Switching back to the Palm Pre hasn’t been as painful as I thought it might be. With that said, there are definitely a few things that need to be changed about the phone. First, it’s too slow. Scrolling through my contact list is stop and go at best. Secondly, where are my apps?! The App Catalog just doesn’t have the same breadth and scope of apps as the Android Market. If my memory serves me correctly, Pre has approx 5,000 compared to Android’s 200,000 apps available. Granted the “core” apps, Facebook, Foursquare, Angry Birds, Twitter, Google Maps, Yelp, etc. are there, but the more obscure apps such as Square, Winamp, WordPress, and Beem are no where to be found. This may all change when HP launches their WebOS tablets… I hope.
Back to task at hand. I plan on fixing some of the annoyances that I have been dealing with on the Pre by doing a comm board swap with a Verizon Pre Plus. By doing so I’ll essentially have a Pre Plus on Sprint’s network. The Pre Plus has a faster processor, double the storage space, double the RAM, and the hardware build quality has been improved overall. So long as I can pull it off, it’ll be all win for me. I have already gone through all of the steps to get the software ready for my Frankenstein hybrid of a phone. All that’s left is to do the hardware swap.
The Pre Plus should be arriving tomorrow. If all goes well, I’ll post links to the guide I’ll be using and my feedback on the process.
Update: It worked! I now have a Palm Pre Plus working on sprint with a comm board from my original Pre. The process took about 2 hours to complete. Here’s a picture of the old and new phone side-by-side.
If you’d like to do this yourself, I strongly recommend you follow the guide posted on WebOS-Internals.org.