Carcassonne ($4.99/iPhone)

Easily one of the best games on the App Store, Carcassonne is a German-style board game where players take turns placing road and city tiles in an attempt to earn the most points. To score, you need to place one of your seven “meeple” tokens on a road, in a city, or on the land surrounding these structures. The catch is that you only get these tokens back during the game when you complete a road (by having it terminate on both ends) or a city (by enclosing the entire structure in walls). There’s a lot of strategy involved with trying to block off your opponent (trapping their meeple tokens) and preventing the same from happening to you!

An iPad upgrade is due out sometime this summer (and with that, a price increase to $9.99). However, anyone who purchases the game now gets a free upgrade when the iPad version is released. The game fully supports the high-res display on the iPhone 4.

SquareUp (Free/Universal App)

SquareUp allows you to take credit/debit card payments using your iPhone or iPad. Designed for small businesses and individuals who can’t afford expensive point-of-sale equipment, Square charges lower transaction fees than the large credit card processors. When paired with their headphone jack dongle, you can swipe cards instead of performing manual-entry transactions.

Square also includes some nifty features like emailed receipts and purchase tracking (so it can automatically award your customers that free cup of coffee after they buy 6 cups).

Runkeeper (Free/Universal App or $9.99/Universal App)

Runkeeper uses the GPS in your iPhone or iPad to plot your walks, runs, and other travel-related exercises on a map, which you can view and (if you prefer) share with others. It can also help you with pacing and show various statistics about your runs. The Pro version adds voice prompts to let you know how you’re doing.

Words with Friends (Free/Universal App or $2.99/Universal App)

Words with Friends is a Scrabble clone, but it’s actually much more polished than the official Scrabble application from EA! It supports just two players asynchronously, but you can have as many games as you like going on at once. The paid version (totally worth it) removes the advertisements that appear in between turns.

Pocket Legends (Free/Universal App)

Pocket Legends is the closest thing you’ll get to a Diablo-esque action RPG on the iPhone/iPad. With three classes, 45 levels of advencement, tons of random loot, PvP arenas, and 6 (and counting) campaigns, the game keeps getting bigger every day. The UI is excellent, and most importantly, the game is a blast to play. The Spacetime Studios team supports PL through microtransactions – you pay small amounts of money for things like new campaigns or extra items.

iPad users get their own special client optimized for the larger screen (thanks TouchArcade)!

As the years went by the standalone PDA faded from the public eye, replaced by the “smartphone” (the Handspring Treo was one of the first to become extremely popular). Palm as a company also slowly faded from the public eye, its devices hampered by an aging OS platform and dated hardware (they eventually switched to Windows Mobile).

Fast forward to CES 2009: Palm announces a new smartphone running its fabled “Palm OS 2,” now dubbed WebOS. Sporting a slick interface, brand new Texas Instruments processor architecture, and some very cool cloud-based syncing technologies, the buzz generated was (I would say) on par with that on Apple’s iPhone announcements. I was interested enough to switch to Sprint for the phone, and as of this morning I’m holding one in my hands! So far, it’s been nothing short of awesome.

First up, some pictures!

Hardware and Build Quality

The first thing out of my mouth when I opened the box up (nice Apple-esque packaging, Palm!) was “Wow, it’s so tiny!” Compared to my gargantuan HTC Kaiser, the Pre is slim and svelte. I seem to remember reading that a stone worn smooth by a river was the inspiration for the design; the actual handset isn’t too far off. It looks an awful lot like a pebble,  fits really well in your hand, and feels just right in the weight department. The build quality is excellent (for an all-plastic body), although you’ll likely find the iPhone (being made of metal and glass) a bit sturdier. As far as external controls go, on the left side you’ve got a volume rocker switch. On the front, a chrome center button and the keyboard (which I’ll get to in a moment). I only have a few complaints with the industrial design:

• The sliding mechanism that covers the keyboard is tough to open. Because I’m pushing the top of the unit up but grasping the edge in one hand, I’m fighting myself to work the slider.
• There’s an exposed bottom edge sharp enough to cut cheese (thanks Gizmodo). Depending on how you hold the Pre while you type, this may be a non-issue.
• Guys, could you have made it any more difficult to remove the MicroUSB cover on the right side of the phone?

“But what about the keyboard?” you ask? The Pre’s keyboard has the tiniest keys I have ever used on a smartphone (I’m told Centro and BlackBerry Curve users have similarly sized keys). I’m used to the much larger keys on handsets like the Sidekick and the BlackBerry Bold, so I wasn’t sure how much I was going to like typing on the Pre. I work a bit more slowly, but I’ve noticed I make fewer mistakes. The actual keys are hard, but they have some sort of gummy gel-like coat on top that helps your fingers “stick” to them. All in all, it’s not the best, but it’s workable.

The camera is a 3.2 megapixel, LED flash, no autofocus job. It takes okay photos, as you can see in this shot of a flower vase on our kitchen table:

Interface and UI

Clean and vibrant, the WebOS UI revolves around a concept Palm is calling “Cards.” WebOS supports actual, honest-to-goodness multitasking, so when ever you press the chrome button on the front, you get a screen that shows each running application in a small rectangle (a live preview, by the way). Flicking back and froth switches between cards, tapping one pulls it to the forefront (so you can work in it), and flicking one up and off the screen closes the application. It’s actually kind of fun to use. Palm needs to do some work in the memory management department though. I got a nasty error message when I had six apps open and tried to launch another.

The actual “interface” portion will be intimately familiar to anyone who has ever used an iPhone or a Palm OS device. You’ll feel right at home with fat, finger-friendly icons and a very iPhone-ish set of UI controls.

The other half of WebOS revolves around gestures. You might have noticed, but there are no “Back” buttons in WebOS applications; to go back a level in an application’s hierarchy, you drag your finger from right to left across a small black strip under the display. Similarly-themed gestures (that work a lot like the iPhone’s) are available for zooming (pinch) and scanning through items (quick flicks up, down, left, or right). Flicking from bottom to top pulls up the Launcher, which is used to open applications. A small qualm here: there’s a “quick launch” bar the opens up with the Card interface (the one you use to switch between apps), but it only holds 4 items. I wouldn’t mind a fifth!

As far as responsiveness goes, the Pre isn’t lightning fast, but it won’t have you tapping your foot waiting for applications to load. It does a good job of showing you little progress indicators when it’s busy trying to perform a task. Because the processor the Pre is using is brand-new, I’m going to predict that future software updates will speed things up a bit. In any case, transitions are smooth and there’s little lag to be felt.

Synergy, Contacts, and Mail

Synergy is Palm’s contact synchronization and linking technology. The basic gist is that you can pull in contacts from multiple sources (Gmail, Facebook, and Exchange right now), and the Pre will combine information from all of those sources in to one contact. For example, I have my Gmail and Facebook contacts synced to my Pre right now. It’s pulling all of the pictures and address data from Facebook, but the email addresses and telephone numbers from Gmail. Needless to say, it works extremely well (and has the added benefit of always keeping your contact information up to date)! My only complaint is that the process is all-inclusive; you can’t pick who gets synced over from a source you add. It brings over everyone. Yes, Facebook users, that means every person you’ve ever friended. GMail users, this includes everyone in your contact list, not just the “My Contacts” section. Do a little manual cleanup beforehand and you’ll thank yourself later.

What I like best about the Contacts application is its integration with the rest of the system. Tap someone’s address and see it mapped out on Google Maps. Tap a number, it dials. Tap an email address, it fires up the Mail application. It’s small touches like this that make the Pre a joy to use.

Messaging and Mail have some cool features; the Pre will aggregate conversations you’ve had with a particular person, pulling in SMS, email, MMS, chat, and phone calls in to a sort of “all in one” view. This makes it easy to view correspondence you’ve had with someone. Mail will set up separate folders for your Gmail labels (and supports both labeling and starring of messages). Other than that, it’s fairly basic.

Browsing and Other Preloaded Applications

The Pre’s browser is based on Webkit (just like Safari on the iPhone), and runs at a good clip. In my brief tests, it loaded pages a full 2-3 seconds faster over Wifi than my iPod touch. The browser supports the same zooming and panning features that the iPhone does, and the word on the street is that Flash support is coming as well. Besides the Browser and PIM apps, the Pre comes loaded with a bunch of other nifty applications:

• Photos (seemed to handle the standard gauntlet of PNG, JPG, GIF, and BMPs I threw at it)
• Music (which syncs with iTunes, anything that’s not DRMed at least)
• Videos (haven’t had a chance to check this out yet)
• A cool Memos application that automatically titles your notes for you
• Google Maps (a solid, speedy implementation that’s faster than the iPhone’s at rendering map tiles)
• A Calculator (morphs into Scientific version when viewed in landscape)
• Office 2007 and PDF viewing support
• Sprint Navigation (which I haven’t tried yet)

There’s an application store as well, but it’s pretty sparse at the moment. Of the available applications, Tweed (a Twitter client), Pandora (of internet radio fame), and Fandango (for movies) are the most solid of the bunch.

Touchstone Charger

While not a part of the standard Pre package, I thought it would be interesting to touch on their inductive charger, the Touchstone. A combination of a replacement back cover for the phone and something that vaguely resembles a hockey puck, the Touchstone allows you to charge the Pre wirelessly. A few magnets help properly align the phone on the puck, and there’s a mid-tack restickable adhesive on Touchstone’s bottom that allows you to position it virtually anywhere. The back of the Pre gets a bit warm charging this way, and the Touchstone charges the phone more slowly than a straight cable. However, it’s all worth it to not have to pry open the ridiculously-difficult-to-open MicroUSB port door on the side of the phone.

I really hope inductive charging takes off; being able to just toss your devices on a charging pad would be nothing short of incredible!

Conclusions
I’ll echo what some other reviewers have said: the Pre is a superb effort by Palm. Especially for a generation one product, I think this is one of the best smartphones I have ever used. Nothing has come close in terms of ease of use (the Cards metaphor works really well in this context), and the Synergy technology that aggregates your contact information (with some minor caveats) works really well. If you’re not too keen on joining Sprint, Verizon and AT&T should have the Pre sometime next year.

If anyone has questions, please leave them in the comments! I’ll put together a Q&A post!

That being said, I basically have three options that I’ve narrowed myself down to.

The lightest (and also the most expensive) would be a new Sony Vaio Z-Series. It’s powerful, portable, and has discrete graphics that don’t completely stink. Not so sure about the very MacBook-like keyboard, but the quality certainly seems to be there.

The middle-of-the-road model (and likely the most inexpensive) would be a Lenovo IdeaPad U330. It’s not a slim or light as the Sony, but the keyboard is the rock-solid ThinkPad one (I love ThinkPad keyboards) and it’s pretty powerful. The only issue (apparently) is that the “mirror-like” screen can cause headaches.

And finally, the heaviest option (at 7 pounds) is a Clevo M860tu (aka Sager NP8660). The bang for the buck ratio here is simply incredible (this thing is basically better than my desktop, crammed into a laptop shell). The quality appears to be top-notch as well. Again, the only issue at the end of the day is the weight (really heavy).

In a perfect world, LG would sell their P300 in the United States, but (despite what they’ve said), that doesn’t look like it’s going to happen anytime soon.

Thoughts?

The software supports importing just about anything. Audio, video, pictures, ink, and written text are all supported, and the UI is pretty intuitive. The caveat is that “free” accounts have small monthly upload caps (50MB). For $5/month or $45/year, your upload cap gets bumped up to 500MB, you’ll have priority online indexing, and ads get removed from public notebooks. Time will tell if I’ll need to actually go for a pro account…

Google and a few other companies have been touting their free online office applications. What you used to have to do on a locally installed office suite, you can now do online. Even multimedia applications are making the move. Adobe recently launched an online version of Photoshop called Express that has a comparable featureset. The benefits of offloading storage and processing power to the computing cloud are huge. For one, costs for client hardware decrease as you don’t need as much local storage or processing power to get your computing tasks done. Device subsequently need less battery power, so you can use smaller batteries and decrease the size of your hardware.

There are reasons why fully-featured portable devices like the iPhone are so successful; they combine excellent user interfaces with streamlined, responsive hardware. The web browsing experience on my iPod touch comes extremely close to matching that of my desktop computer. Even now, we’re seeing more and more devices that are cutting the traditional desktop PC out of the equation. You can buy books, newspapers, and magazines for the Amazon Kindle via the device’s CDMA wireless radio. It never needs to be plugged into a PC at all to function. By freeing itself from the tethers of a PC, the Kindle allows you to take it anywhere knowing that you can buy a book or download a sample reading no matter where you are.

There’s a bright future in the field of mobile devices!

You might have also noticed that I occasionally post entries in ink. While my setup using Windows Live Writer and the ink plug-in isn’t quite as robust as Sumocat’s build 51 implementation (which supports making inked words into links),I think it makes for a nice change of pace from the massive amounts of text (and the occasional image). I think ink adds a more personal touch to posts, even if my handwriting is terrible!

Some other cool tools I’ve found include InkSeine, a Microsoft Research prototype geared towards searching(and organizing the results) with ink alone, the Physics Simulator (included in the Microsoft Tablet PC Experience Pack), and Crayon Physics, a puzzle/physics game that’s more-or-less perfectly suited to the input methods on a tablet.

After switching from Trillian to Pidgin about a year ago, I saw a new instant messaging program over on Lifehacker called Digsby. Why the switch? Digsby integrates both Facebook (meh) and Twitter (yay) into its UI! Plus, the Google Talk integration actually works (compared to Pidgin). It just came out of closed beta, so give it a try.

I decided that I couldn’t wait for Apple to release their official 3rd party application support for the iPhone and iPod touch, so I found a fantastic unlocking program that’ll jailbreak either of those devices in under a minute. It’s called ZiPhone, and it supports all sorts of unlocking variants for iPhones (just one for the iPod touch!). You can just jailbreak an iPhone/iPod touch if you just want 3rd party application support, or jailbreak, unlock, and activate an iPhone unit for use on other providers’ networks. It’s quick, extremely easy to use, and best of all: it just works.

If sharing music via Internet and LAN is more your thing, head over to Deusty Designs and check out Mojo. Available for Mac and Windows (beta), Mojo lets you view the libraries of other iTunes users on your friends list and download any songs that catch your ear. The Windows version only works over LAN right now, and it autodetects other Mojo users on the network (although with limited success in my case; Matt and I couldn’t get our copies to see each other). The Mac version is substantially more robust and functions over the Internet.

On the web browser front, we saw the release of Firefox 3 (Beta 4) from Mozilla in the past week or so. It’s the first time I’ve really sat down and tinkered with the new interface, and I have to say I’m impressed. The biggest change that I noticed is the new address bar UI: check out the size of the back button! I know I rely on it all the time for navigation, and since the forward button doesn’t see nearly as much use (from what I’ve observed), I’m liking the disproportionate sizes. The other cool feature is the web address matching in the address bar. Notice how it scans through your history and attempts to autocomplete addresses it thinks you’re trying to reach? Nifty! If you’re looking to try the beta without mucking up your Firefox 2 install, try the Portable Apps version.

Fox and NBC have a new video site called Hulu with episodes and clips from a fairly large selection of current and former shows (House M.D., all of Firefly, the list goes on). There are also a couple decent movies (The Big Lebowski). There’s no uploading here; it’s strictly a “sit back, relax, and watch” sort of affair. Some nifty extras like Lower Lights (dims the rest of your screen, leaving the video bright) and embedding support make this one of the best ‘official’ online video offerings.

Enjoy!

Packing modified hardware from 2001/2002, my model is equipped with the following:

900MHz Intel Celeron-M @ 630MHz
Intel 910GMLE Express chipset
7″ WVGA (800×480) LCD Screen
512MB DDR-667 RAM (upgraded to 1GB)
4GB Solid-State Disk (soldered to the motherboard)
Intel GMA900 Graphics
10/100 Ethernet and 802.11b/g Wireless LAN
SD(HC) Card slot
3 USB 2.0 ports
1/8″ Audio Out/In jacks
VGA Out
Stereo speakers (mounted on screen sides)
Microphone
0.3MP Webcam (mounted on top of screen)

Here are some shots of the hardware itself. Note that the battery cleverly doubles as a sort of ’stand’ to prop the machine up at a positive tilt.

The EEE’s build quality is better than I would have expected from a $399 machine. Although its body contains a minimum of metal, the plastic feels sturdy enough.

The buldge on top of the image there is the battery. Directly below that is the RAM / Mini-PCI access slot. Ignore the “WARRANTY IS VOID IF REMOVED” sticker over one of the screw holes; Asus has stated that it is perfectly alright to add RAM to your machine without voiding the warranty. The numerous slits are for ventilation purposes.

Not much to see from the front…

Front the left, the SD(HC) card slot, two USB 2.0 ports, VGA out, and a Kensington lock slot.

Just the power adapter’s port on the right side.

From the left, 10/100 Ethernet, a blocked-off modem port (not available on my model), a USB 2.0 port, and the microphone and stereo jacks.

There’s a substantial amount of ‘bezel’ around the screen; those are actually the speakers. Note the small size of the keyboard and the touchpad (more on that later). The indicator lights on the bottom right are for power, SSD activity, and wireless respectively.

The cramped keyboard layout of the EEE was mostly unavoidable, but it doesn’t take long to learn to type on it. Some of the key placements are a bit funky, especially the right-size Shift. I wouldn’t go writing a novel on this machine, but it certainly works for note taking purposes.

The screen is of decent quality; it’s only 7 inches, and sports a “Wide VGA” resolution of 800×480. It’s also one of the new LED-backlit types. I still can’t seem to figure out why Asus didn’t go with a much more ’standard’ 800×600 panel instead.

Now for the OS! The EEE is unique in that it comes prepackaged with a variant of Xandros Linux, specially modified with a simplistic icon-based UI. It’s organized into ‘tabs’ to make applications easy to find. Rather than attempt to reinvent the wheel, you can browse through eeeuser’s Flickr gallery if you’d like to see some shots of the Xandros interface. I forged ahead (since ASUS supplies Windows XP drivers for the hardware) and slapped a copy of Windows XP Professional SP2 on my machine. After some pagefile tweaking and a bit of hacking to get Windows to recognize my SD card as a “permanent” drive (so I can install application to it), I was in business!

(Matt thinks this was blasphemous, by the way.)

Performance is fairly snappy for underclocked five-year-old hardware. While you won’t be editing your next high definition film’s footage on this machine, it’s excellent for some light browsing, office work, and playing older games (especially SCUMM titles). Where the EEE truly excels is in the communications department. Its camera and mic setup makes it a great Skype machine (Skype actually comes preinstalled on the Xandros OS) and it works just fine for instant messaging.

Other than that, there’s not much to say. The 802.11b/g card in the EEE is one of the best I’ve used; not only does it connect more quickly than my ThinkPad X61, it maintains its connection in places the ThinkPad can’t even see the access point in my house. Battery life is decent; I get around 3-3.5 hours with maximum brightness and the wireless enabled. If anyone has any questions, feel free to ask. I’ll put up a reply and edit this post.

If the passenger with the iPhone would be kind enough to use it to check the weather at our alternate, calculate our fuel burn due to being rerouted around the storms, call the dispatcher to arrange our release, and then make a phone call to the nearest Air Traffic Control center to arrange our timely departure amongst the other aircraft carrying passengers with iPhones, then we will be more than happy to depart. Please ring your call button to advise the Flight Attendant and your fellow passengers when you deem it ready and responsible for this multi-million dollar aircraft and its passengers to safely leave.

See here.