**Part 1: Hardware, webOS, user interface | Review index | Part 3: Data speeds, backup, battery, Bluetooth, pricing, wrap-up**
There's a lot new in the Pre. It's not just the phone and it's not just the OS -- it's the underlying ideas and bundled applications too. We're going to try and run down the stand-outs and standards -- from the heady promises of Synergy, to the basic stuff you'll be using every day.
Besides things like Universal Search and unobtrusive notifications, another really big idea that Palm has for webOS is Synergy, a contact / calendar management system that aims to put an end to the confusion of having to juggle multiple accounts from multiple services on a single mobile device. Unfortunately, this is probably the aspect of the OS that needs the most work.
The Synergy premise is simple: it will take your Gmail account, Facebook profile, AIM identity, and / or Exchange data and merge it all together on your Pre, killing duplicate entries, joining together sources where there's overlap (creating "linked contacts"), and generally making your connected life super-duper awesome. What it actually does is dump pretty much all of your content into the phone without a second thought for what it's letting through the door. If you have a single Gmail account, you'll probably be okay -- it perfectly handles a set of data from one source just fine, and that source would be easily manageable because... well, it's your Gmail. However, it's totally indiscriminate about what contacts it pulls in, which means if Google has auto-saved anything, it's going to be on your phone. That's fine, we're used to this. The G1 does the same thing. The problem really arises when you want your Facebook profile integrated. Guess what? You don't get to say whose info gets pushed to the phone -- every single person you "know" on Facebook will instantly becomes a part of your contact list. And we're talking people who only give you access to their birthdate. How does it feel to have a contact on your phone that is simply a birthday? Annoying.
We don't know if you're like us, but we don't want every person we're friends with on Facebook in the contact list for our phone. Facebook kindly provides grouping for different contacts because it appreciates the fact that not everyone has the same kind of relationship. WebOS? Not so much.
The system works fine if you don't care who ends up in your address book -- in fact, it works really well at grabbing all that info and sticking it on the phone (while keeping it in sync with server-side changes). Where it breaks down is giving you any kind of tool to really manage and gatekeep the information.
Secondly, contact linking doesn't seem to work the way it should -- namely, it doesn't find duplicates in all contacts, whether an AIM, Google, or Facebook account and merge where appropriate. What we discovered is that that adding our AIM account to the Gmail contact list that lived on the phone didn't automatically bring the correct names under one roof (as you imagine it's supposed to). Instead, we had to manually link contacts, even when we could clearly see that the AIM name was already in our Google contact. That's the opposite of what Synergy is supposed to do... we think. We spoke to Palm and confirmed that for now, Synergy isn't pulling in AIM names, only email addresses, though they're considering one of those OTA updates to fix once the device is launched.
Don't get us wrong -- there are a number of good ideas at play with Synergy, but it clearly needs some kinks worked out before it realizes the vision that the company seems to have for it. For the time being, we'll likely only be juggling our AIM and Gmail account data, though we're ready and willing to see what happens with that aforementioned OS update.
Contacts and Calendar
Since contact management with Synergy can be handled in multiple locations, we expected fairly robust options when it came to our address book -- and we weren't disappointed. The contact app in webOS is extremely well thought out and easy to navigate. As you'd imagine, if you're using Gmail as your main contact list (as we were), changes to contacts are updated periodically. We were hoping there would be a push and pull, but no luck. Still, you can choose to manually sync when you want to update, and changes seemed to flawlessly take whether we made them in Gmail or on the phone. One option we'd like to see in the future is for Synergy associations to be allowed to migrate back to your Gmail / Facebook contacts. For instance, if you link an AIM account and Gmail contact on the Pre, when you sync back to Gmail, it will add the AIM name to that entry. Still, we think webOS provides a deep and useful platform for managing contacts, despite some of the shortcomings of Synergy.
The calendar app, like contacts and email, will automatically sync to your Gmail (or Facebook / Exchange) set and pull data in. Besides offering helpful views in a variety of colors (though not enough variety for our needs -- this app is hurting for user-selectable hues), it also can hook into / be hooked into other applications on the device. For instance, you can buy tickets for a movie via Fandango, and have it drop the event in your calendar. Like contacts, calendar merging is an all or nothing affair, though you can choose which calendars you see in your views.
Navigation in the app is actually really clever -- this is the first calendar application for a smartphone that didn't feel like it was trying to cram too much information into too small of a space. Admittedly, the week and month views aren't going to reveal lots of detail to you -- you'll have to go day-by-day to see that info -- but for giving a clear overview of your events (provided you know which colors are which), it does an outstanding job. We also liked the fact that it used the familiar left / right and up / down swipes to move through days, weeks, and months, which felt completely native and natural to the webOS environment. It's obvious that as with previous applications, Palm needs to work out the Synergy kinks, but this is clearly a place the company didn't skimp on.
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