Palm Pre: The Missing Manual

Chapter 2. Move Around the Pre

A side from making calls (and sometimes even then), cellphones can be so complex that that they’d stymie a CIA code-breaker. Going from an address book to a Missed Calls screen, for example, can involve labyrinthine menus and confusing “soft” keys.

On the other hand, smartphones—mobile phones that you can use to check your email and browse the web—typically hamstring you in other ways, like limiting you to one task at a time. You can send an email, but not while listening to music. Or you can surf the web, but you can’t check your calendar, too. As a result, you usually end up opening and closing programs all day long. That’s not the way your desktop PC works, and it shouldn’t be the way your smartphone works, either.

Fortunately, the Pre sets things right: It simplifies menu navigation with a library of easy-to-use gestures, lets you open multiple applications at once, and lets you switch among them easily and logically.

In this chapter, you’ll learn how to control the Pre using gestures, how to switch from one program to another, and how to take advantage of some special characteristics of the Pre’s keyboard.

Finger Tips: Six Ways to Navigate the Pre

You interact with the Pre through a variety of gestures, finger motions that the Pre recognizes as commands. The six techniques described below will have you finger-tapping your way through the Pre in no time. But first, you need to know where to make these gestures.

Touchscreen vs. Gesture Area

As you’ll see ...