I've had my Palm Pre for about five days now and I'm really starting to like it. That's not to say the last five days haven't been frustrating and disappointing, but I've managed to find acceptable solutions for most of my problems. The experience has turned out a lot better than the last time I tried switching platforms.

The Pre is definitely a 1.0 release so if you're a techy user like me, you'll find lots of things to gripe about, but there's still a lot of promise in the platform. The operating system itself is at version 1.0.2 so it's really pretty new.

Issues

I'll start with some of the issues I've run into.

PIM data

If you're a PalmOS user migrating to the Palm Pre, you're likely to run into some of the same issues I did. First off, when I asked the Sprint sales dude (who owned a Pre and had owned a Centro prior to that) if he could transfer my data to the Pre, he said, "Sure!" and then proceeded to try to get the data off my Centro. A few minutes later, he told me he could not because he just couldn't get any of the data to transfer over the IR port.

That's okay, a little reading on Palm's site told me what I needed to know. I had to sync the Centro "one last time" using the latest and greatest Palm Desktop for Windows (which I installed specifically for this task) and then download and run Palm's Data Transfer Assistant program for Windows (which is a free download from the support area of Palm's website.)

This allegedly transferred my address book, calendar, tasks, and notes/memos to my online Palm Profile where the Pre would automatically find them and install them. Within a few minutes, the address book on the Pre was populated with names and contact information that were on my Centro. Yay. The notes seemed to transfer okay too. But when I went into the Calendar application on the Pre, my day was blank. None of the events I had scheduled for the day were visible.

Retracing my steps, I wondered if maybe I hadn't selected the calendar data to be transferred. In retrospect, Palm doesn't let you choose which data you want transferred, but the DTA application has icons for each of the types of data (Calendar, Contacts, etc.) and when you click on those icons, they illuminate as if they're selected. As a result, a user (me) might think clicking the icons somehow activates that stream of data to be transferred to the Palm Profile. So, I went back into the DTA and "selected" only the Calendar data and transferred it again.

Nothing ever showed up in my view of my day's events on the Pre. Fiddling, I changed to the Week View. That's when I saw confirmation that the data I had transferred using the DTA did get transferred... twice. In the Week View, I saw colored bars indicating appointments and events (in duplicate). But when I switched to the Day View, I saw nothing. Bleh.

It would be super neat if the Palm Profile was tied to Google Calendar-like web application so you could have a Palm Desktop type app on the Web, but, no, Palm doesn't do that. There is a web-based portal that let's you log into your Palm Profile, but it doesn't let you do much at all except remotely delete all the data on your phone (very handy if your Pre gets stolen and you want to keep your personal information out of the hands of the thief).

So, I wasn't sure what I was going to do. Looking at the Palm support forums, it was clear this wasn't a unique problem to me. Lots of people were having this problem. The seemed to be that people should use Google's Calendar app as the online storage location of Calendar data. So, I figured out how to export my PalmOS Calendar data and then import it into my Google Calendar. That worked. Now I had THREE copies of every event showing up as colored rectangles in my Week View, but at least now I had actual events in the Day View.

I tried remotely deleting the Pre's data from the Palm Profile page, but when it booted back up, it asked me for my Palm Profile username and password and then proceeded to load up the duplicate calendar entries again. Buried in the forums, I found information that described how to erase the data in the Palm Profile (Disable backups on the Pre and then reset it.). Then I proceeded to set up the freshly reset Pre to use only Google as my online repository of Calendar data. That worked well.

In the course of all this, of course, I deleted my address book as my contacts data was stored in my Palm Profile. The Pre grabbed my contacts from Facebook and the handful I had stored already in Google Mail's address book, but I have hundreds of contacts from my Centro that I needed to figure out how to get into Google, I guess. Google appears to only let you import from an CSV file generated from Microsoft Outlook (bleh). I can generate a CSV file, but I don't know what one generated from Microsoft Outlook looks like, so I'll need to do some research on that before I do it. So, for now, I'm doing without a fully-stocked address book.

E-mail

The Pre has a pretty decent e-mail client built-in, but I had problems. Again, if you're using Google Mail as your only e-mail account, the Pre should work with no problems at all. I set up Google Mail, but I have four other generic IMAP mailboxes I wanted to check with the Pre as well.

My first problem was with encryption.

One of the IMAP sites I wanted to check mail with has CA-signed certificates in place for its encrypted IMAP traffic. This means they have purchased a authenticated certificate from a company like Verisign or Comodo. That seemed to work okay.

The other two sites I wanted to check mail with have self-signed certificates. I trust them because I set up the self-signed certificates myself. Where most modern desktop e-mail applications would raise an alert like, "Hey, we can't vouch for the authenticity of this encryption certificate. Do you want to trust it or what?" the Pre just says, "SSL error Check your time and date."

I hope this is something they fix in the next update of the OS because the way it works now is just bone-headed.

I discovered, yesterday, there is a manual workaround. You can grab the public certificate file off the server and copy it to the Pre via USB. Then, go into Device Info and make your way to a menu item labeled "Certificate Manager". There, you can add a certificate, select the certificate file you added to the Pre via USB, and specify that you want to trust this certificate.

I am still having trouble sending e-mail through the two sites I manage. What's really frustrating about this is that once you try to send e-mail, and it can't go through, the Pre just keeps telling you there was an error sending that message. Deleting the offending message from the Outbox doesn't stop the repeating alerts. The only way I've been able to stop it from notifying me about the problem is to remove the e-mail account and add it again. Stupid!

More to come. Sleep calls me.