webOS Email Fail

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.