http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=290102878

To Ryan Block’s EXTREME credit he asks the only review question that people should care about.

It comes at the very end of the podcast.

The question – “so who is buying a Pre”

This gets to the core of a reviewers TRUE feelings about a gadget.

Leo Laporte – Nope – just ordered an iPhone 3 G S
Peter Rojas – Android
Chris Ziegler – Nope
Ryan Block – Nope
Josh – nope not sure

To me that’s a pretty good OS experience.

I’ve read in other forums (everythingpre.com) that people are having other issues – particularly centered around closing the screen and having the device reset itself or lock up. I didn’t experience any of that. It’s tough to tell how widespread the issue may be.

Battery life is another issue that I had trouble nailing down (so I didn’t mention in the video). On days when I used the camera and mailed photos to Facebook — my battery was pretty drained by noon.

On other days when I didn’t use any of the data features – I seemed to get a pretty average battery life — and probably could have gone until 4 or 5 in the afternoon on a single charge which is on par with my BlackBerry devices.

For comparison my BlackBerry Bold will also run out of a charge by noon if I’m running data heavy applications like instant messaging. So I think some of the Pre’s battery woes are due to applications that are either in the background running, are taking up lots of battery life while uploading or connecting to the web or even perhaps hung programs that seem closed but are still consuming battery life. For that reason I’m hopeful that the Pre’s battery life will be improvable in future OS upgrades.

The Palm Pre is like Sidekick Pro. Really pretty interface but ultimately not enough usefulness for me to think about buying one. As the Pre enhances the features in future releases this may be a phone that becomes more useful.

I don’t look at these devices and grade them based on any “oh, that’s just a 1.0 effort and it’s pretty good”. I think that’s a cheap cop out type of review and neglects to consider that consumers pay 2009 top dollars for a real plan to run these devices on. Nobody comes to us and says “oh, that’s a 1.0 device — here pay a little less each month and take it with only a 6 month plan instead of 2 years just in case we don’t update it as fast as you would like”.

And Palm has had three years to gather information on features to add to the phone and to hire employees with the skills to make it happen. Frankly I just don’t buy the “pretty good effort for 1.0″ reviews that were cheerful about the device then when you listened to their podcasts and they asked everyone “so who is buying one with their own money” the real “feet shuffling” started…

The real shining star of the Palm Pre is the Sprint network. I loved the Sprint Navigation. If I were to buy a Palm a large part of my reasoning would be to use the turn by turn directions which I think are a huge benefit. I also like that Sprint includes voice/text/data in their plans for one monthly price — and for $99/mo you can have unlimited everything. Not a terrible deal.

This isn’t an awful device – it probably will “get there” — the problem it has is that in an era of 2 year contracts and $80 per month cell phone charges these smart phones are going to have to become better than “pretty good 1.0 effort” in order to be purchased by lots of people.

My best guess is Sprint will do a bit better than the Samsung Instinct (which launched to a ton of advertising and fanfare) but nowhere close to Apple.

I’ve said from the start that Palm as a company is an acquisition play at this stage in the game and I still think so.

Great Video!