Anyone who has used a webOS phone for any period of time knows that battery life is not one of the strongest features of those phones. While it has gotten significantly better from when the original Pre was first released in 2009, it's still a difficult task to make it through a full day with any type of moderate usage. For Pre, Pre Plus, or Pre 2 owners, the good news was that you could use spare batteries from any of those phones interchangeably or purchase spare stock or extended batteries from places such as the webOS Nation store.

With the official limited release of the HP Pre3 in Europe and the slew of AT&T (and a few Verizon) phones making their way to eBay, we found ourselves in a bit of a quandary: the only way to get a spare battery for those phones was to buy an extra Pre3. Not exactly an inexpensive (or efficient) proposition. And if you didn’t want to spend the hundreds of dollars on another Pre3 just for its battery, what would happen if/when the battery stopped working after extended usage, shorted out, or gets trashed?

Seeing a potential business opportunity, Mugen Power Batteries (who previously made extended batteries for both the Pre and Pixi) created their own a survey late last year to gague interested in extended batteries for the Pre3. Within just a few hours of opening the poll, Mugen announced that they received enough feedback to justify development of Pre3 batteries. Pre-orders were opened in December for a 1400 mAh "SL" extended battery for $46.95 and a 2800 mAh "XL" extended battery for $98.95, the latter of which comes with a larger back cover for the Pre3. As compared to the stock Pre3 battery that clocks in at 1230 mAh, these batteries should provide an extra 14% or 128% of battery life before your phone needs to be plugged back in.

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When you are listening to music on your phone, did you know that you can control certain aspects of playback using your wired headset? Many headsets–including the one from Palm that comes with your phones–have a button on them that you use to hang up a phone conversation, but that is not the only use you will find for that button. From the stock music app to homebrew apps like Music Player (Remix) or other audio apps like DrPodder, you can control the audio playback using that button. Just load up an audio file and click once to pause/play that current track, or quickly click twice to fast forward to the next track.

 Thanks to RagaR for suggesting this tip

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With synergy, you can have up to 16 different email accounts loaded in your email account. Each of those inboxes will be displayed individually for you to search through, although by default they will all show up in the "Favorites" section at the top of your main account/folder view. You can use Email folder favorites to add or remove them from the "Favorites" section, and you can also use the "All Inbox" view to consolidate the messages from all your inboxes into one single folder. Keep reading after the break to learn how to set this up

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With over 25 existing tips that reference some aspect of the Email app, there are lots of great tidbits of information that will help you navigate and use the Email app on your webOS device. From searching for an email, to discarding a draft, to saving a video from your email, you can access all those email-related tips by clicking here. To review some of the top-rated and most useful email-related tips, continue reading after the break.

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Attaching a photo or video to an SMS/MMS message is a fairly straight-forward task. You can either push a multimedia file to a new message from another app, such as directly from the Photo or Video app, or you can attach it directly from within a text message. The easiest way to do this is to tap the icon in the bottom-right corner of the screen to load up a photo selection screen, choose your desired folder and then photo, and tap the "Attach Photo" button. If you want to send a video, use the icons on the bottom of the screen to switch between photos and videos.

You will notice that once you start writing your message, the icon turns into a icon to send the message. If you want to attach a file after this, you don’t need to first delete your text to get the icon back. Instead, just swipe-down from the top-left of the screen to bring down the Messaging application drop-down menu and select "Attach File" and follow the same steps as above.

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Throughout webOS, there are many data entry fields that provide you a long list to scroll through to find the specific data you need, such as the Date and Time selections of a calendar event. While the list may be easy enough to scroll through in most cases, you can actually type in your selection as well. As you can see in the screenshot, selecting the "minutes" box to choose the start time of the calendar entry pops up the long list of times, but you can then just start typing to get the time you want. So, to get an entry that starts at 4:25, just type "2" then "5" on the keyboard. No visual indication will be given other than the changing numbers on the screen. You can also use this for text fields, such as the month. To get July, tap on the Month field and start typing "jul". You will initially see "Jun" in there (as that is the first selection that starts with "J"), but it will change to "Jul" as soon as you type the "l" key

A few notes:

• To get numbers, you do not need to hold down the Option (Orange/Silver) key for numbers. In the example above, to type in "25", just press the  key then the key
• You are only able to type in selections that are available. So, if you tried to type in "23", the "3" would cause the selection to become a "30" since that is the first available option that starts with a 3

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By default, webOS adds the Inbox of each email account to the "Favorites" section at the top of your main account/folder view in the Email app. However, did you realize that you are able to remove any of those inboxes, as well as add any other folder from any of your accounts? In order to do this, you just need to tap the star next to the desired folder name that you want to add or remove from your favorites.

For example, in the attached screenshot, if you wanted to remove the Yahoo Inbox from the Favorites section, you would just tap the gold star () on the right of Inbox row (under the Yahoo section, not in the Favorites section, as there is no star there for you to toggle) and it would turn to a gray star (). Or, if you wanted to add the "Outbox" to your favorites, just tap on the gray star and it will turn gold and the folder will then appear in the favorites section.

The listing of the Favorites will first be sorted by the order of your email accounts (e.g. all Yahoo folders first, then all Gmail folders), then will be sorted with the Inbox first, Outbox last, and all other folders listed alphabetically.

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If you are in an area where you do not get good service from your carrier, you have the ability to roam on other carrier’s networks for both voice and data. Depending on your level of service, roaming might be included in your monthly bill (e.g. Sprint gets "unlimited" roaming included) or it might be an extra charge, so be careful about how you set your Roaming options. To toggle these options:

• Open up the Phone app (), swipe down from the top-left corner to bring up the Phone application drop-down and select "Preferences". A new card will open with your Phone preferences options
• Scroll down to the "NETWORK" section
• To toggle Voice roaming, tap the "VOICE NETWORK" line and choose between "Carrier Only" or "Automatic".
• If you select "Automatic" for voice, you then get an option for "DATA ROAMING" where you can either be "Enabled" or "Disabled" data roaming
• Note that you can also turn off your Data Usage entirely here, if you are trying to conserve your plan’s data allowance.

Thanks to brendu for suggesting this tip
 

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Before Palm officially puts the final nail in the Universal Search coffin (to be replaced with Just Type in webOS 2.0), we figured that now is probably the best time to bring Universal Search to our Tip Roundup. Everyone using a webOS device should be familiar with Universal Search, as it allows you to search for contacts, apps, Google, maps, websites and so much more from anywhere on the device. If you are not familiar with Universal Search, all you need to do it just type while in either card view or in the launcher, and webOS will display the results right on the screen, to be accessed with a single tap. Keep reading after the break to learn what Universal Search is capable of, along with some additional tips to get the most out of your search.

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Want to check to see if you have any dead spots on your touchscreen? Worried that your accelerometer isn’t functioning any more? Think your proximity sensor is busted? Instead of trekking into a repair center to check on these or trying to find a specific app that has the feature you want to test, there are actually some built-in tests that you can run yourself.  Just open up the Device Info app () and swipe down from the top-left corner to bring down the Device Info application drop-down menu, choose Tests, and then either "Quick Tests…" or "Interactive Tests…"

• If you choose "Quick Tests", the device will run some automated tests to check your phone’s memory, Wi-Fi, bluetooth, and the modem.
• If you choose "Interactive Tests", you can choose from six categories of tests to check various aspects of the hardware, and even send your results to Palm if necessary.

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