In this chapter, you learn how to maintain your Palm Pre. One of the most important maintenance events is to keep your Palm Pre’s operating system, webOS, up to date. We also cover some general maintenance and care tips. Topics include the following:
→ Upgrading webOS
→ Battery maintenance
→ Device maintenance
Your Palm Pre can last a long time if you take care of it. From keeping your precious device clean and scratch free to running routine updates of the software, this chapter includes a few tips to help you do this.
When using your Palm Pre, oils from your hands can leave smudges on the screen. To keep your Palm Pre’s screen clean, rub it with a microfiber cloth or pad specifically designed for phone screens.
Because the Palm Pre’s screen is plastic, do not use any fabric that might scratch the screen. A scratched screen is hard to fix. Never use chemicals to clean the Palm Pre’s screen. A damp cloth can do the trick.
Battery life is important when using your Palm Pre and the longer it lasts, the more time you have to use your phone during any given day. Here are some tips to extend your Palm Pre’s battery.
• Change the email fetch interval. Do you really need to check for new mail every 5 minutes? If not, then set this value to something much higher, like once an hour. You can always force a manual email check when needed.
• Try and reduce your use of Instant Message (IM). Because IM is real-time, your Palm Pre will be constantly sending and receiving data and that eats up battery charge.
• Turn off Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS when you are not using them. This is rather an inconvenience but if you need to squeeze a few more minutes out of your battery, you can do so by turning these radios off.
• For CDMA versions of the Palm Pre (Sprint and Verizon in the US for example), in bad coverage areas, put your Palm Pre into Airplane mode. Your Palm Pre uses up a lot of battery power in low coverage areas so if you need to preserve battery power, pay attention to this. In fact, bad coverage accounts for the biggest drain on battery life during a given day.
• If you have a choice, use Wi-Fi. If you are in an area with Wi-Fi and can associate to that Wi-Fi network, do so. The Wi-Fi radio is much more power efficient than the cellular network radio. As soon as you associate successfully with the Wi-Fi network, your Palm Pre stops using the cellular network for data. This also saves on battery life.
• Don’t let your Palm Pre’s battery run down completely. If possible, try and have some charge in it before you plug it in to charge. This extends the life of the battery.
• Carry a spare battery with you. If possible, keep two batteries charged and carry them with you just in case you have a heavy day of voice and data usage.
Just as the applications on your Palm occasionally need to be updated, so does webOS, the operating system that makes your Pre run. Palm is constantly improving the Palm Pre by adding features or fixing bugs.
Here is how to update your webOS:
If you update your Palm Pre’s webOS and now it won’t boot, Palm has a web browser tool called webOS Doctor. This tool resets your Palm Pre to its factory defaults, which should allow it to boot up properly again. webOS Doctor runs in any web browser on any computer. Here is how to use it.
After you have used webOS Doctor to recover your Palm Pre, it will think that it has never been used before and will ask you to go through the first time setup steps. Luckily, much of your data will be recovered from your Palm Profile account, so after you complete the following steps, you will be back in business.
If, after running through the update and reset procedures described in this chapter, you still have problems with your Palm Pre, you can turn to many places to get further aid.
• The official Palm website. Visit the Palm website at http://www.palm.com/us/products/phones/pre/.
• Your wireless carrier’s website. Your local wireless carrier has support for your Palm Pre.
• Palm Pre Community websites. The Palm Pre Community is strong and active on the Internet. You can find help with your Palm Pre issues by asking questions in the forums. Following are some of the more popular sites:
Pre Central http://www.precentral.net/
Palm Pre.org http://www.palmpre.org/
Everythingpre http://www.everythingpre.com/