So I take back everything bad I said about Sprint’s AIRAVE.
After looking at this page for the 600th time I realized that most of the monthly fees associated with this device were not required ( the word “optional” should have been a dead giveaway ).
The “Unlimited Calling Plan” monthly fees simply allow you to use your phone over your AIRAVE connection without using up your normal contract minutes. Well this certainly isn’t a problem for me — and probably shouldn’t be for anybody since Sprint let’s you call ANY mobile network for FREE. I have the smallest family plan available with unlimited data which has 1500 anytime minutes. Wife and I only use about 200 minutes per month! So sure, let this thing go ahead and gobble up my anytime minutes — somebody needs to.
So anyway, I dropped the $100 on the box and I’m giving Sprint another $4 per month for the use of the box, but I’m okay with that. For the first time in 8 months, I have unbelievable signal strength! I love it… no more dropped calls, no more “what’d you say dude? you’re breaking up…”.
Great device. Now highly recommended.
UPDATE: I’ve changed my tune on the AIRAVE… read more here.
Image: www.krunker.com
I recently stopped by my neighborhood Sprint Store to check out a phone I was interested in and decided to mention the abysmal signal quality I get at my house. I live less than 5 blocks away from this Sprint Store and signal strength there is through the roof. In fact, walk just 2 blocks north of my house, signal strength increases rapidly. Which is funny because if you look at Sprint’s coverage map, I should have Grade A signal quality.
So, being the good salesman that he is, this Sprint employee tried to sell me the AIRAVE.
“Wow! A mini cell-tower right in my house??? Now that’s cool! How does it work?”
“Just plug it right into your home broadband router and away it goes!”
“Wait… it uses my broadband? How much does this thing cost?”
“$99.99″
“Hmm… not too bad I guess…”
“Plus $10 per month per line. Plus a $4.99 per month Enhanced Coverage Charge.”
“What?! But I’m already paying $129 per month for 2 lines and the service doesn’t work at my house! And you want to utilize my broadband connection which I am already paying $70 per month for? Shouldn’t you want to GIVE me this box and service so I don’t leave your network for one that works?”
I actually had that last part of the conversation in my head as I walked away laughing.
And according to this article about a similar product from AT&T, these devices actually help take load off of their system and will there by enhance their service for other customers in my area.
You’re killing me Sprint…. I’ll buy the box, but you should want to bend over backwards to enhance my user experience without raking me over the coals for it.
Everybody else gets to make these lists — why can’t I?
I’m a webOS noob, so I’m sure this list will need updating soon.
UPDATE: this post is only a few hours old, but I’ve already got a new favorite app:
CowTasks
Switching from Android to Palm, I was disappointed to find that Remember the Milk did not have a webOS app. I mean, they have an app for every other platform, plugins galore, etc. Why no webOS app??? Their touch-enabled mobile webapp (http://m.rememberthemilk.com) works pretty well, but you can’t get native notifications on the phone.
But d0lph1nK1ng has done a real nice job building an app from RTM’s API. His app is called CowTasks and it’s got just about everything the Android app does.
CowTasks
Tweed
Definitely the best Twitter app for webOS. 99 cents but worth every penny. Upload pictures, shorten URLs, everything you would expect from a full-featured Twitter client.
Tweed
QR deCODEr
QR Codes are cool and this little app does a great job of decoding them.
QR deCODEr
DirecTV
A must for any DirecTV subscriber. Sure you can do all this from DirecTV’s mobile site, but a native app just makes it that much easier.
DirecTV
DirecTV Search
OpenTable
OpenTable isn’t as prevalent here in Salt Lake City as it was in New Orleans, but a very well done app anyway. Check it out if OpenTable is big in your town!
OpenTable
Engadget
Ok, there are a hundred different ways to get your Engadget fix on a mobile device, but this little app is pretty nice!
Engadget
Backgrounds
One of my favorite apps on Android — glad to see he’s got a webOS version too.
Backgrounds
Expanded reviews coming soon!
I made the jump from Android 1.5 on a Samsung Moment to webOS on a Palm Pre, as I discussed here, mainly for webOS’s rockin’ email support.
I’ve had my Palm Pre less than a week now and I’ve suffered TWO email meltdowns.
The first time I let the battery die completely one night and when I charged the phone back up and tried to start up the email app, I was met with a blank white screen. I killed the email app, restarted it, and got another blank screen. I went into ‘Preferences and Accounts’ and saw no accounts listed! Not good. I tried to re-add my Gmail account — put in my credentials and hit ‘Sign In’ and it just sat there spinning. I finally killed it and tried again with my work Gmail account — same thing.
At that point I had only had the phone a few days, so I said screw it and decided to try a reset — “Erase Apps and Data”. This is actually a pretty slick feature since just about everything on the phone is backed up to your “Palm Profile”. The phone came back up after a few minutes and said it was restoring my apps and data. Nice! ( Yes, it restores apps you’ve purchased through the catalog too, but did not restore any “homebrew” apps I had installed. No biggie, I’ve still got the ipk’s on my computer. )
I had to re-enter the passwords for my email accounts, but they came right back up and worked great. Whew… hope that never happens again…
But it happened again yesterday! This time the battery was down to about 10% ( I only mention that because I was convinced that the first cataclysm happened because I let the batter completely die ). Same issue — blank white screen when I tried to start the email, couldn’t re-add the accounts, etc. Sigh… time for another reset.
How often is this going to happen?
This thread in the Palm forums makes me think that this problem was introduced with the webOS 1.4 update. Hope they are working on a fix!
At the end of this thread a user claims that Palm Tech Support is requesting log files from users with the problem. I’ll have to remember to check my log files before resetting if it happens again.
This is more of an OS comparison than a hardware comparison, but I’ll touch on hardware a little. Mostly though, I want to compare Android 1.5 to Palm WebOS 1.4. When the Samsung Moment gets the Android 2.1 OS upgrade, this could be a completely different discussion.
I’m not sure I’m ready to say Palm webOS is a superior OS to Android, but as a Palm fanboy and a web developer, I think it’s pretty slick.
Email
One of my biggest gripes about Android 1.5 was lack of support for Google Apps. A year or so ago I convinced my coworkers that we should migrate to Google Apps to handle our email. I was very disappointed that Android’s Gmail app could not support multiple accounts. I’ve even read that I could not have used my Google Apps account as my main account on Android — that it had to be an @gmail.com account.
Even my old Blackberry had a dedicated app for a Google Apps email account!
Supposedly Android 2.1 will allow multiple accounts in Gmail. Maybe somebody could confirm or deny that for me. Looking forward to it….
Meanwhile, I was impressed with webOS’s Gmail handling in the emulator. webOS’s Synergy feature is pretty cool — quietly commingling your email, calendar and contacts from various accounts all into one view. They can be viewed separately as well of course, but having one inbox will all your unread email is pretty cool.
All that being said, I’ve run into a problem with webOS’s email which I will discuss separately.
Everything Else
So email was my main motivator for switching ( at least temporarily ) to webOS, but what about all the other stuff? Well, the Palm Pre is definitely smaller and lighter than the Samsung Moment. I miss my nice wide horizontal sliding keyboard on the Moment though. The Pre’s keyboard is not bad and I can hammer out an email pretty quick ( even with my giant sausage thumbs ), but its a tad cramped.
The phone itself is better on the Pre. I live in a basement and get a horrible signal anyway, but the Moment was barely usable as a phone in my apartment. The Pre does much better and I don’t get “hold on dude… you’re breaking up” all the time.
The web browser is at least as good as Android’s, and maybe better because of Pre’s multitouch support. Zooming in and out on large web pages is pretty slick.
Moving around in webOS is really cool. Once you get the hang of the swipe and flick gestures, you can get around really quick. Sure, Android uses gestures too, but flicking webOS’s “cards” around is much more fun.
