While I'm very happy with my unrooted Epic, here are a few things I miss from my day-one Pre:
1. The task manager. The writeup at the start of the thread recommends Itching Thumbs, Wave Launcher etc. The thing is, they're all just
apps, and so when you press the Home button it needs to load the app if it isn't resident. If you do anything memory-hungry (Firefox, Angry Birds, etc.) your launcher gets terminated like any other app when the phone needs memory. My Epic has half a gig of RAM and I still have to wait 10 seconds for LauncherPro to restart after running Firefox, and Itching Thumbs was pretty much unusable. Android purists will say you don't need to see a thumbnail of a running app just like iPhone people used to say you didn't need to multitask on a phone. Well, we don't need to use smartphones at all, but we do, and I was really spoiled by the ability to flick back and forth between
apps. It makes the long-press-Home switcher feel like Windows 3.1.
2. For that matter, the "automatically kill
apps when you haven't used them in a while" feature is a great theory, but in practice it means that so much as bringing up the task manager will cause Firefox and other large programs to lose their state and reload from scratch, even if they're only using less than 10% of my phone's RAM. Yes, WebOS saying it was out of memory and I needed to close some cards was annoying, but at least I got to choose which
apps got closed. And switching to another task to check something and back to the text message I'm writing only to find myself in a different conversation than I was in previously, because every app maintains state differently even when they're not terminated, has caused me a lot of embarrassment when I didn't notice.
3. Non-invasive Exchange support. My Palm Pre didn't have ActiveSync support, yet it was still able to connect and sync with my clients' Exchange servers without having to accept ActiveSync policies. I'm not going to give an Exchange server controlled by someone else the right to wipe my phone remotely when they didn't buy me the phone, so my only option for Exchange access on my Epic is OWA Light. "Sorry, I didn't get your email this morning because I only remembered to check OWA just now." I understand there are hacked versions of the mail client I can use when I root my phone, but my Pre did it before I even enabled homebrew on it.
4. If there are keyboard shortcuts for page up, page down, home and end in any of the popular browsers (stock, Dolphin Light, Miren, Firefox, Opera) I haven't found them yet.
5. A standardized keyboard layout. While the SSH and VNC options (which I use pretty much daily) are far more robust than those available on the Pre, the fact that every phone has different keys (or none at all) results in things like "Hold down the trackball for CTRL" (whose phone has a trackball anymore?) or "Press End Call for ESC" (I swore I'd never get another phone without a hangup button, but somehow I did). I got a patched version of ConnectBot that lets me use the useless Smiley button as a CTRL key, but other
apps don't fare nearly as well. If I'm lucky, maybe
6. Interactive indicators. On the Pre, you could swipe down on the indicator bar to get the date, which wifi network you were connected to, etc. Alarms showed up as notifications, which was annoying at times because of the screen space used but often useful. On Android, wifi and alarm states are reported in the indicators, but to see what alarm is set or which network you're on, you have to go into settings menus, sometimes more than one level deep.
7. As others have noted, there's no OS-level screenshot facility, no way to silence the phone without turning on the screen (but at least I haven't had an alarm go off in the movie theater because WebOS alarms defaulted to not respecting silent mode),
There are so many things I like better on the Epic, even without having rooted it, that it seems almost silly to bring up these minor downsides. For example, just being able to run Firefox (and be able to scroll overflow: auto divs and iframes that seem to be used on more and more sites these days) makes my Epic twice the web browsing device my Pre was, and Android's voice recognition does a way better job than any of my PCs ever did without having to train it. But it hasn't been a 100% smooth transition. No doubt other power users have had their own issues to deal with, but I'm glad I got out of the WebOS downward spiral four months before it hit bottom, and I haven't even powered up my Pre since then.
I still hold out hope that HP will release WebOS as free software and allow Google to copy some of their design wins, but I'm not holding my breath.
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