When Palm announced what seems like years ago they were developing a completely new phone web based OS I got excited. I live and breath the web and know the power of web devices. Finally they announced the Palm Pre and it was released yesterday, June 6 2009. Of course supplies were going to be limited so getting in line early was key. The Sprint store by my house opened at 8 am and I got in line at 6. I ended up being #19 and there were 3 people who actually camped overnight. The store ended up having about 80 of them so I easily got one. Here is a breakdown of my first 24 hours with the Palm Pre.

Feature Run Down.

Initially reading the reviews everyone said the plastic was flimsy and the phone was too light. I found none of these to be true, the phone is a great weight and doesn’t feel cheap at all. The only piece that does feel flimsy is the little cover for the micro USB port. You have to open it carefully the first few times to break it in, it feels like it is going to break if you are not careful. But after a few times opening and closing it it loosens up and I feel more comfortable about it now.

The Web OS is Amazing! very fast and fluid. Launching applications and switching between them takes almost no effort at all. It feels very similar to the iPhone except you can use gestures instead of always clicking the center button to move back a screen. Moving between apps and launching apps happens super fast, not sure how it compares to the iPhone but it blows the Backberry Storm out of the water.

The screen is very bright and the colors, transparencies and shadows are amazing. Its almost like when someone moves from a Windows PC to a Mac. The window placement, transitions and movement are just so fluid you don’t know how you ever worked on a PC. I was scared that the feel of the screen was going to be like the Blackberry Storm, (I hate the feel of the storm screen) but its not rubbery at all, its not glass but its super solid. Very reactive and sensitive. It reacts to your fingers without effort. Only thing I could not figure out at first was how to do is take a screen shot, one thing I like that the iPhone/Tough can do in just two keys. I finally figured it out with the Orange, Sym, and P keys (kind of a hassle).

The App Catalog is limited at the current moment, I really hope Palm releases the SDK soon because it looks super easy just from the apps I have downloaded. I downloaded 6 so far and they have all been pretty good. Tweed could use some more options but it works, I am sure someone will create a better Twitter client once the SDK comes out.

The audio quality is amazing, both in the ear piece and on speaker, I think better than my Blackberry. I love that there is a full headphone jack at the top, a great position for it and the iTunes integration is awesome. The Pandora app lets you stream music right over the air (no need to be on wifi, but if wifi is enabled it will use it) and can even keep playing in the background. Something the iPhone cannot compete with.

The notification system is really cool to say the least. It comes through at the bottom of the screen with tiny icons or one line text till you touch it and all notifications expand and moves your application up a little, no need to quit your app it just keeps running. Clicking on a notification launches the app and still keeps your old app running in the background.

The battery life is good so far. It came about 40% charged and playing with it the battery was going down quick. After charging it to 100% it only went down 10% in about 4 hours. Its hard to say how good the battery life is yet, I will post an update in the next few days.

The browser is solid and loads pretty much any web page, zoom happens with the normal two finger actions. One thing I was disappointed by was the lack of Flash. I really hope it comes in a update soon. Updates get pushed through in the background and looks like they are going to be updating the OS often. There already is an update for Web OS to 1.0.2 and it updated without issue. The Sprint network is amazing, I was getting 358 kbit/sec with 0.215s latency data transfer. Site Used: DSL Reports Mobile Speed Test

The keyboard I heard form reviews was hard to type on and the keys were too small. I did not find this to be the case. The only issue I found with the keyboard layout is how close the “back” and “enter” keys are to each other. Without looking I often went to click the back button but ended up clicking the enter key. Bummer but totally possible to get use to.

The network integration is awesome. No need for the Google Sync app its all built in. The only downside is that Google Sync allows you to pick your “My Contacts” instead of “All Contacts” by default in the Pre. So it pulled in 500+ contacts and a lot of them I didn’t even know I had in my book. Took me a little bit but I finally cleaned up my addresses and now all is good. Adding Facebook contacts only complicates things further, wow there is a lot of people in your phone now. I ended up removing Facebook contacts for now.

Wrapup

Overall the Palm Pre is a pleasure to use. It makes using a phone seem effortless and fun again. I really hope they release the SDK soon so they can get more Apps in the catalog, this will be the make or break feature for the phone. The features and positives definitely outweigh the negatives. If you are looking for something different the Pre is definitely for you, its not your run of the mill phone and hopefully will compete for some of the iPhone’s market share. Competition is good and this phone will definitely keep Apple and Google on their toes.

Going through Magento Connect

I get the following errors:

magento-core/mage_core_adminhtml requires package “magento-core/Mage_Core_Modules”
(version >= 1.3.0, version <= 1.3.0), downloaded version is 1.3.1
...
Install Errors
No valid packages found
PEAR ERROR: upgrade failed

It was giving me this error for all packages, requiring an odd version and not letting me go any further.

Searching around

Looking around I couldn’t find any fixes for this issue. There were a few people who had the same issue but no replies to their forum threads.

The Solution

Upgrade the installation via command line. For some reason going through the web interface just did not work. But if you have SSH access (which you should) to your server just navigate to your Magento install directory and run the following commands. I believe this works on both Linux and Windows servers.

./pear upgrade-all
rm -rf downloader/pearlib/cache/*
rm -rf var/cache/*

And then tada! “Magento ver. 1.3.1″ should show up in the footer of your admin area.

The panel consisted of

• Christopher Barger, Director, GM Global Communications Technology.
• Nick DeNardis, Associate Director, Web Communications, Wayne State University.
• Kelly LaVaute, Social Media Director, Quicken Loans.
• Shauna Nicholson, Marketing Manager/Ingenuity Engine, Biznet Internet Solutions.
• Steve Schwartz, CEO Guy, RateMyStudentRental.com, and Co-Founder, Alfa Jango, LLC Software & Marketing.
• Moderator: Tim Kiernan, Co-Host for the wildly popular Design Critique podcast.

There was no live stream or recording of the panel but Zachary Spencer rocked out an almost word by word transcript of the whole discussion.

In preparing for the panel they asked for a position statement from each of us. I decided to post mine below to get your thoughts.

Position Statement

Higher education institutions are working to understand the best way to leverage social networks to get the attention of prospective students. High school and even middle school age students are spending more time on social networks interacting with peers and companies they trust.

The more time prospective students spend online the more they ignore traditional media and commercials. DVR’s and MP3 players are letting these users bypass traditional advertisements. Companies and universities now need to start evaluating where they spend their ad dollars and resources.

Social media exposes the truths about a company or university regardless if it is good or bad. In the social space users are in control and are not afraid to speak their mind. University administration may not be open to exposing these truths. Because of the traditional nature of universities getting buy in is tough. Spending the already limited resources on an untested and unknown ROI of social media can be a difficult task.

The universities that do embrace this media and can navigate it appropriately, have the ability to tap into a wealth of motivated advocates that can essentially promote the university for them. On the other hand universities that go into the social space without a game plan or by thinking too traditional, have the potential to be pushed out and their advocates could turn into protesters.

The simplest thing for a universities to do is search and discover what is already being said and posted about them. Some administrators would be amazed at the content that is already out there.

Without being present in the social space, any negative comments or posts will go unanswered and all the user’s followers will see them as truth. Being in the social space allows universities to control their brand and respond to any misconceptions or answer any questions users may pose.

The best recommendations for a product or service are ones by friends or family. When a user has 800+ friends online and they post a message, it goes out to those 800+ friends as a recommendation. It is scary to think but news that use to take weeks to tell all their friends now only takes seconds online.

With the high spam detector that middle school and high school students have, universities have started creating positions for community managers and social media experts. Ensuring they are using the most appropriate tactics to interact with prospective students. The social space is essential for universities to be apart of, but strategy and experimentation are key to their success.

Currently Listening: SXSW 2009 Torrent

Currently Reading: Desire to Inspire

When You Are Comfortable:

You are philosophical and opinionated. You have quite a few pet causes, and you’re always adopting a new one. People see you as clever and smart. You now a lot, and you love to talk about a variety of subjects.

When You Are At Your Best:

You are ambitious, and hard-working. Adversity allows you to shine. You resourceful and able to make due. People see you as honest to the point of bluntness. But they always know that you’ll be fair. You have the good intentions.

When You Are in a Social Setting:

You are a determined and responsible. You strive for success, and you know what it takes to get things done. People find you to be trustworthy and a good leader. You treat people well, and they benefit from your wisdom.

Find out what your initials say about you

I am proud to announce my new site EDU Snippits. A Web site dedicated to collecting the best higher education design user interface elements.

What is EDU Snippits?

EDU Snippits is the place to collect and get inspired about design elements for higher education web sites. It’s not designed to rate the whole web site (that is what eduStyle.net is for) but to rate snippits of the design that you find appealing or useful. It’s a place to gather by category the different design elements of Web pages.

The idea is simple, see something you like on a higher education web site, take a screen shot, cut it out and submit it. It can be anything from the wordmark, promotion button, navigation, forms or even how the content is laid out. The goal is to compare and inspire web designers, developers, writers and user experience experts.

Check it out

• EDU Snippits Homepage
• More Information and Launch Timeline
• Follow @edusnippits on Twitter

administrator@shuttle:~$ rails -v/usr/bin/rails:17: undefined method `require_gem' for main:Object (NoMethodError)

Anytime I called “rails” I would get this error and could not get past.

Here is the fix

administrator@shuttle:~/$ sudo vim /usr/bin/rails

Look for anywhere in the file that calls “require_gem”, I found it in only one spot:

require_gem 'rails', version

And change “require_gem” to just “gem” so:

gem 'rails', version

Save and when you run “rails -v” you should see this:

administrator@shuttle:~/$ rails -vRails 2.2.2

You should no longer get the error with running “rails”

If you’re reading this I am going to assume you have not picked up a printed Yellow Pages to actually look up a phone number in the last five years. But last week, like clockwork a car was driving down the street delivering Yellow Pages on each doorstep. It made me kind of mad, I wanted to return the book right to them, I just took it from the porch and placed it in recycle. Why is this not an opt out delivery? It is, you just have to look for it, the opt-out is available at http://www.yellowpagesgoesgreen.org/, they should be promoting the opt-out option instead of delivering these zombies each year.

The Living Dead

Imagine the number of trees being cut down, the ink used, the plastic wrapping and the gas for delivery that are being used to create these books that a large majority of people are not even going to use or worse not recycle. The amount of litter and waste these book create is almost incredible. Checkout the stats at the Paperless Petition Web page.

I think of these books as zombies, no one I know with an internet connection uses them but they just keep coming, they are relentless. “Dead” in the eyes of the community but apparently thriving because of ad revenue produced. Its sad because they are obsolete withing days of bring printed, they are non-adaptable and non-scalable.

Environmental Responsibility

It amazes me that a company can be so wasteful and irresponsible. Although it probably keeps thousands of people employed and suppliers employed. Is the waste it creates worth all the jobs? What are the consequences of stopping the production of this book? Do the consequences of all these jobs outweigh the environmental benefit? Should companies be rated or rewarded for their overall environmental impact? I think so.

How you can help

Go to http://www.paperlesspetition.org/ to view and sign the petition. Be responsible and think about what you consume and how it impacts your world.

Footnote: I just opted out but since they only deliver every year have not had the chance to verify the opt-out works. If anyone can verify please do.

The panel consisted of (from left to right):

• Nick DeNardis, Associate Director of Web Communications at Wayne State University
• Shauna Nicholson, Marketing Manager, Biznet Internet Solutions
• Chad Wiebesick, Interactive Strategy Director at Perich Advertising + Design. (Moderator)
• Kevin Krason, President, Biznet Internet Solutions
• Ken Burbary, VP Digital at BIG Communications

This free event took place at Washtenaw Community College in Ann Arbor, Michigan. There was ~30 people who attended from various industries, they came to get a better understanding of social media and how they can leverage it.

The questions brought out not only the direction and how to for beginners but also the best practices and case studies of the advanced users in the social media field.

On the Refresh Detroit Web site they posted the summary of resources and references.

In addition the entire panel was recorded and is available below.

Audio provided by VC Web Services: