Palm Pre: takeaways from Premier night
By Chris Ziegler 
posted June 5th 2009 9:30PM
posted June 5th 2009 9:30PM
- Tethering is not supported and Sprint has no plans to offer a tethering add-on. The company says it just isn't a very good user experience and would prefer folks added on a data card line instead.
- About 1,000 invitations were sent out to randomly-selected Premier customers for this evening's events at ten locations across the country. We've heard intermittent reports of folks getting in with no invite, but the Chicago store was staying firm.
- We were told that no store selling Pres this evening would be out of stock for tomorrow, but all bets are off once the floodgates open on Saturday. Company-owned stores got the lion's share of stock while Best Buys and Radio Shacks were held to lower levels, so your best bet over the weekend is likely a Sprint store.
- We played with our keyboard and then a Sprint employee's immediately after that had been in use for two weeks; the keys had lost some of their "stickiness," which we take as a good sign. Fresh Pres have a slightly odd feel across the key surfaces.
@Paul a Chapel
Can you tell me where? or give me a quote please? All I've seen from his review is that his battery life is crap from being in a Sprint fringe area.
"...battery life is the Pre’s heartbreaker. Depending on how heavily I used the thing, the battery was dead either by late afternoon or by dinnertime. Yikes."
—David Pogue, New York Times.
More lame excuses for no tethering means more BS from a company that's more interested in making the CARRIERS happy for YOUR dollar.
Please allow me to tell you what you can do with your wireless air card.
Tethering is in the software, and it does connect via Bluetooth to my MacBook Pro but there's a flag set by Sprint that says 'No Go'.
http://forums.buzzaboutwireless.com/baw/board/message?board.id=PalmPreForum&message.id=1718#M1718
"Tethering is not supported and Sprint has no plans to offer a tethering add-on. The company says it just isn't a very good user experience and would prefer folks added on a data card line instead." HA i would love to get my hands on that memo,'tell them our crappy broadband cards are way better when the fact is we want them to get both cuz god knows only one out of every 50 people qualify for the pre at 200 and we dont have enough of everyones money already'
I think there may be a way to tether. I am wondering if one could use the palm os emulator program to run Pda Net... that could work.
why is tethering not possible on Sprints network?
took it for a 10' test drive (yes short but was trying to be fair)-the OS hung up, possibly due to 'Demo Mode' but agree with other reviews about the disconcerting lag going app to app. The keyboard is very small-painfully so, big neg. for me as there is no other option for data entry (yes on screens aren't great either). Despite other reviews saying that the phone registered touches accurately, I found multiple touches were required-again, blame Demo Mode? The browser was quick but after zoom, the page did not re-format? The 'smooth, polished stone' is less so with the keyboard open with the weird sharp edge on the bottom of the keyboard-not a deal breaker but seems odd. The camera is amazingly fast, 'click', 'click', 'click' essentially basically zero lag.
Multi-tasking should be a breeze but two steps to close an app seems odd too. Maybe great to some, but not enough to give up my TP.
"Tethering is not supported and Sprint has no plans to offer a tethering add-on. The company says it just isn't a very good user experience and would prefer folks added on a data card line instead."
Bullshit. God, I hate telco's.
I'm afraid this isn't going to be the savior Palm needs. With iphones and blackberry's, who needs a Pre? Not me.
So many people are complaining about tethering like it's some shocking surprise that it won't work. Yes, Sprint initially listed it as a feature of the Pre, but they removed that detail from the features list and Engadget even covered it here:
http://www.engadget.com/2009/02/19/palm-pre-no-longer-features-data-tethering-on-sprint-website/
Sprint does want to steer people towards adding a mobile broadband card to their plan instead of tethering, but when they say it is not a good user experience, it is not just an excuse. As others have said, Sprint's network(and any other CDMA network, if I'm not mistaken) does not support simultaneous voice/data. This means that if you are tethering your Pre to get your laptop online and someone calls you, they will go straight to voicemail. I think SMS might still work, but I'm not sure. Either way, I would say that missing an important call because of tethering is not a good experience. This is just guessing, but Sprint might also be thinking that their number of subscribers will be increasing due to the Pre and anything that would increase strain on the data network could slow it down, which would be a negative user experience.
I think the number of people who frequently use tethering is most likely a small percentage of the overall subscriber base, so this is only a minor issue from Sprint's point of view.
If a software solution has worked for other Sprint phones to get around tethering limitations, I assume the Pre has the same potential. Please stop complaining. If you like the Pre so much, be patient. If no tethering is such a deal-breaker, there are plenty of other options out there.