Verizon Palm Pre Plus review: New video features and browser | Family, travel, mom blog

Verizon Palm Pre Plus Review: Video news! and the Web browser

Posted by ThemeParkMom on March 4, 2010 | No Comments

I have now been using my Verizon Palm Pre Plus for about two weeks, and I am becoming increasingly convinced that this is THE mobile device for me.

I did not know much about the Palm Pre Plus before I started using it, but one thing I had heard about was the webOS operating system Palm had developed. I heard people were raving about it.

Now I see why, and that’s what I will be covering in my next few posts about the device.

The big news is that my phone told me there was an update of webOS that needed to be installed yesterday. This update was “pushed” to my phone; I didn’t have to go anywhere and download it. That’s great for me because I am terrible about taking the time to download software updates and get them installed. One click to give the OK to install, and the Verizon Palm Pre Plus did all the work.

And then I went to use the camera. And lo and behold, the only major thing I had been missing in this phone was there: Video! The Palm Pre Plus can now take video! And not only does it shoot video, you can edit it right on the device and upload it to YouTube. I was going to give it a try yesterday and upload a video to share, but mama was having a very bad hair day. I will be shooting a video to share on my trip to the beach this weekend.

So, that’s the big news. There were many other feature updates with the new webOS upgrade. The sheer number of them tells me Palm is serious about improving their operating system continuously to make it easier and easier for its users.

On to the Web browser, which is, in a word, fantastic. With my old phone, I used to constantly try to load a Web page and then just give up when the browser would hang on a script it didn’t want to run. The Verizon Palm Pre Plus has loaded every Web page I have tried in the past two weeks, and that has to number in the hundreds by now.

I also like that the Palm Pre Plus Web browser loads the whole page as it would appear on a larger screen. Then, I double tap on the area I want to zoom in on and read. This saves me a surprising amount of time. Other mobile devices I have used broke up the information on Web pages to load everything in a readable size first, so I had to scroll through a mile of sidebar information to get to the blog post I wanted to read.

The speed of the Web browser seems lightning quick to me on Verizon’s 3G network. Last week, I took a trip to a rural area not yet covered by 3G, and the speed was still noticeably faster than it had been with my old device in the same area.

Next up: I will be talking about how Palm’s webOS uses “cards,” and why this system is great for busy moms. And I’ll show you a video taken with the Verizon Palm Pre Plus.

Disclosure notice: Verizon paid for my Palm Pre Plus and is paying for one month of my service in exchange for me trying the phone and posting about my experiences on my blog. I’m still thinking for myself, though, and you can count on me to provide my honest opinion of this product.