The written musings of a long-time Apple //e and Macintosh tech nerd. Opinions are my own.
I stumbled upon another webOS application shortcut.
If you begin to type “address” or “people” on your Palm Pre or Pixi, Universal Search will find the Contacts application.
Cool, huh?
Here’s a quick recap of the short cuts I’ve found so far:
add = Contacts
date = Calendar
sms = Messaging
pref = Displays webOS’ “control panel” applications
peo = Contacts
The 2010 Consumer Electronics Show is under way in Las Vegas this week and Palm has used the event to make a big splash with the media and their customers. Here’s a run down of what Palm has been up to!
Palm 2010 CES Presentation Video and Highlights
PreCentral has posted Palm chairman and chief executive officer Jon Rubinstein’s CES presentation for your viewing pleasure if you are like me and somehow managed to not make it out to Las Vegas this year. The highlights of the presentation include:
To check the video, head over to the PreCentral website.
New Phones, Wireless Carriers Announced
Many people will be happy to hear that Palm and Verizon Wireless will finally be bringing Palm webOS phones to market. Starting on January 25, Big Red customers will have their choice of the newly reformulated Palm Pre and Pixi smartphones known as the Palm Pre Plus and the Palm Pixi Plus. Why “Plus?” The Plus refers to the refinements over the older versions of the Pre and Pixi smartphones already available on the Sprint network.
The Palm Pre Plus will sport 16GB of RAM and a more streamlined form factor. As far as I can tell at this point, that simply means that the center has been removed from the front fo the Palm Pre Plus. Rather than use the Center button to zoom in/out from card view, you can simply flick up from the gesture area to zoom out of a card and then tap on the card you want to zoom back into full screen. The removal of the Center button is just one less thing that can break on the Pre form factor body and I welcome the change. And unlike the Sprint edition, the Verizon Wireless Palm Pre Plus ditches the glossy back plate battery door for the slick matte finished Touchstone charging battery door. Even if you don’t plan on getting the super cool Touchstone charging dock, in my opinion, the matte finish of the Touchstone battery door is much easier to hold than the slippery gloss finish door.
The new Palm Pixi Plus uses the same body form factor as the older Sprint edition, however, the Verizon Pixi Plus will include an 802.11b/g Wi-Fi radio. (Shame on you Sprint for not allowing Wi-Fi in your Pixi!)
Verizon customers will also have access to a new App Catalog application called Mobile Hotspot that will allow the Pre Plus or Pixi Plus to act as a cellular Wi-Fi router allowing other near by Wi-Fi enabled device, like a netbook, to gain access to the Internet over the Pre or Pixi’s EVDO cellular connection. Up until now, this was a trick reserved for devices like the Verizon Mi-Fi card. Kudos for Verizon for allowing their customers to share their data connections this way.
Palm will also continue to grow their presence overseas in the second quarter of the year when they bring Palm webOS phones to France on the SFR wireless network.
The last remaining question for US customers is when will Palm webOS devices be launched on AT&T? For right now, there is no official word from Palm on when webOS phones will appear on AT&T, however, Engadget has posted an article stating that AT&T’s President and CEO, Ralph de la Vega, has gone on the record claiming that by the middle of the year, they will be carrying two unnamed Palm webOS devices. You’ll have to stay tuned for the next few months until more details emerge on the AT&T front.
For more details on Palm’s newest smartphones, visit the Palm blog.
Here Come the 3D Games!
Today Palm also unveiled 7 3D games specifically written to take advantage of the special graphics processor, called a GPU, inside the Palm Pre and Pre Plus smartphones. Combining the GPU, the new software development kit, released in beta form, and the software under pinning that are in the recently released Palm webOS 3.5.1 update, Pre customers can now play games on their smartphones that look just and play just as good as the games on Apple’s iPhone.
Starting today, and via the Palm App Catalog, you can purchase and download the following 3D games:
I’m excited about Palm’s enabling of the GPU found in the Palm Pre and Pre Plus as it means that Pre customers no longer have to feel like second class citizens in the world of mobile gaming. While I looking forward to playing some of these games (I already purchased a copy of Monopoly this evening), I am still looking forward to playing games like Bejeweled and all of the great card and board games from Astraware, the games division of Handmark.
To learn more about today’s announcement of the new 3D games for the Palm Pre and Pre Plus smartphones, visit the Palm website.
Ready! Set! Develop!
Lastly, Palm announced that the Palm Developer Center is now out of beta status and open to any application developer who wishes to write applications for the Palm webOS platform. Palm also announced that developers will have a choice of selling their applications through the Palm App Catalog or promote their applications by themselves, yet, they can still leverage the Palm over the air (OTA) distribution and installation service.
This is great news for the legions of web developers out there who know how to write HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code because, as I’m told, those three languages make up the bulk of the application development foundation for webOS applications.
For developers who are looking to write games and other applications that take advantage of the 3D rendering hardware and software found in webOS devices, like the Pre and Pre Plus, Palm is making the Palm webOS Plug-In Development Kit (PDK) available for use with the standard webOS Software Development Kit (SDK). According to Palm’s press release, “[w]ith the PDK, developers can seamlessly integrate C and C++ code into their webOS apps, enabling new functionality such as 3D games.”
Developers who wish to further explore the possibilities of the Palm webOS platform should visit the Palm Developer Center website.
Following just 7 days behind the webOS 1.3.5 update, Palm has released the Palm webOS 1.3.5.1 update. This update, according to Palm, is attended to address a very specific bug in the Calendar application when data is synchronized with a Microsoft Exchange Server.
The release notes for the latest webOS update states:
“This release fixes an issue in which the Calendar app displayed no events for any account after a user synchronized Calendar with an Exchange account. With this update, Calendar events now appear correctly after an Exchange sync.”
According to a KB article published by Palm on Jan. 3, the nature of the problem is “that the turn of the year [to] 2010 has surfaced an issue that affects customers who use Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) to synchronize their calendars. Data remains intact on the device; however, this issue prevents the data from being displayed correctly in the Calendar application. It impacts all versions of webOS.”
The Palm webOS 1.3.5.1 update is available for immediate download by using the Updates application on Sprint branded Palm Pre and Palm Pixi smartphones and will take about 10-15 minutes to install. Aside from resolving the issue with the Calendar application, there are no new changes between 1.3.5.1 and Palm webOS 1.3.5 which was released on December 28, 2009.
You can read the Palm webOS 1.3.5.1 release notes on the Palm webOS updates page. You can read the full Palm KB article on the Palm support website.
UPDATE
The good folks over at Motion Apps have dropped me a line to clear up what is addressed in the 2.1.2 update to Classic.
“This was a regular release bringing stability improvements mostly, the one we’ve been waiting for quite a while, mostly because the issues Classic had after [Palm webOS] 1.3.1.”
So there you have it. Classic 2.1.2 is a maintenance update. If you haven’t already done so, you can download the latest update to Classic by using the Updates application on your Palm webOS smartphone.
Late in the day yesterday, Palm released the Palm webOS 1.3.5 update for Sprint branded Palm Pre and Pixi smartphones.
Late in the evening reports where coming in that it was slow going downloading the 13MB update. I for one found myself waiting quite a while for the update to be downloaded and processed on my Pre. Once the update was downloaded, my Pre took the usual 15 minutes to install the update.
This update is important for a number of reasons. The Palm App Catalog app received no less than 9 updates, one of which includes the ability to download apps in the background rather than forcing you to wait until the current app is downloaded. The Calendar app also received a performance update that allows you to swipe between days much faster than in previous releases of Palm webOS. This one is important to me since I use my Pre to help schedule my meetings and daily work. You can also now launch the Sprint Navigation application directly from a Contact record. (I haven’t figured out how this feature works yet. When I tap on an address in Contacts, Google Maps is launched, just as it always has. I’ll post an update later on reporting on whether or not I got this feature workings and what, if anything I had to do to make it work.)
Probably the biggest updates for Palm enthusiests in this release is the ability to use the Pre’s and Pixi’s USB storage space for applications, freeing many folks from the dreaded “too many applications installed” error that was popping up. Kudos to Palm for coming up with an elegant solution for addressing this problem. The Palm webOS 1.3.5 update also lays the ground work for some exciting possibilities for some new applications; games in particular. According to the folks over at WebOS Internals, Palm has delivered two package files that will make it possible for developers to access and use the Pre’s and Pixi’s Graphics Processing Unit, or GPU. This update should make it possible for high-quality games, the likes of which have been available on the iPhone for some time now, to be released for the Palm webOS platform. I’m really looking forward to seeing some of the Handmark/Astraware games to show up on webOS. I miss playing Bejeweled 2.
This update does not repair the iTunes Media Sync feature. At this time it is unclear as to whether or not Palm will attempt to reactivate this feature or if they can come to some kind of an agreement with Apple to allow the iTunes sync feature to work. If you want to sync iTunes content with your Palm webOS device, it is recommended that you use DoubleTwist.
Some of the highlights from the Palm webOS 1.3.5 update include:
The complete list of software enhancements and bug fixes can be found on the Palm webOS software updates website. You can download the Palm webOS 1.3.5 update by launching the Updates application on your Sprint branded Palm Pre or Pixi.
The latest print edition of eWeek hit my desk today and they listed out the best products of 2009. Being a big fan of Palm, I was delighted to see that Palm webOS made this years list of outstanding products.
Andrew Garcia writes:
“From the way it integrates all like communication into a single interface, to the way it seamlessly moves from local search to Web search, to its intuitive gesture-based user controls, Palm webOS is a joy to use.”
However, Mr. Garcia also warns that one of the biggest obstacles to the success of Palm’s new mobile operating system is third-party developer support.
Again, Mr. Garcia writes:
“…I have my doubts as to whether third-party developers will create enough action on the platform to make it successful long term, Palm webOS is a thoughtful and well-designed mobile platform.”
The complete list of eWeek’s products of they year are:
1. AWS Toolkit for Eclipse
2. Microsoft Bing
3. RIM BlackBerry Enterprise Server 5.0
4. Cisco Unified Computing
5. Mozilla Firefox 3.5
6. Intel “Nehalem” Family of Processors
7. Palm webOS
8. SUSE Studio 1.0
9. VMware vSphere 4
Why 9? Usually at this time of the year, it is all about top 10 lists. Oh, well, let’s just say that it has to do with the current year ending in ‘9’.
You can read eWeek Lab’s full review of Palm webOS, written by Mr. Garcia, on the eWeek website.
Over the weekend I stumbled across a new shortcut for Palm webOS. Using the Universal Search feature, you can type “pref” to see all of the preferences applications that Palm preinstalled on your Pre or Pixi smartphone.
This is especially handy if you have added a ton of the great Palm App Catalog or homebrew applications to your phone and don’t feel like flipping through pages of application launcher pages.
Disclaimer: I’m using a Sprint branded Palm Pre running Palm webOS 1.3.1. I don’t have access to any other versions of the Pre or the Sprint Palm Pixi. Mileage may vary.
PreCentral has some good news for Flash Player junkies: Adobe will have a beta release of their mobile player out this year!
“A prerelease version of Flash Player 10.1 is now available for Windows, Macintosh and Linux operating systems. A beta is expected to be available for Palm webOS later this year.”
Check out PreCentral.net for the full article…
[Via PreCentral.net…]
Over the weekend, Palm released the Palm webOS 1.3.1 update for the Palm Pre and also launched the Palm Pixi on Sprint’s wireless network.
One of the new features of Palm webOS is the ability to sync your Yahoo! account with Synergy, Palm’s wireless technology for collecting all of your contact, calendar, and email data and displaying it to you in a single, synchronized place that fits in your pocket.
I wanted to test out the new Yahoo! Synergy sync on my Palm Pre with webOS 1.3.1 installed. My first attempt didn’t go so well because I was trying to log in to my Yahoo! account with the wrong password. My second attempt didn’t work either, even after I confirmed that I had the correct password. I kept getting a message popping up on my Pre that my account password was incorrect. What gives?
Turns out that before you can use Synergy to sync with your Yahoo! account, you need to do two things first:
1. Upgrade your Palm Pre or Palm Pixi to webOS 1.3.1 if you don’t already have it installed
2. Upgrade your Yahoo! calendar to their new beta Calendar
You can upgrade the operating system on your Pre or Pixi by using the Updates application on your smart(er)phone. To upgrade your Yahoo! Calendar, you need to access an upgrade page on the the Yahoo! website. (I was already logged into my Yahoo! account before I went to the Calendar switch website.)
After you have upgraded your Yahoo! Calendar, you should be all set to add your Yahoo! email account to the Pre or Pixi Email application. Once the Synergy connection has been established, webOS will begin to sync your Yahoo! email, contacts, and calendar. Additionally, afterSynergy has done its thing, you will be able to access your Yahoo! instant messaging account from Messaging application.
If you want to learn more about how Palm webOS Synergy works, you can read more on the Palm support website.
This has turned out to be a Facebook-tastic weekend! Earlier today, Facebook 1.0.0 for Palm webOS was released for the Pre and Pixi smartphones.
The new Facebook client, written by Palm, became available from Palm’s App Catalog today and requires that Pre and Pixi customers upgrade their phones to webOS 1.3.1 or later before it can be installed. The Palm webOS 1.3.1 update was made available to Pre customers on Sprint and Bell Canada yesterday; and should be available in the next few days for customers who purchase the new Palm Pixi smartphone starting tomorrow.
And Apple iPhone and iPod touch customers also got a little Facebook love this week with a minor bump to Facebook version 3.03 which includes bug fixes and adds Japanese and Chinese localizations. The update is available via iTunes App Store (iTunes link) from a Mac or PC. If you have the app installed on your iPhone or iPod touch, you can download and install the update over the air (OTA) using the App Store application on your device.