Give me back my TEXTS! #palm #pre

After almost eight months, I have had to grow accustomed to my Palm Pre, with the slow WebOS operating system, the cracked screen and the chipped edges (read my thoughts on issues and problems with the Pre). My friends always say, "Sanford - you can easily just get it replaced. Your camera has never worked, just get a new one." Or, just wait until the google Nexus One Phone gets released on Sprint (which I have been thinking about over and over again).

I would happily fix my phone - if it weren't for the fact that I can not get my text messages off the phone! (Makes me think of acting like Mel Gibson in Ransom and screaming "GIVE ME BACK MY SON TEXTS!")

I mean really(!), we are in 2010.

Just because the original concept of texting was short-lived, IM messages that were disposable, today - texting has become almost as important as email. Keeping telephone numbers, conversation threads, other important facts - all stored in the threads of text messages.

I have already spoken to the Palm Development Team about this, and this was the answer I got:

Hi Sanford -- I did check with the team on this, and given what we have in place today it's not possible to do. The only kind of work-around (and it isn't much) is to do a 'copy all' in the edit menu of each transcript, then mail it to yourself. You still can't get them back in to the app easily. (you could probably send them to yourself from an SMS bridge from your computer)

We are in the process of reworking our data models that would enable this, but that is still some time out from being deployed -- my apologies!

Unfortunately, that is not a resolution to the problem. It is more of a frustration than a resolution. I saw Jamie's frustration in his post (read his tirade here "Dear Palm, it's just not working out.) I am astonished at the fact that, even with a Linux distro, there is not a simple way to grab the texts in some form of tar-ball and migrate them from one phone to another. Or what about a simple CSV file of the texts? Why did the data model not take this into consideration?

Texts are not disposable!

In the 15 years I have owned a cell phone, and in the last ten where I have been almost tied directly to SMS though my time in England and Europe, I have retained so many text messages like old emails - simply because of the quaint aspect of the message, the information stored within them, or what have you. Texts are no different than email - just shorter and less likely to be spam.

Why can texts be treated as first-class citizens in the realm of the Internet? Please?

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BTW - I have been building videos on the slowness of the Pre Calendar app (interacting with google Calendar), the dog-slow nature of the Pre Email client, the lack of camera (STILL!) and the general sluggishness in using the global search for friend's names when wanting to dial (though, the release of 1.3.5.1 seems to have speed up this every so often). And, my favorite new act - my phone suddenly dies after being put into airplane mode(!). Oooooh - this is exciting!