A smartphone is an invaluable tool for many healthcare professionals. For those who are ready to take take the plunge, his blog will give you some fundamental information that will assist you in the decision making process.
As stated in the previous blog, I will take you through all of the popular smart phones so you can compare their strengths and weaknesses and make an informed decision while trying to inject as little bias as possible. I will start with the Palm Pre.
I have a Palm Pre and have been using it since the day it was released. This phone is made by Palm, the company that made the handheld computer a household name, and at one time controlled 80% of the smartphone market. As of recently, they have been bought out by HP to try to compete in a highly competitive smartphone market. The Pre is an evolution of the Treo series of phones which was one of, if not the first, to popularize the smartphone. (Handspring which was bought out by Palm was the first to combine a handheld organizer and a phone.)
The Pre has it's strengths and weaknesses as with all phones.
The Pre is on of a few of few phones with a slide out keyboard. It's a matter of personal taste whether you prefer a physical or on-screen keyboard. For the novice it's a little bit easier since it's more similar the full-size computing experience.
The Pre is one of the smaller smartphone which also lends to a smaller screen. For those with small hands this is a plus. Once you start integrating it into your everyday life you may find yourself yearning for a larger screen. The screen size is 3.1 inches. The latest smart phones have a 4.0 inch screen. That may not seem like a big difference but since you're dealing with such a small screen a few tenths of an inch is night and day for viewing comfort.
A real strong point for the Pre is multitasking. All smartphone have some version of multitasking but the Pre has a very elegant method. It uses a cards theme that allows you to run several tasks at once. You can look up drug interactions on Epocrates while emailing a prescription or writing a prescription on E-Rx while looking at your desktop through RemoteWin. You can continue all of these tasks uninterrupted if you fire up the wifi while taking a call. You will also notice a small icon in the lower right corner of the screen in the image above. That's a notification that there is something on your ToDo list you need to take be aware of. This is the notification system. They initially come up in a large size.
These notifications stay there until you remove or minimize them. This is very helpful if you can't look at or answer you phone when it alerts you to incoming information. All activity is summarized at the bottom of the screen. Another forgotten aspect of in then Pre is synergy. All phones have some form of consolidating you online information. The Pre takes the popular site such as FaceBook, Google, Yahoo and Linkedin and combines them for easy access. Your calendars and address books are updated automatically
In your phone when changes are made on you desktop or laptop. No more syncing. This is a convenient and important feature as we use the internet and social networks in our practices. The downside is if you have the same person on multiple sites you have to manually combine them in your phone's address book. This is a very intuitive task and once it's done you don't have to repeat it.
The software store for Palm is not as large as the other stores. Don't go by just the numbers for software. The largest store iPhone has a lot of titles but a large number of them are for vertical markets such as real estate and and other industries so they cannot be used by everyone.
(picture of phone keyboard)
Many times as we purchase a smartphone we forget it's actually a phone. The phone portion of the Pre is very easy to use. Calling is from a large number keypad that covers the screen. A green bottom the covers the lower eighth of the screen is to dial or hang up the call. If you have sighed into you Facebook calendar when a call comes through the callers FB picture pops up or just a blank screen for non-FB callers. Answer by clicking a large green button on the right ignore by clicking a large red ut button on the left
Text messaging is by threads so you can trace the entire conversation. This is helpful if you have been communicating over a few days or have information I have requested but forgot where I stored it. You can also incorporate various other instant messaging accounts here to keep all you text messaging in one spot.
Email let's you track numerous accounts. Each can be set to manually or automatically download your messages. It allows text or HTML email so you don't miss any information.
The main shortcoming of the Pre is a document editor. You can read any word, excel of PDF, but not edit it. Scratch WP is a beta word processor that does a good job of basic editing. Quick Word is supposed to be coming out with a full fledged Office suite within a year. Another common complaint of the Pre is the hardware. Rarely does it fail but the build quality of the slider mechanism does tend to loosen with use. The finish is smooth and a finger print magnet. The finish is reasonably scratch resistant. The on off button generally takes some instruction to find. It's on the upper right hand corner barely visible or palpable. Once someone shows you where it is it's a pleasant surprise.
Palm went to all extremes to design in subtly and elegance in the phone. As mentioned before the on off button is barely noticeable. There are only two places on the front, the speaker and the notification light/ button on the original Pre. The Pre Plus has only the speaker on the front.
In conclusion the Palm Pre is a pretty good smart phone with features that are comparable to the leading smart phones. The Pre is not as popular because of the way it was introduced to the market. This in no way implies it quality or usability. There a decent amount of after market software available with the variety increasing daily. There is a new version of the OS that is supposed to be coming out around the first of the year with new hardware.
The Palm Pre should defiantly be included on the list to compare as you venture into the smartphone march
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
