One thing dominates my experience of the Palm Pre for the last 3 days and that is the case of the screen going black when making a phone call. With the primary objective of the phone being to make calls it is a little irritating to say the least. The reasons why it happens is beyond me, but the way it happens I have narrowed down to the following:
When making a call and I have dialed the numbers and move the phone towards my head the screen goes black this means that after say a couple of seconds if you wish to hang up all you see is a black screen with no obvious way of getting back. Press the power button because the screen has locked is pointless as there is no lock on the screen. Sometimes moving the phone back to the “in front of face” position seems to bring the screen back to life , other times it does not. On one occasion I had to resort to taking the battery out just to get a screen back.
Whilst I was writing this I decided to do some investigation to see if other people were having similar problems and long behold I discovered that the screen going black in the “against the ear” position was actually a feature of the Palm Pre and it was meant to do this. The screen should spring back to life when it is moved back to “in front of face” position. All this is done via clever sensor on the Palm Pre and any problems with this not working properly were most likely down to a screen protector stopping the sensor working properly. As I still have the original screen protector on the phone I guess this was causing the random nature of the phones behaviour.
At the beginning of this post I called the fact that the screen goes black irritating , maybe I was a little quick to judge as this could be a simple case of a really clever feature (I take it to save battery life by having screen black during a call) not working properly. It is one of the joys of having a new toy like the Palm Pre that you learn to love it for all the things it does well as well as those that it could do better.
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