5 Palm Pre Plus Tips for Verizon Users

Verizon recently added the Palm Pre Plus to its smartphone roster. I've owned the Sprint Pre for nearly a year now. Here are some tips to help you get the most out of the phone.

Sprint's monopoly on the Palm Pre and Palm Pixi has expired, which is good news for the millions of Verizon subscribers out there—and even better news for Palm. With two major networks, Palm just might—might be able to hold on in a mobile market increasingly dominated by the BlackBerry, iPhone, and Android platforms. Purchasing a Palm Pre for Sprint makes me marginally invested in the success of the webOS platform, so I wanted to offer some advice to new customers on Verizon, including some usability tips—and a couple of warnings.

The first thing that Verizon users should know is that the Palm Pre Plus and Palm Pixi Plus devices are better than their Sprint analogs—and not just because they have the "Plus" after their name. The Verizon models come with double the memory (16GB for Pre Plus, 8GB for Pixi Plus) and the ability to turn into a Wi-Fi hotspot, like Novatel's MiFi router. Both are cool features I would love to have in my phone, but for most other intents and purposes the devices pretty much work the same way. That said, if you are used to a BlackBerry or other device, here are a few tips that can make life a lot easier.

1. Get Used to Universal Search. Just start typing the first letters of persons name and the phone will call up that person's contact info. If you don't have that info your phone, Google, Wikipedia, and Twitter searches are automatically launched. You can also use keywords like "pic," "store," and "ToDo," which will automatically pull up individual applications.

2. Don't Count on iTunes Synching. When the Pre launched, all you had to do was connect it to your PC, and it would synch your music and podcast libraries in iTunes, just like an iPod. Apple was not amused and disabled the feature in an iTunes update. Then Palm re-enabled it in an update of their own. And then…well, you get the idea. I just tried it with iTunes 9.0.0.7, and it worked fine. After I updated iTunes to 9.3, the sync broke again. This may continue for a while. You can always put the phone into USB mode and drag and drop files, but I recommend using a utility like DoubleTwist (free at www.doubletwist.com) to avoid the mess altogether.

3. Turn on Advanced Gestures. I used my Pre for months before Bill Shrink's CEO Peter Pham told me about this tip. Just go to Screen, Lock, and Turn on Advanced Gestures. This will let you flip through applications in full-screen mode without using the Card View menu. It saves you some swipes.

4. Buy an Extra Battery. Sad to say it, but the Palm Pre's battery life kind of sucks. I charge it every day, usually both at home and in the office. If you can swing it, you can pay $50 for the Touchstone inductive charge, which is cool as hell, but $50 is a lot to pay for an AC adapter. On a journalist's salary, $20 for an extra battery is a better bet. You can get them on Amazon.

5. Delete apps with two clicks. For months, I thought the only way to delete apps was to go into Device Info and scroll through a long list. Total waste of time. All you have to do is hold the orange key and tap an application icon. You will get a pop-up window that tells you how much space the app takes and lets you delete it with one click. This is particularly important for Sprint users, since our devices have only half the memory of the Plus models, but it's good advice all the same.

Time was, Verizon was a killer network with a relative dearth of premium smartphones. Not anymore. With the Motorola Droid, Eris, and a host of high-end BlackBerrys, Verizon is lacking only one major smartphone: and sorry folks, the iPhone ain't coming any time soon. This could be Palm's last shot at being a top player in the mobile market.

Hopefully some of these tips will make the transition easier for thousands—nay millions—of Verizon customers. If you have your own Palm Pre or Pixi tips, please share them in the comments section below. (PCMag - Dan Costa)