Yeah, I'd say, of all the Blackberries, Bold is definitely my favorite but I still like my iPhone - even though this lil' bastard went and deleted ALL of my text messages yesterday out of the blue

 

I honestly can't say anything about the phone itself. The problem is that to get it, you have to go with Sprint. Sprint, at least in the part of New Jersey where I live is nothing short of horrible! They had some special program at my daughter's college and they wanted all of the kids to have Sprint. Well, this lasted for about 3 months and she couldn't take it anymore. We would send her text messages from our phones on Verizon and she would get them over 4 hours later. I was never so happy to pay an early termination fee to get rid of that crap and put her back on Verizon. My employees who have AT&T or Verizon have no problems. The 2 guys with Sprint have constant signal problems or billing problems.

 

Yeah, now I'm having second thoughts on the pre... I loved the device, it's great!! but being on sprint, and using CMDA (no SIM card) means I'll be stuck with sprint and won't be able to use the phone on another network, or when I travel outside the US.

 

I would love to use voice command, but I have found it to be, oh, 50% reliable, and I'm from the Midwest, so it can't be due to my accent! It is very frustrating trying to get voice command to recognize the desired name. Maybe the blame has to be that I've got too many contacts for it to sort through - that differences in so many names is too suttle for the program? For example, no matter how many ways that I pronounce "Rita Jones" it consistently supplies "Reed Smith's" telephone number. I've started the process of weeding out as many unused/little used contacts to depopulate the "A to Z' list and make the voice command search a little simpler. It would be great if there was a training program for voice command that I happen to have missed, because in its current state it's pretty unusable for placing calls.

Or, for Palm to reinstate the old Treo system where you assigned up to 70 favorites on the phone and that was all that was transimitted to the car. That was a pretty clean approach. Plus, it didn't transmit every fax, mobile, work, home and other phone number for every contact in your database to the A to Z list!

I will say I am hugely relieved that the Palm Pre/BMW interface works, even if it is somewhat clumsy.

Another observation: One of the most frustrating aspects of the Treo/BMW performance was the sound quality being sent from the car to the the person listening on the other end of the line. Unless I was parked or driving very slowly, I would always have complaints while on a call using the Treo/BMW sytem that it was very difficult to understand me. Somehow the sound quality has improved on the Pre - not sure why it has, but that is the feedback I've gotten when I've asked those on the other end of the line to compare it to the Treo/BMW performance.

 

Yes I tend to agree here, it can be frustrating when the voice commands are not recognised to the extent that you state. I use the same telephone handsets, therefore contact database, in an e60 and e65 - the e65 required the setting up of a voice command (call) database which was time consuming however worth it in the end. In my experience, (from being coerced into reducing the quantity of numbers due to the set-up effort required for the e65!), the fewer numbers in the e65 database works very well; I do not experience the instance of wrong names found by the cars system as much as in the e60; an off the cuff percentage would be circa 90% correct in the e60, in the e65 99% correct (failures probably me!)

From that position I have reduced the number of contracts in my telephone which seems to have helped in the e60 reducing the instances of the voice command not locating the correct name. The outcome here is we all tend to carry around so much ?crap? hence reducing the quantity of contacts has benefitted this issue; after all do we really need circa 500-1500 contacts? I?ve found I only use around 300 per year for business and social reasons hence pruning can help!

The base voice recognition system could do with improving a deal, there are better around - I've used other voice recognition systems in recent years whereby they learn the accent/diction of the speaker very well in a short time; the issue is perhaps is they appear expensive to license.

I hope your contact pruning helps............

 

i have the pre too...the phone will come back on eventually, it just takes about 5-7 minutes which is very annoying. even when i turn it off with full battery remaining and turn it back on again, it takes a long time to reboot.

other than that my biggest beef with this phone is the speed dial. Specifically, when i set a contact's speed dial key to one that does not have any digit (i.e. letter "H"), i just can't seem to get it to work....ughh!

 

I reduced my contact list to 150 from 1,000 items and, coincidentally, now the contact list wont sync with my car. The phone functions work fine between the Pre and BMW, but the A-Z list is stuck saying "please wait".

One thing I noticed is that on the Pre, under Preferences in the Contacts section, it shows the Palm Profile and below that the words "2 Contacts". Not sure what that means, but I'm wondering if it means that there are 2 Contact lists causing a conflict in the transfering protocal to the car?

 

NEWS FLASH: I did a "soft reset" on the Pre and now the contact list has transferred perfectly to the car.

Soft reset: hold the power button down while you switch the ringer button back and forth three times.

Worked like a charm!

 

I just recently picked one up and sync'd it up to my car no problems, but I don't see any contacts on there. Though my last phone didn't either (an LG Fusic). I don't really care, i can just use my phone to dial, no biggie to me.

Real question, anybody bought a touchstone to put in their car? I've been thinking of doing this but don't know where to mount the touchstone. Any ideas?

 

I was thinking about this for the past three days as well. I modded my galaxy s3 to work with the touchstone and now need a good place to mount the base. My buddy mounted his to the side of the center vents but I think there are more spots. Has anyone else mounted this?