prashant's new web blog.

Palm Pre Tips List:

A. Battery Life
-set email to check every 6 hrs instead of more often
-screen brightness to lowest setting
-turn OFF GPS under location services when possible
-Use WI-FI if available, otherwise turn it off. (Saves power by using
WiFi instead of 3G when possible)
-Battery life does seem to improve with use (Conditioning phenomenom).
-Turn OFF Google Talk or AIM by clicking on Green round circle and picking Sign OFF from the messaging application when possible.

B. In General
-if screen goes dead everytime you use phone, might be something interfering iwth the proximity sensor (special sensor that turns off screen when holidng up to ear). IN my case, it was the dumb plastic screen cover it ships with....just remove it and use the velvety pouch it comes with instead (or get a real screen protector).

Overall - I'm loving it!!

The Pre supports cut, copy, and paste, but I don't think the mechanism for doing this is intuitive, so I've put together a quick guide.
http://forum.brighthand.com/showthread.php?p=1765693

To select text, hold down the Shift key and drag your finger over the text you want. This takes some practice, as the Pre tends to stop selecting text before I get to the end of the word. A hint: Drag way past where you think you think you should have to.

To copy the text you've selected, you can use the drop-down box, but a faster way is to tap and hold on the gesture area* and then hit the C key. To paste, you hold down on the gesture area and hit the V key, while cutting is the same with the X key.

You can use these functions in some applications, but not all. You can't use CCP in the web browser, for example.

Also helpful for installing epocreates:

http://palmdoc.net/?p=2384

I can confirm Epocrates is up and running on classic using the setup.prc. Run it in classic and it will sync up with epocrates server and download it!
You download this from get.epocrates.com while on a palm device. OR
by gtrickingh the server into thinking you are on a palm device.
From a pretty old post in another forum: instructions for firefox (on your computer):
type in about:config in the title bar.
right click, select new/string. enter :
'general.useragent.override' for the preference, and 'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98; PalmSource/Palm-TunX; Blazer/4.3) 16;320x448' as the value.

this fools the server into thinking that youfre connecting from a palm device.
navigate to get.epocrates.com
click ginstall nowh
save to your location of choice, and move setup.prc to your classicapps folder on your pre.
Run classic on your pre and self-explanatory from here on.

This one was frustrating - how to install Classic Apps in the new Palm Pre Phone? After all, that's the reason I bought it.

Turns out after webOS 1.03 something happens where you have to follow these instructions posted HERE:

Here is a brief summary:

Well, this trick has worked for so far. First, after updating to WebOS 1.0.3, and having ClassicApp recreate the new folders seen under USB, I reloaded ClassicApp ROM updater in the ClassicApp/Palm/Launcher folder. I unmounted the USB Pre drive and restarted Classic. After a couple BSODs, Classic started just fine and I ran the ClassicApp ROM updater fron the internal card. After making sure Classic would run again, I went back to Pre in USB mode. The new folder structure was the ClassicApp/Intsall folder (which really doesn't seem to do anything), and a revised ClassicApp/Launcher/Install folder. Make sure to delete all read Me files under either of these USB folders. Then to add new prc or pdb file, I put them in the ClassicApp/Palm/Launcher/Install folder. When I unmounted the Pre from USB and restarted Classic, I immediately ran the Import app under Classic, and lo and behold, IT WORKED! I could now install prcs and pdbs and have them run in Classic again.

Apparently, when files are installed this way it imports the files from the Internal (virtual) Card and puts them in Phone under Classic. The Internal Card becomes empty, and in Classic, the prc can see the appropriate pdb file and the app runs as designed. This took a lot of fiddling with various combos, but this version worked for me. YMMV.

Here's a fix for anyone who has a dv2000 HP laptop that gives a dvd drive not detected problem. I first had this problem with Vista 32-bit SP1 (this laptop comes natively with Vista 32-bit). That time the problem with the missing drive became severe enough that I had to restore the computer back to factory specs and the missing DVD drive reappeared.

This time I've installed Windows 7 64-bit. Sure enough the missing DVD is back. Tried the upper and lower filter driver registry hacks mentioned elsewhere, but they didn't work for me. Further searching reveals that the problem here is a bad (S)ATA driver for the DVD Drive. Where to find drivers? Turns out, I went to control panel --> device manager and found something called SATA controller. I went to the option to choose another / alternate driver and actually installed the standard dual IDE driver instead.

Woila! The missing DVD Drive is found. So it looks like the nforce driver is bad. Oh, well everything works for now.

Also, fixed a missing "coprocesser" device manager icon by installing Vista 64 Nforce drivers for dv2000/dv2416 from the hp support and drivers site.

Another pesky problem, a problem with blank LCD when powering on (solved that problem temporarily by reflashing the BIOS - seems F.39 works better than F.3C which is a newer bios).