in a snap, my phone was ready to go.\u00a0 I asked about the credit union thing and they said that I should just wait out the first month then come back and switch employment since my employment discount wouldn’t have credited the activation fee.\u00a0 So we’ll see in a month what happens with that.<\/p>\n
But enough with the customer side of the phone, how’s the phone itself?<\/p>\n
It’s totally great.\u00a0 On the one hand, I come from a long line of crappy flip phones.\u00a0 On the other I do have an iPod Touch and can draw a lot of comparisons (without the phone part) between the iPhone and this device.\u00a0 I synced it to my gmail and my exchange account very easily which is surprising due to the relative difficulty of setting my exchange account up.\u00a0 I then added my AIM account which was a horrendous mistake.\u00a0 It’s been said before but syncing all these things adds a lot of contacts to your contact list.\u00a0 I didn’t think this would be a problem since I spent all week trimming my gmail contacts, but adding AIM added all my buddies into the contacts.\u00a0 One flaw I’ve found so far is that in my contacts list I’ve put a lot of their IM names, but when the IM accounts are in the contact list with the regular contact list, it never merged them automatically.\u00a0 So not only do I have a lot of duplicates that I need to merge (which turns out to be pretty easy), I also have a lot of contacts I never see which I need to delete.\u00a0 People I’ve not spoken or seen online in many many years are now thrown in.<\/p>\n
On really cool feature about the iPod is that when scrolling along the the contact list, you have an alphabet you can index quickly on the right side.\u00a0 This feature is missing from the Pre BUT I discovered recently, very in fact, that you can just start typing letters which is actually just as good.\u00a0 Maybe not to others who are used to the iPhone but to me, I don’t think it’s an unacceptable workaround.<\/p>\n
Gizmodo goes on and on about the sharpness of the edges of the phone when flipped open.\u00a0 I have yet to realize this incredible sharpness or discomfort.\u00a0 Not only that I feel like they’re describing a way to open the keyboard that is probably not ideal.\u00a0 I tend to put my thumb in the middle of the screen and press upwards and it flips out quite easily and have not yet had a snag yet.<\/p>\n
It wasn’t until much later I realized I was using the gesture area incorrectly. It does occasionally help to read the manual sometimes.\u00a0 I left the screen protector on and blamed it on that, but it turns out the gesture area is above the round button on the bottom center.\u00a0 I thought it was the area immediately to the left and right, but that is untrue it turns out.<\/p>\n
I’ve sent out a few text messages and feel pretty good about the keyboard.\u00a0 It is tiny, but it’s not uncomfortable and I’ve had very few typing mistakes.\u00a0 I’m not used to the iPhone’s spellcheck since I don’t type all that often, but when I do it seems annoying when I’m purposefully typing a word it doesn’t know.\u00a0 One thing I miss is arrow keys though.\u00a0 I very very often tend to type long messages only to axe the whole thing and start over.\u00a0 I have to press and hold backspace which is fairly quick, but still very lengthy compared to just doing a mouse or arrow select with shift and control.<\/p>\n
Ok so I said earlier that I mistakenly put in my AIM account.\u00a0 Well for the longest time I was trying to figure out how to erase it.\u00a0 I finally discovered you are not allowed to erase an account that is actively logged in.\u00a0 This isn’t intuitive at all.\u00a0 The screen where remove account appears doesn’t indicate this and was really just a bit of luck I finally discovered how to do this.\u00a0 But now that it’s done I feel good about how my contact list is stored and there’s now far less errant entries that are just AIM names.<\/p>\n
I hopped on the app store and downloaded a twitter, fandango, weather, and where app.\u00a0 They work very similarly to their iPhone counterparts and even better in some ways since the Pre allows multitasking.\u00a0 I threw a picture of Rex up on Flickr using the email client and it worked great.\u00a0 The large size picture quality isn’t so hot but medium level is tolerable.\u00a0 Google Maps is very as expected pinpointing my location with much higher accuracy than the Touch did with just WiFi location. There’s cool things I hear about programming for the Pre and bad things.\u00a0 I hear it’s just Java and XML making it a non-proprietary sort of platform.\u00a0 But I also hear they aren’t widely distributing the SDK which shows when I have a paltry 12 apps to get vs the 40,000 on the iPhone. Palm really needs to loosen up the app stuff because having fewer apps is going to hurt them in the long run I’d imagine.\u00a0 Regardless of if they’re quality, if Apple can tout 1000 times the selection it sounds much more appealing.<\/p>\n
I always run my phone on vibrate mode because I hate hearing other people’s rings and I hate when people say “Oh I didn’t hear my phone ring!” when you can throw it on vibrate and leave it in your pocket or clipped to your belt or whatever.\u00a0 However now that I can do mp3 ringtones I’m tempted to find a great ring or great set of rings to individualize people.\u00a0 While messing with this feature however, I was annoyed that text messages are so unobtrusive that they don’t even make the phone ring.\u00a0 They make the screen pop on and that’s about it.\u00a0 My old phone would ring or vibrate like a regular phone call at least.\u00a0 Now that I have unlimited text it’s possible I won’t even notice them at all unless I’m looking at my phone every few minutes!\u00a0 I find that to be somewhat terrible but not beyond a software update to fix.<\/p>\n
I heard something today that may or may not be true but this phone will supposedly work on the Sprint 3G and then 4G network.\u00a0 This was great until I realized that I’ve not seen the 3G signal light up at all.\u00a0 No matter since I have Wi-Fi in my apt and at work now, but possibly annoying when I’m out and about.\u00a0 Though let’s be honest here.\u00a0 I rarely use my phone.\u00a0 I did my part during this recession and bought frivolous gadgets, but at the same time I’m saavy enough to start using more and more of the capabilities of this phone at greater frequency.<\/p>\n
I am annoyed at the inability while the phone is plugged into the computer in fake iPod mode and removable storage mode to send and recieve calls but that can be chalked up as a minor annoyance at best since I don’t expect mega important phone calls while I’m taking a 5 minute break to sync my media.<\/p>\n
I tried to set a monthly recurring event on the phone and that didn’t turn out so well.\u00a0 I ended up just setting it up on my computer.\u00a0 I don’t know if that’s totally awesome or somewhat annoying.\u00a0 I mean, it’s great that I don’t have to constantly dock and sync my phone and that changes I would usually make are cloud synced to my phone anyway.\u00a0 But it’s annoying that I couldn’t do what I would consider to be a basic enough calendar entry.\u00a0 I didn’t mess with it as much as other features so it’s possible I haven’t discovered the Pre version of the feature.\u00a0 Discovering the type to jump to contacts made contacts frustrating to work with completely enjoyable.<\/p>\n
Overall I’m extremely pleased with this phone, I think it works for me and does everything I want.\u00a0 And even if there are things that an iPhone can do better, I have a touch to do those things except for calling.\u00a0 I’m sure I’ll have more to say as the week goes on.<\/p>\n
My current Pre wallpaper:
\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So let’s start with yesterday which is pre-day 1. I headed out to my local Sprint store (mini one not a super one) to check on availability and quantity.\u00a0 They said that pretty much all were spoken for but people might back out or not show up.\u00a0 The rep said that they’d be notifying us […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-581","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.timothyhanson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.timothyhanson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.timothyhanson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.timothyhanson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.timothyhanson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=581"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.timothyhanson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/581\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":589,"href":"https:\/\/www.timothyhanson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/581\/revisions\/589"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.timothyhanson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.timothyhanson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.timothyhanson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}