Welcoming back an old friend

Unspun, being a boy who loves his toys, had been a friend of Palm from way back, from the first clunky organizer (by today’s standards) right up to the smartphones such as the Treo.

Then the Centro came along and although it wasn’t a very good phone the Palm operating system was still great. Unspun also loved the many features, the friendly the user interface and the ease with which the Palm could synchronize with Window and the Mac. These were the features that adhered Unspun to Palm and its products. But by then Palm had become a tired brand. There was nothing new, it offered no new features, applications were few and no new applications were coming into the market.

The Centro, however, killed Unspun‘s love affair with Palm because it was a piece of crap. It was unstable and Palm by then did not have the service to back up the phone’s deficiencies in Indonesia. So Unspun began to look around for another phone. He tried the Nokia E71 and found that it was unnecessarily complicated and user unfriendly. He sold the phone off within a week of buying it.

That virtually left the Blackberry Bold as the only contender about a year ago, before the iPhone came into the market. So Unspun bought the Blackberry Bold. It is an impressive phone for the price you pay but at the same time there are many deficiencies to the phone that left Unspun pining for the Palm. To begin with the Blackberry’s synchronization with the Mac is horrendous. It is a marvel how a product that retails for Rp6 million up does not have software that enables it to synchronize properly with the Mac.

The Bold’s sms features were also lagging behind the Palm’s. It puts sms messages in chat fashion but if you have a break in between, it starts a new tread. The Bold also isn’t the most stable of phone systems and you occassionally get a “hang” and you have to reboot the phone which will take a few minutes.

So it is with a flutter in the heart when Unspun heard of the Palm getting a management revamp and launching the Palm Pre.

Although Unspun does not have a preference for sliding keyboards, the phone looks good and if the critics are to be believed the function and features have lots of new and useful stuff. Unspun guesses it will be some time bfore the Pre is launched in Indonesia but he’s seriously considering palming off his Blackberry Bold for the Pre, if nothing else because the Bold fails to meet expctations, in performance and service standards, that come with its high price tag. So here’s to waiting for the Pre…