On the other hand, many organizations (and this by no applies just to nonprofits) will throw money and time at trendy projects without thinking about whether they're the right tools, with the right strategy, investment, support, or marketing behind them.  By all means, try new things.  But do it smartly.  Do your homework, test, learn from others, learn from your own failures, and get better at it over time.  And don't neglect what's already working for you.

The Rezound is my first Android device.  While I'm not finding the OS as intuitive and elegant as Palm's OS, I like it better than Apple's IOS.  Here are some quick impressions:

Pros

Beautiful, bright screen.  Easy to read as long as you're not in direct sunlight.

Thin case.

Great video and audio.

Supports Flash. 

Sensitive multi-touch screen.

Great GPS, even indoors.

Internet access is reasonably fast when making a 3G connection, lightning fast on 4G.

Lots of options for configuring the phone. 

Battery life is good as long as the phone's in Economy Mode.  I also turned off most push notifications and automatic syncing (for instance, I fetch email only when I open the mail app).  I can get through a day with the phone turned on performing functions like occasional email, web access, phone calls. I haven't found a description of what gets changed in each power mode -- the user guide has no details.  So far I haven't noticed any drawback to Economy Mode.  Installing apps or watching streaming video will still drain the battery quickly (I ordered a spare battery just in case).

Tons of apps.  (The lack of apps was a huge drawback with the Pre.)  So far I've installed Firefox, a BART trip planner, a controller for my Sonos system, Shazam, Evernote, Dropbox, FlightView (for tracking flight status), TweetDeck (my favorite Twitter client), KeePassDroid (a password manager), DroidLight (a flashlight), Battery Status (a battery percentage meter), QR Droid (a QR code reader), AVG anti-virus, Yelp, OpenTable, TuneIn Radio (for listening to Internet radio), LinkedIn, Google Voice, Pandora and a few other music apps, and a few games.  The phone came with Facebook, Google Maps, Gmail, Kindle, Weather, YouTube, and lots of navigation and entertainment apps.

Cons

It's hard to see the screen in bright sunlight.  Maybe I need an anti-glare screen protector.

The phone is larger than I'd have preferred -- it barely fits in a jacket pocket.  But the large screen is vastly easier to read than the Palm Pre's.

Too many options for configuring the phone.  After 2 weeks I'm still tinkering with settings.  And the integrated help doesn't give clear explanations for what every setting does.  Most don't have any Help entries.

The phone came with separate apps for Gmail and all other mail.  But I was able to set up my Gmail account through the "other" mail app and ignore the Gmail app.

The screen often seems too sensitive.  The Palm Pre's screen had a "frame" of about 1/8" around the edge that didn't respond to touch, and the iPad has a larger "frame".  The entire Rezound screen is touch sensitive, and I often launch apps unintentionally.  Fortunately, the phone has lots of "home screens" and I moved nearly every app into folders and off the main screen.  That way there's less to inadvertently click.

Terrible battery life in the default High Performance power mode.  I installed a battery meter app that shows the charge as a percentage and could watch the charge drain away any time the phone was on.  Even when the phone was off the battery would drain throughout the day.  Fortunately, Economy Mode and turning off most push notifications and automatic syncing fixed this.

Some pre-installed bloatware like games that can't be removed (at least, not through normal means).

This isn't specific to this phone, but why do so many seemingly simple Android apps require access to all of the phone's data and functions?  Creepy.

Every time I connect the phone to my computer via USB it tries to install Windows drivers and Verizon software, even though I already did that.  I don't see a way to turn this off.

Not an international phone (that was one of the big selling points of Verizon's iPhone, but not enough to seal the deal).

If you have an urgent call to action, a way of reaching a mass audience, and don’t mind not being able to identify, steward, or resolicit most of the donors who give via text, mobile giving can definitely be effective. But those are big “ifs” and most nonprofits don’t meet those criteria.

I do expect this to change over time. There will be more ways to give via cell, like PayPal for Mobile and XIPWIRE. That will bring down the startup and monthly costs and allow you to identify your mobile donors. But we’re not there yet.

If you want to learn more, Mobile Active published a great overview of the mobile giving landscape last year called Texting for Charitable Dollars: The Definitive Guide
 

The Paperless Choice Challenge is rewarding successful, creative, replicable campaigns that use electronic  fundraising tools by giving away eight prizes totalling over $20,000. Entries can be submitted between June 15 and September 15, 2010. 

For more information go to http://www.paperlesschoice.org/. And while you're at it, check out more resources on going paperless from the GreenTech Initiative's paper reduction campaign.

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You are traveling through multiple time zones and need the calendar to display the local time for each appointment. For example, imagine you are in New York and have a breakfast meeting at 8:00 A.M., then fly to Chicago for a 1:00 P.M. meeting, and then fly to Las Vegas and have a dinner reservation at 6:00 P.M. Outlook displays all these appointments relative to the time zone you were in when you created the calendar entries. This means that in New York when you look at the Calendar, breakfast is at 8:00 A.M., the Chicago meeting is at 1:00 P.M., and the Las Vegas dinner is at 6:00 P.M., but when you look at the Calendar in Chicago, the breakfast is at 9:00 A.M., the local (Chicago) meeting is at 2:00 P.M., and the dinner is at 7:00 P.M.

(Adapted from http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HA010565301033.aspx)

My Palm Pre does the same.  I think I have fixex for both.  We'll see after my trip this week.

For Outlook, the fix is to disable automated time sync in Windows (I know this fix works).  To do this in Windows 7, click on the clock, click Change Date and Time Settings, click the Internet Time tab, click Change Settings, and uncheck Synchronize with an Internet Time Server.  (I undo this when I get home.)  Then change the clock manually when you get to your destination.  This will keep your time zone from changing.  In my case, this means that the dinner I put on my calendar for 7 pm won't move itself to 10 pm.  But it does mean that I need to watch out for web sites that automatically add calendar entries using the local time zone and manually change those to the local time (for instance, Open Table puts a 7:30 pm. EST dinner on the calendar at 4:30 PST).  Fortunately, that's the less frequent problem.

For the Palm Pre the fix is easier: Open the Date and Time app in the Launcher and change Network Time Zone to Off.  The time will change when you travel but the time zone won't.  (At least, that's the theory.  I haven't tried this yet.)

Sync

My major problem with the Pre is due to its lack of a built-in sync with a standalone/desktop copy of Outlook.  If you don't use Outlook, or use it on an Exchange server, you might not have these problems.  I tested PocketMirror, CompanionLink, Go Contacts Sync, gSyncIt, Google Calendar Sync, and Evernote. Here's what I've ended up with:

Contacts: gSyncIt, via Google (my contacts sync to Gmail, then to the Pre).
Tasks: gSyncIt, via Google.
Calendar: Google Calendar Sync. gSyncIt would probably be fine, but I already had Google Calendar Sync working before I found gSyncIt.
Notes: Evernote. gSyncIt can get my notes into Google Docs, but those don't sync with the Pre and I don't want to have to get Internet access just to read or write a note. Also, gSyncIt also brought my Google Docs into my Outlook Notes, which wasn't good. Most were too big the spreadsheets, were useless.

I initially had trouble getting a bi-directional sync to work. If I added a new contact in Gmail, it sync'd to the Pre, but if I added or deleted a contact on the Pre the change didn't show up in Gmail. The trick (provided by Palm tech support) was to set up Google as an exchange server (yes, the Pre needs to treat Gmail as a Microsoft Exchange server) using server = m.google.com and domain = google. That's not ideal -- it doesn't respect the manual mail sync frequency I had set up. It's also not reliable.  For some reason it stopped syncing again after a month and I had to start over. 

The Palm tech told me bidirectional sync problems are at the top of their list of things to fix and an upcoming release should make it work through IMAP.

I am not happy to have to rely on the cloud for syncing, but that seems like the best solution -- at least for now. I was optimistic about CompanionLink, but it would not sync reliably. I finally got sick of calling their tech support. Plus, it was the most expensive option.  I've also had some odd experiences with the sync -- some events have looked fine in Outlook but have refused to show up in my Google calendar, which means they don't show up on the Pre, either.  I had to delete those events and recreate them.  I haven't figured out why this happened.  Fortunately, it hasn't happened often.  But I'm concerned that this could really mess me up some day.

I'm told that syncing wouldn't be a problem if I was using MS Exchange instead of a desktop installation of Outlook.  But I don't see the need to pay $10/month for Exchange hosting.  I'm going to give Chapura and CompanionLink another try when I have time.

Usability

I really like the Pre's user interface.  Sometimes it's slow to respond, but overall it's easy to use and intuitive once you learn the basic gestures.

Music

I found that MediaMonkey, a free music organizer/player, sync tool that I had used with an older MP3 player, will sync my tunes with the Pre.  The trick is to put the Pre in Media Sync mode.  You also need to decide whether to use iPod-style folders, which some people seem to hate (I'm not using them).  Otherwise, it was pretty straightforward.  

I also installed the Music Player (Remix).  It has more features and I prefer the interface.

Web

My main complaint at this point is the lack of Flash.  The current version of Palm's WebOS supports Flash and I watched a YouTube video of an Adobe tech demonstrating Flash on a Palm, but it hasn't been released yet.

Apps & Tweaks

Like other app phones, there's a growing supply of apps for the Pre, both free and paid.  This includes a long list of homebrew apps available outside the app catalog.  But even better is that Palm left the system open for developers to tweak.  This has proved to be one of my favorite things about the Pre.  Tweaks and homebrew apps aren't for novice users, but if you're computer savvy and don't mind some work there's lots of great stuff out there. So far I've installed tweaks to:

• Add new card to the Launcher
• Change the Launcher from 3 icons per row to 4 (a much better use of the screen real estate)
• Keep the screen turned on while charging -- very handy when listening to music in the car.
• Allow messaging and email in landscape mode
• Add percent charge remaining to the battery icon
• Charge by default when connected to my computer via USB
• Add additional alarm options
• Turn off alerts during calls
• Add a Delete All option for emails
• Display an icon to show when the ringer switch is turned off
• Add an on-screen keyboard (in addition to the physical keyboard).  Handy when working in landscape mode.

The apps I've installed include:

• Google Calendar Search
• Pandora (great to have Pandora in the car)
• Yelp
• OpenTable
• Twitter
• Facebook
• GoodFood
• Weather
• Dictionary

 Miscellaneous

Palm added a video camera feature with the last software upgrade.  It can be used to record audio as well, although it doesn't seem to respond to an external mic.  I still wish they'd add voice memos.

Removable/replaceable battery.  How do people get by without this?  The battery life is better than I'd expected, but I like having the spare just in case.

Multitasking.  I can listen to music while syncing data, browsing the web, or downloading an app. 

It describes the process of raising funds via SMS from the donors' and the nonprofits' perspectives, including costs and tips for getting started. The guide is available for free at http://mobileactive.org/mobile-fundraising.

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Look and Feel

I like the shape and size.  The multitouch screen is beautiful. Here's an in-depth review with specs and photos:

http://the-gadgeteer.com/series/a-week-with-the-palm-pre-smartphone/

Usability

The screen is responsive most of the time, but doesn't always figure out what I want to do (e.g., go back, switch apps, close an app).  Clicking on text is much more challenging than with a stylus.  It's hard to highlight text or back up a few characters.  (You can click the function key next to the letter Z (I gather it's orange on Sprint's model, but not on Verizon's) to simulate arrow keys, but it's still hard to move around.  It can also be very difficult to click a hyperlink in the browser -- I often need to zoom in before I can click properly.

The phone usually responds quickly as long as I'm not relying on wi-fi.  I've found wi-fi response times to be wildly unpredictable (no surprise). They've ranged from instant to SLOOOOW, with many "white screens of death" when web apps freeze up.  Even worse, some of the freeze-ups seem to have tossed my login credentials, making me reauthenticate to sites that recognized me moments before.  I haven't done enough testing to compare the web browser response over Verizon's 3G network vs. wi-fi.

The phone clearly does not want to be turned all the way off.  Doing so is a multi-step process, and restarting is very slow.  It's essentially a soft reboot.  The equivalent of turning off the Treo is to put the phone in "airplane mode."  That disables phone functions and turns off wi-fi (you can then turn wi-fi back on).  Airplane mode seems to be the best route to preserving the battery when you don't need to make or get calls.  Note that alarms will still sound in airplane mode unless you either set the phone to vibrate mode or disable alarm sounds in the calendar app. So if you keep your phone near your bed, think about whether you want the alarms on.

The keypad is full QWERTY but unlike the Treo it doesn't have a number pad. Although the keypad appears to be the same size as on the Treo, the keys are tiny, closer together, and not as rounded.  It's much harder to type on the Pre.  There's an on-screen keypad for dialing phone numbers, but not for calendar entries, notes, texting, etc.

The Help documentation is stored online.  If you're in airplane mode and not connected to wi-fi you only have access to some quick tips.  And if you're in airplane mode and have a poor wi-fi connection, the Help entries can take forever to load.

It took me a while to figure out how to "back up" within apps and screens that lack a Back button.  A right-to-left swipe across the gesture area would often fail to do the job.  The trick is to swipe only halfway across the gesture area, starting from or stopping at the Center "button."

The biggest drawback so far is that there's no built-in way to search for text in calendar entries.  I was trying to figure out the dates of an upcoming conference, but the only way to do that is to look at every day individually.  There are weekly and monthly calendar views, but they only show colored bars to indicate events -- no text, no way to hover to see what's there.  This is a huge step backward from older Palms and I hope they'll fix it soon. 

The best solution seems to be to sync my calendar with Google (less of a worry than storing my contacts there) and use the free Google Calendar Search app. 

Sync

Sync with Outlook is a mandatory requirement for me.  Unfortunately, it's not nearly as easy or intuitive as on old Palms.  This seems like a huge step backwards for Palm.  I had to try 3 products to find one that's acceptable.  Chapura's PocketMirror, which I've used for years on older Palm OS products, was a big letdown.  It will only sync via wi-fi, which I don't feel I can rely on.  In addition, the first sync took so long that I gave up--I finally killed it after 6 hours.  I contacted Chapura tech support and got a quick response saying that subsequent syncs would have been almost instant, but since I don't want to rely solely on wi-fi I decided it wasn't worth further testing.  Chapura says they have no plans to allow syncing via the USB cable.  The Missing Sync is also wi-fi only, so I didn't pursue that one.  I've settled on CompanionLink, which is USB-only.  I've got it working, but found it unintuitive at first, and the documentation wasn't much help.  Tech support took 3 days to respond to my support ticket, and only with questions, not answers.  I finally had to call their support line -- not a toll free call, BTW.  The tech I reached was very helpful and provided good follow-up to some unresolved questions.  I learned that syncing is a 2-step process -- first you plug in the Pre and run the sync process on the PC.  Then you unplug the cable and run the sync process on the Pre.  And it seems like when you make a change on the Palm that you want replicated on the PC, you have to remember to first click Sync on the Palm app, then plug in the cable.  In addition, notes & tasks sync to the CompanionLink app rather than the built-in Palm tools. 

The easiest  -- and cheapest -- way to sync is through Google.  I gather that Google can sync notes and tasks, even though they don't exist in Gmail or Google's calendar.  But I have confidential data in Outlook that I don't want to store in the Cloud so I haven't gone that route. (As noted above, I am going to try it with my calendar to address the search issue.)

Ideally, I'd like to be able to sync using either USB or wi-fi, depending on the situation.  But no one seems to offer that.

NB: plugging in the USB cable requires opening a small port cover.  The cover seems like something that's sure to break off with repeated use.  It's easiest to open if you slide the keyboard out.  I find that it's difficult to plug the cable into the micro USB port -- you have to find just the right angle.

Web Browsing

The browser is tiny and hard to read.  You can zoom but that puts a lot of screen real estate off-screen.  I haven't found an equivalent to CTRL+ or Readibility to increase font size without reducing screen size.  Apparently some apps allow you to select the font size, but the built-in browser does not.  Switching to landscape mode seems to be the best approach.  But the physical keypad is only available in portrait mode, so I've found myself swapping back and forth. 

WebOS apps or mobile versions solve many of these problems.  I'm using apps or mobile pages for Facebook, YouTube, OpenTable, Google Maps, Twitter, and Yelp.  But some seem crippled in comparison to their normal functionality.  For instance, there's no Share option for Facebook entries. 

Email

Setting up a Gmail account was incredibly simple - I just had to enter my login info and the Pre knew how to configure the account.  Setting up my business POP account was only a bit harder: I had to supply the usual login and port info, and tell the phone what to do with messages I delete on the handheld.  The Pre also gave me the choice of downloading email on a schedule or manually.

Texting and Chat

The text message app is straightforward, with the added bonus of being able to integrate with Google Talk and AIM.  There isn't an app for Facebook chat, but apparently you can just use your browser.

Music

The Pre has 16GB of storage, but, unlike the Treo, you can't add a storage card if you run out.  The Pre also doesn't include true media sync capability.  In order to get my music onto the Pre I had to drag and drop it into the proper folder (and the Help files didn't give a clue about which folder that should be -- I had to search online to find that it's the DCIM folder).  It appears that changes to my music on my PC will not be picked up automatically -- looks like you have to selectively copy the files, or overwrite the entire collection.  In addition, the Pre stored most of my podcasts as albums, unlike my Zune which recognizes them as podcasts.  I've read that there are 3rd party tools that will sync music with the Palm, but I haven't had time to experiment.

The Palm media player itself is only average.  You can select albums, artists, genres, songs, or playlists -- so far so good.  But when you choose an artist with multiple albums your only choice is either a single album or Shuffle All, which plays all the tracks in random order.  Playing multiple albums by an artist in track order can be done, but is such a pain that it's not worth the trouble.  And I haven't found a 3rd party media player that runs on the Pre.

Miscellaneous

The Pre doesn't include voice memos or any other tool for recording audio through the mic.  I used Audacity Audio to record meetings on my Treo, but it won't work with the Pre.  Apparently, Precorder, which is currently in Alpha release, will provide this feature.

The app catalog is hard to navigate.  Searches return strange results.  For instance, I searched for Google Voice (with and without quotes) and Google Voice wasn't in the top 5 results.  In fact, the word "Google" isn't in the names of the top 5 results.  The first result was BuildaSearch.  Results also included "English-French Dictionary," "Diet Control," and "Chicago Football Fans."  Huh?

Pros

• Shape and size
• Screen quality
• Nice integration with Google and Google apps
• Multitouch screen with "gesture area"
• Works with Verizon
• Syncs with local installation of Outlook, including calendar, contacts, notes, and tasks (as long as you either sync them to Google or buy sync software)
• Syncs with POP and IMAP email
• Good text and IM integration
• GPS, accelerometer
• True multitasking
• Lots of apps
• Runs old Palm apps (requires buying the Palm Classic emulator)
• Charges from USB cable or USB to A/C adapter
• Replaceable battery.  Extended batteries available

Cons

• No built-in calendar search -- have to use Google calendar & search app
• Built-in "Universal search" only performs limited searches
• Can be slow to load apps.  Have experienced many frozen screens and apps.
• Syncing isn't nearly as easy as on older Palms
• Web browser can be hard to read.  No choice of font size.
• No removable storage (e.g., SD cards)
• Battery life.  Not as terrible as I'd feared, but I'll definitely be buying an extended battery.

 Overall, I'm giving the Pre a "B", but a few changes (like better search and a better media player and sync) could move it to an "A."

I got email from Vindigo in March saying the service was shutting down. Their home page is a blank screen. However, the software continues to work. I'm still able to download info for new cities, and the sync with vindigo.com appears to be functioning.  It's a zombie.

A month ago Vindigo started presenting an error message saying "Your Vindigo 2.0 subscription was scheduled to renew on 4/11/2009 but you haven't synced your device recently. As a result, we are unable to verify the status of your account. Please sync within the next 19 days to avoid a disruption in service." I thought it was about to die at the hand of its billing module. But the warning message went away after a few weeks and Vindigo still works.

Since no new data is being provided, movie and museum info are useless and there won't be any updates to the restaurant info. But it's tolerable for now. I feel like the app is on life support and could go any day. And , assuming it continues to work, I'm not sure whether I'll be able to transfer it to a new phone (assuming I stay with Palm).

Lots of people are mourning the loss of Vindigo and looking for a replacement. So far the best bet seems to be running web searches on one's phone -- a poor substitute in my opinion.  Or maybe a return to Avantgo, which I used before finding Vindigo.

I'd love to hear about options for a downloadable guide to restaurants, movies, and shops that works even when you can't get connected to the web.

In September 2007 M:Metrics, a mobile advertising analysis firm, observed, "[W]hile the volume of SMS ads is lowest in the United States, with only 17.2 percent of Americans receiving them, it also shows the strongest response rate, at 12 percent."

The Mobile Giving Foundation advocates for text solicitations: "Charitable giving in the US amounts to almost $300 billion a year, with 76% of that coming from individuals. Given the almost total saturation of the US population by wireless devices (250 million subscribers), and the exponential rise of text messaging (used by 68% of 18-24 year-olds, 37% of 35-44 year-olds and 14% of those over 65), it is easy to see how development of a "Mobile Giving Channel" could vastly increase the pool of charitable donors."

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