Palm Pre

By Ed Baig

If you've got your hands on this year's hottest new smartphone, you'll want the book that covers it inside and out: Palm Pre: The Missing Manual . This beautiful, full-color book from USA Today personal-technology columnist Ed Baig will help you go from newcomer to expert in no time. The maker of the legendary Palm Pilot is back on center stage with a smartphone that lets you browse the Web, listen to music, watch video, view pictures, and a lot more. Palm Pre: The Missing Manual provides you with everything you need to know to get the most out of this amazing mobile tool. Get to know the touchscreen, and learn to navigate by tapping, swiping, dragging, flicking, and pinching Link your contacts, merge calendars, combine email accounts, and more by syncing your phone over the Web Stay in touch with other people by using the Pre as a full-featured phone and organizer Use it for email, texting, chatting, and as an efficient web browser Take advantage of the Pre as a complete media center to store, sort, play, stream music and video, and sync with iTunes Take and view photos, import images, and share them with others

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0596803702
• ISBN13: 9780596803704
• Release Date: October 2009
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 2.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.1" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Must Have

the Pre comes out of the box with a quick start guide and that is it..there are videos and such on [...] but the book is an invaluable tool..I had the Pre for 9 months and thought I knew everything there was to know but I learned 8 or 9 solid tips from the book that have helped .

Palm Pre is a sophisticated phone. . . .

. . . and it doesn't come with a written manual. We had the phone for a couple of months before we got this book. It answered a lot of questions right away. The manual paid for itself big time because it added much more value to our $150 phone! The 'Missing Manual' is well organized, easy to understand; and it explains things better than your average product manual would.

The Palm Pre - A Manual without the Apps

Consistent with other missing manual books, Palm Pre, The Missing Manual is a well written introduction to the Palm Pre, the new smart phone from Palm and Sprint. The target for most smart phone makers is the iPhone, and this book often compares features of the two phones. It discusses the advantage that multi-tasking brings to a smart phone, as applications don't have to be closed to access other features of the phone. The various features and applications of the phone are presented in a breezy, conversational style. Despite its small size, the Pre is an excellent smart phone, with many of the same capabilities as a laptop computer. There are many functions that are available that won't be immediately obvious to even the experienced smart phone user. Browsing through a book such as the Missing Manual will introduce most of these functions to you. My Pre came with the equivalent of a quick start guide, I downloaded the manual from Sprint to compare with the Missing Manual. The Pre manual is arranged somewhat differently, though the information included is similar. I learned several things I wasn't aware of as I paged through the Missing Manual, those items are also found in the Sprint Manual. The Missing Manual focuses more on the "gee whiz" aspects of the phone, the Palm manual states the features in a more prosaic fashion There is a 17 page index which is quite complete. If you download the Pre manual in PDF format, an index is superfluous as you can use the search function in the reader software in its place. Neither manual is able to give an up-to-date description of apps in the Palm app store, they are beginning to appear rapidly, and the rate of their appearance will only increase. For further information on the current state of Pre apps, you'll have to access one of the web sites that is devoted to the Pre. The apps that are available are also viewable on the Pre, but there is little detail included as to what they do. If the Pre is to become a major player in the smart phone market, it will need rapid development of interesting and practical apps to appeal to a broad swath of potential users. Perhaps O'Reilly should have a web site devoted to this book that updates the available apps and allows user comments and ratings of the apps.

A must-have for any Palm Pre owner or soon-to-be owner

I'll start by saying that this book-- Palm Pre, The Missing Manual-- is a must-have for any new Palm Pre owner. Sure, the pamphlet that comes with the Palm Pre is adequate for getting you started and on your way, but there are so many figurative nooks and crannies in the operation of the Palm Pre that you won't even know about unless you've happened across them by accident or you've read this book. I've owned a Palm Pre since the first week it was available. A long-time user of older Palm smartphones such as the Treo line and Centro, I enthusiastically and anxiously followed the the technology news about the forthcoming Pre. The concept of Synergy -- the Pre's software mechanism for collecting data from various online sources such as GMail and Facebook into centralized databases on the phone -- was incredibly appealing and frightening at the same time. I often wondered if Palm really could pull it off or if the Pre was going to be Palm's dying gasp and I would be left to the mediocrity of Windows Mobile or Blackberry or the cult of conformation using Apple's iPhone. Thankfully, my experience with the Pre has given me hope. Being an early adopter, I've had my shares of bumps along the way, but generally, the Pre is an awesome device. Now that the Palm App Catalog is filling up with new, exciting applications and there's talk of more operating system updates on the horizon, I'm really enjoying myself with the Pre. Let's get back to the book. Edward C. Baig's book seems fairly typical for a "Missing Manual" book. It is fairly short, witty, funny, and packed full of valuable information interspersed with plenty of callouts to "tips" and "notes" along the way. The book is extremely easy to read and shouldn't intimidate those who are nowhere nearly as geeky as me. My daughter was easily digesting the book before I started reading it and she's nine years old. Had I had this book the first week I owned a Pre, it would have saved me some frustration figuring out the best way to get my contacts and calendar data onto the Pre. Palm Pre, The Missing Manual is available directly from O'Reilly and Associates and probably from any of your favorite online booksellers. The MSRP is USD 24.99. That seems a bit much to me for what you get. Something ten dollars less would be more reasonable, I think.