The Palm Pre Review

With Our Powers Combined

Palm had a magnificent idea with what it’s calling Synergy, and honestly, it’s probably missing 10% polish to make it perfect. Synergy is the other feature that Apple needs to add to the iPhone pronto.

The concept of Synergy is ridiculously simple and completely possible given today’s technologies, yet no one, including Apple, has attempted to do it. Point the Pre at your Facebook, Gmail and local address books and it’ll not only sync with all of them, but combine identical entries to avoid making duplicates.

The Pre grabs my contacts/calendars from all of these accounts and stores them in my phone, eliminating duplicates and updates them automatically as changes are made. Please, yes.

My Facebook entry for Michael Andrawes is coupled with my local address book entry for Michael Andrawes so I only have a single Michael Andrawes on my phone, with all of his contact information.

It just works. Yep, I just said that about a product that wasn’t made by Apple.

Facebook and Gmail syncing works wirelessly. Update a Gmail contact on your phone and it updates in your Google account, and vice versa. Even more useful is the fact that your Facebook contacts essentially manage their own contact info. If they change their address or phone number on their profile, it gets updated in your phone - you don’t even have to do anything.

I didn't have to input a single piece of information for Manveer, his Facebook profile gave the Pre everything it needed to know

In fact, Palm doesn’t even want you to sync with your desktop after the first time. It suggests that you choose to sync with either Palm’s own online service or Google, that way you don’t have to worry about having your phone connected to your computer all of the time to sync address book changes. It’s freakin cool and it’s how a web enabled device should work, over the web, not over a USB cable. A self updating phone; next stop, Skynet.

There are, of course, issues with the system. Currently there’s no way to specify which Facebook friends to sync, so if you enable Facebook syncing you get everyone currently on your Facebook friends list. Finally! Punishment for those who simply seek to inflate their friend counts on social networking sites. It’s an easy fix of course, Palm should offer customization options for the import which I’m very confident it will if Palm plans on actually seeing the Pre through.

I also have no idea how long it takes changes to get reflected on the Pre. Facebook syncing appears to take over a day for changes to propagate, while Google syncing seems to work much faster.

The more bothersome issue to me (yeah sure, lots of Facebook contacts in my phone, that’s why they made the fast flick gesture) is that Synergy currently won’t combine AIM names with address book entries.

Using Michael Andrawes as an example again, I now have two entries for Michael Andrawes in my Pre’s address book - one for his AIM contact and one for the rest of his contact information. Great.

I have to go in and manually add his AIM name to his main contact to make that work properly.

Despite its shortcomings, Synergy is sweet and worth every last bit of praise Palm has earned since the Pre was announced. To out-innovate Apple like this deserves a commendation. If Palm can fix the system in 3 months I’ll be more than happy but even today it’s a plus.

Wireless Backups Too?

Oh, oh! Not only does the Pre keep your contacts synced wirelessly and automatically with Google/Facebook/Palm, your phone will automatically back itself up daily. Should your phone die or need replacing, you can restore from one of these online backups. Palm also supports wiping your device remotely just like the new iPhone OS 3.0.

The last thing you can update wirelessly is the phone itself. New OS releases are delivered to the phone, wirelessly. It will also seamlessly download any available updates in the background over the course of multiple days, while your phone is idle, to avoid interrupting your user experience. How very thoughtful.