Unfortunately, I'm probably one of the few Pre owners that will run into any problems updating their phone to WebOS 1.4, which was released just hours ago.

The "updating" throbber froze at just over 1/3 complete, leaving me with a completely still screen telling me at the bottom "Installing Update Do not remove battery". Crap. After giving it another 20 minutes to make sure it was really stuck… it was.

So I did exactly what it was telling me not to. I opened up the back cover (and was surprised by how much dust had accumulated inside my phone), pulled out the battery, put it back in, and turned the phone back on.

And it worked. The Pre went right back into the update process and a few minutes later was already past the point where it had originally frozen.

So, if anyone else has this problem, and the throbber isn't even spinning. Try yanking the battery.

If that doesn't work, you can try the webOS Doctor available from Palm's website (webOS Doctor [palm.com]). webOS Doctor will completely wipe and restore your phone to the latest webOS version, this means you'll lose any pictures and media you had on the phone (try mounting the phone in USB mode and downloading all files before doing a recovery). Your contacts, calendar events, and tasks will be synchronized with your palm profile.

I want to see the Palm Pre listed on flickr's "Top Cameraphones" chart over on the Camera Finder page. The only way to do that though… is to get more people to take and upload pictures from their Pre, which is not an easy task.

If you own a Pre, take some pictures and upload them to flickr. If you're not on flickr… sign up. 🙂

I've started a Pre A Day group that you can join and submit pictures to. Even if you can't upload a picture every single day, every little bit helps.

I have a funny feeling I'm going to be the only group member for… ever. Maybe not though. We'll see!

I've had my new phone for a couple days.. and I like it. A lot.

The size and shape make for an incredibly comfortable fit in my hand. The touchscreen and interface feel snappy and responsive most of the time, with expected "hiccups" when I'm trying to (or accidentally) do multiple things too quickly.

Pictures taken using the camera are decent, and can be automatically geo-tagged. I think this might get me back into posting pictures on flickr.

The battery life is about what I expected – a day or so of normal use. The phone I just replaced was to the point where I could flip a coin as to whether I could get a full day out of it, or have it completely die after 3-4 hours of standy (no internet, email, or calls).

My Touchstone charger was successfully delivered by UPS yesterday (even though UPS tried to send it back in time), but it's going right back. It worked fine for about an hour, but now it can't continually charge – switching from "Charging Battery" to not charging about every 4-5 seconds. Amazon is shipping a replacement that should arrive tomorrow. (5 star rating for Amazon's prompt replacement program! No hassles or anything!)

The only thing that I'm really not to keen on is the slideout keypad. It's pretty solid, but I'm still afraid I'm going to manage to break it somehow.

I'm looking forward to getting to know this phone a lot better. 🙂

Yep!

In a few days, I'm gonna be playing with my shiny new Palm Pre!

You should all be jealous… unless you have a better phone, in which case, you should feel like a jerk.

I want my Palm Pre… getting tired of waiting til my contract is up so I can renew and get a discount on it.

Hey, someone from Sprint reading this – what's the easiest way to upgrade from a SERO plan to an Everything Plus Referral Plan? And are there any discounts (Customer Loyalty, etc) that can be added to get the price down a bit closer to my current SERO pricing? 🙂