theratshack.net

After owning my Palm Pre, I have decided to do a followup review. Unfortunately it seems to be common practice of most company-based reviews to only use the product for a few days and then review it which really doesn’t paint a realistic view of what you can expect overall.

So here we go. This is the short, quick, easy monthlong usage review:

Good:
- True multitasking operating system that actually works. Performs well and only crashed it twice. (Hint: don’t read a 40 MB eBook with the built in PDF reader. )
- Phone is elegantly designed, with standards compliant connectors! 3.5MM headset/speaker jack means not having to buy adapter cables for your nice headphones when you are wanting to listen to music. Micro USB connector means standardized connection, no more having to find that (*#*&@ cable to charge your phone.
- Contacts Integration is a definite plus with the caveat that you must clean up your contacts list before you integrate.
- Good quality digital camera with flash makes taking pictures easy and integration makes sending as email, MMS and uploading to Facebook very simple.
- Pandora application for streaming music is great over EvDO and Wifi.
- GPS through Google Maps or the Sprint GPS application is very accurate.
- Optional Inductive charger available. (Device is called a Touchstone)
- Supports 802.11 b and g, WPA, WPA2 and WEP, and transitioning between EvDO and Wifi and back again is easy.
- Yes, this thing runs Linux, Yes I hacked mine..

Bad
- BATTERY LIFE!!! My phone can’t go 8 hours without needing a recharge when listening to music over EvDO. The processor supports dynamic speed control for battery life, but is not implemented.
- Weak app store. The application store for the Pre is severely limited, to only a handful of applications. More are supposed to come in now that the SDK has been released.
- Touch screen surface is plastic, not glass. Scratches are a certainty not a probability. Screen Protector recommended!
- Phone option doesn’t have a “1-Touch Dialing” like the phones of the prior generations had (like Favorites or Shortcuts of the Treo era)
- Touchscreen is hyper sensitive to location. It takes me several clicks to select a link on some resolutions.
- While charging the phone or talking for a long time, the phone gets very warm. Some users report theirs have gotten extremely hot.
- Phone can only be used as a Mass Storage Device/Media Sync if the phone functions are suspended.
- On the topic of storage. This phone only has 8GB with no way of expanding it. Was this a Palm developer oversight? I remember someone saying something a few years ago about how 500MB on a computer was more than plenty… Can’t remember the guy’s name.

The UGLY, or just plain WEIRD
- The Facebook Mobile website (m.facebook.com) works better than the Facebook Mobile application on the Pre.
- Weird bug in Facebook Mobile application and Gmail Mobile application, where “BACK” exits the application rather than taking you to the last screen you were on.
- From the Mojo SDK, there is not going to be socket based communication support for the WebOS for a while. (WTF, no SSH client or IRC client?)
- Multiple versions of Car chargers out there for the Pre. Make sure yours is rated for 1500ma otherwise your phone will take a long time to charge and may damage the car charger which could also destroy your phone. (Luckily I have never experienced this.)
- Bluetooth support only supports A2DP. Can’t send or receive files from the PC or other phones.
- Multiple reports of people at the Palm OS Dev forums reporting heat issues distorting the screen. Although they were all confirmed as initial release V1 phones, (mine’s a V2) this is still something UGLY and worth noting.
- Hard to install homebrew apps without the SDK, requires hacked phone.
- Can’t get rid of NASCAR or NFL logos.

So there you have it. Short, quick, to the point, and under 700 words too. Feel free to ask questions about it in the comments section. I actively monitor my comments and will respond. I will post photos soon, as soon as I figure out how.

I was on a smoke break at work talking to a coworker who was talking about his site. I was listening kinda half-assedly when he said that his site was making a load of money. When I asked him about it, he said that Google was doing advertising and depending on the options selected, you could make money off of advertisements on your site.

Now, the instant he said “advertising”, the hair on the back of my neck stood on end and I started getting concerned. I had horrible flashbacks of popups, annoying flashy add banners, Flash based advertisements (like the ones that haunt CNN, and definately did not want that mess. But as I asked questions, he told me that the advertisers that did that were all the wrong ones and that advertising on my site is as non-invasive as the typical Google Ad-words advertisements that you see in Gmail and other Google sites.

I’ve always been very skittish about the “A” word as I, like so many other millions of people do not like getting the advertising two by four across the face when browsing a site looking for information, but I have to say that I was intrigued by the thought of my site one day being able to pay for its own hosting.

I’ve thought about it and although I have remained ad-free for the last seven years, I have been wanting to see if I could at least make the $10 needed to host the sites I own so that way I could keep theratshack.net alive and running for the many years to come.

But since this is not just a simple “Let’s do it!” thing, I want to reach out to the people that actually browse the site. What do you think?

I will be testing the Google advertisements and seeing what impact they have on my site, both from a usability standpoint and from an administration standpoint. I want the advertisements to be subtle and not interfere with the site’s use. I have already come up with the following list of things I want to ensure continue as I go through this change:

With this in mind, I want you to know that this is an experiment and hopefully the results are positive and do not impede nor hinder my site’s operation, navigation or accessibility.

The only question I have is would this classify as selling out or do you think it’s a good way to make some extra cash, even if all it does is pay for the hosting (or less?)

I’m interested in your comments!

Well, the files have been moved, the SQL unpacked and just rolling out the new carpet of changes and stuff. I’m happy to say that we look to have survived the transition from the home cable server to the new shared server at HostGator.com.

Lots of changes are in the mix as I iron out the kinks and squash bugs in the site. (Granted a twenty pound sledge helps with the squashing of bugs. )

Mr. Carey’s line from “The Mask” is definitely appropriate as I try to bring this site into something that looks like it was designed in this century.

If you’re still jonesing for the old TheRatShack, you can check out this link but I can’t guarantee how long those files are going to stay up as I work to get them absorbed into my hacking/modding site, YourWarrantyIsVoid.com

So, with that in mind, bear with me as you fight with the occasional site error, or “Page Cannot Be Displayed” or whatever errors you may come up with because I’m in the background scratching my head trying to make this site work for you.