Verizon recently added the Palm Pre Plus to its smartphone roster and PC Magazine has some tips to help you get the most out of the phone:
1. Get Used to Universal Search. Just start typing the first letters of persons name and the phone will call up that person’s contact info. If you don’t have that info your phone, Google, Wikipedia, and Twitter searches are automatically launched. You can also use keywords like “pic,” “store,” and “ToDo,” which will automatically pull up individual applications.

2. Don’t Count on iTunes Synching. When the Pre launched, all you had to do was connect it to your PC, and it would synch your music and podcast libraries in iTunes, just like an iPod. Apple was not amused and disabled the feature in an iTunes update. Then Palm re-enabled it in an update of their own. And then…well, you get the idea. I just tried it with iTunes 9.0.0.7, and it worked fine. After I updated iTunes to 9.3, the sync broke again. This may continue for a while. You can always put the phone into USB mode and drag and drop files, but I recommend using a utility like DoubleTwist (free at www.doubletwist.com) to avoid the mess altogether.

3. Turn on Advanced Gestures. I used my Pre for months before Bill Shrink’s CEO Peter Pham told me about this tip. Just go to Screen, Lock, and Turn on Advanced Gestures. This will let you flip through applications in full-screen mode without using the Card View menu. It saves you some swipes.

4. Buy an Extra Battery. Sad to say it, but the Palm Pre’s battery life kind of sucks. I charge it every day, usually both at home and in the office. If you can swing it, you can pay $50 for the Touchstone inductive charge, which is cool as hell, but $50 is a lot to pay for an AC adapter. On a journalist’s salary, $20 for an extra battery is a better bet. You can get them on Amazon.

5. Delete apps with two clicks. For months, I thought the only way to delete apps was to go into Device Info and scroll through a long list. Total waste of time. All you have to do is hold the orange key and tap an application icon. You will get a pop-up window that tells you how much space the app takes and lets you delete it with one click. This is particularly important for Sprint users, since our devices have only half the memory of the Plus models, but it’s good advice all the same.

Palm’s latest update to its mobile operating system now allows owners of the Pre and Pixi to use Yahoo’s instant messaging client and watch YouTube videos in wide screen view, among other things.

But one feature not included in the update is the seamless synchronization with iTunes, Apple’s popular software for managing music and other media on a computer.

Palm has long clashed with Apple over whether or not owners of its devices can sync them up with their iTunes libraries without any intermediate software.

Palm confirmed that the newest release of WebOS, the mobile operating system for Palm devices, does not include a fix to the media syncing capability, although declined to specify the reasons behind the decision.

Read the full story on NY Times.

The main component of WebOS 1.2.1, which should be making its way to handsets over the weekend fixes the syncing compatibility that iTunes 9 rebroke. Now we just need the Palm Pre to come to Verizon…

[source: Cnet]