You know it, you love it (or you should times 2): PalmCast Live is tonight at 8pm Eastern. Tonight we’ll be joined by Matthew Miller of Nokia Experts and ZDNet to talk about the Palm Pre Plus as well as the news of the day.
As always, tweet your questions in with the #palmcast hashtag for our lightning round.
This week the prize is a big one – the Jabra Stone Bluetooth Headset, a $109.95 value. We’re going to make you work for it though, so be ready.
8pm Eastern tonight. We’ll see you there.
A longtime favorite in the Homebrew space, the best podcast listening app on webOS is now officially available in the App Catalog for the low price of $.99! DrPodder will allow you to download podcasts on a schedule, listen to them at your leisure, or even stream them on the go. You can search for podcasts, add them manually, or even export all your podcasts from iTunes and import them into DrPodder (Click Podcasts, then go File -> Library -> Export Library. Be sure to name the file drpodder.xml, then put that file on your Pre’s USB root)
Even if you’re already using the free, Homebrew edition, if you have $.99 to spare (and we know you do) it’s worth a download from the App Catalog. If you’re not a homebrewer but are addicted to podcasts, you owe it to yourself to give the app a whirl. Our favorite feature, naturally, is that our very own PalmCast is featured. 
Thanks @Audemars02!
Palm has released their Plug-in Development Kit Beta for developers to allow them to create rich, 3D games and other native linux apps for webOS. The PDK is available now at the Developer Center.
Palm looks to be making a pretty big push with this – they’ve released at the Game Developer’s Conference and are pushing that they are offering great gaming experiences on multiple carriers:
"Palm webOS is the go-to platform for great games on two of the three leading carrier networks," said Katie Mitic, senior vice president, Product Marketing, Palm, Inc. "We have both the developer tools and the hardware necessary for a world-class gaming experience, and an impressive portfolio of webOS game titles from top-notch developers to show for it."
Full press release after the break. So, developers: how’s it look? Legend79 emailed us to note that Palm has chosen to use Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) for hardware access – which to us looks like yet another way to enable easy porting.
App availability on webOS outside the United States has been a long and arduous saga – one we’re hoping is coming to an end soon. Over at Palm’s developer forums, we have some clear evidence from psartini that Palm is well on their way to laying the groundwork for offering paid apps internationally – they’ve begun adding code to their developer backend to support VAT. ‘VAT’ as in ‘Value added tax,’ as in ‘necessary for processing payments internationally.
In addition to the above, an anonymous source expresses confidence that Palm is targeting March for offering paid apps to all countries. One more tidbit – right now Palm and EA have partnered to offer EA’s webOS offerings for free to webOS users outside the US – but the free program ends …March 31st.So for all you folks outside the US: Get your EA games for free while the getting’s good and take heart at this glimmer of hope that your long international nightmare of not having paid apps on webOS may soon be over.
Oh, one last hopeful note: Palm has also promised to bring the new and improved Facebook app to international users "soon."
Thanks, anonymous!
Qt (pronounced ‘cute’) is Nokia’s attempt at creating a ‘write once, run anywhere’ programming platform – learn more here. It’s a big deal for them as they deal with supporting S60 and their new Meego linux platform (which Maemo will be merged into). The idea is that developers will be able to create their app in Qt and have it run on both S60 and Meego – and darn near everything else they can get it running on.
Add one more platform to that list – webOS. Darron Black successfully ported Qt to webOS in time for a demo at Mobile World Congress. Nokia was naturally thrilled and blogged it up themselves (twice).
We don’t know whether Qt is going to be a viable programming platform for Nokia – ‘write once, run anywhere’ has been a cruel, unreachable pipe dream to many would-be mobile moguls in the past - but now that it’s up and running on webOS, count us as behind it. We’ll take Qt apps, we’ll take iPhone ports, we’ll take it all. As Black noted in his post, webOS is ‘OPEN’ (but not, technically, open source). Add in that it’s arguably more accessible to more programmers than Android and we’re feeling pretty darn good about the platform’s potential.
We’ll have Matthew Miller of Nokia Experts and ZDNet on PalmCast Live tomorrow – you can bet that in addition to talking about his new Palm Pre Plus happiness, we’ll be talking Qt.
Thanks to muchtall for the tip!
Last week a story made its way around the blogosphere that Steve Jobs answered an email. Our pals at TiPb covered the iPad tethering question, originally from 9to5Mac:
First, the question from Jezper Söderlund:
Will the wifi-only version [of the iPad] somehow support tethering thru my iPhone?
And the answer?
No.
Sent from my iPhone
We thought it might be appropriate to send another email:
Dear Steve:
Will the wifi-only version [of the iPad] somehow support tethering through Mobile Hotspot on the Palm Pre Plus? Wait, don’t answer that, we already know that it will.
Love, PreCentral
…of course, we’ll be paying $40 per month for the privilege, but hey, it’s there. While we’re on the subject, we’ll note that webOS 1.4 seems to have busted up the hack to get the Verizon-only Mobile Hotspot app working on Sprint – the hackery required now is epic, to say the least. Win some, lose some – but for Verizon Palm Pre Plus owners thinking about the iPad, we’ll chalk it up as a win.
Never underestimate the investigative search prowess of PreCentral members. Shadow-360 tips us to let us know that he’s done some digging based off some information dropped by TopTongueBarry and the results bring us a sliver of hope that the full-touchscreen, slate-style, high-end halo webOS device we’ve been hoping for could indeed be a reality in the coming months.
It begins with TopTongueBarry, a self-professed AT&T IT employee who posted saying that not only has testing finished for the Palm Pre Plus and Palm Pixi Plus, but that testing will soon begin for a mystery device codenamed ‘Elan.’ That matches up well with previous forum sluethery, wherein ToniCipriani noted that May 10th looks like as good a date as any for AT&T to release the Pre and Pixi.
But back to that Elan. It’s new to us and it was new to Shadow-360, who took to the Google and posted his results: Several accessory manufacturers had once listed devices as compatible with the Elan but since took that information down. TopTongueBarry also provided some hints: AT&T testing for the Elan should begin within about two weeks, scuttlebut within AT&T says that the device should have a ’soft keyboard,’ be released in Europe initially, but may be made available unlocked in the US. All that points to a iPhone / Nexus One slate format, as does the fact that some of the accessories Shadow-360 tracked down were also compatible with the iPhone.
So where do we stand with all this hunting around? Either it’s smoke and mirrors and Elan is simply another code name for the O8F-CASC / US GSM Palm Pre Plus or it’s what Shadow-360 and TopTongueBarry suspect: something all-new and the most exciting thing going for webOS rumors given that Sprint’s mysterious C40 still hasn’t shown its face
Bonus rumor-mongering: Why call it ‘Elan?’ Well, another ‘Elan’ in the tech space is a Taiwanese company that sued Apple for multitouch patents. If this even comes close to panning out, that’d be schadenfreude-riffic.
Update: Soorma finds this site identifying the Elan with the Palm Pixi, in case things weren’t muddy enough for you yet. Shadow-360 also found this site showing the same.
As rumored at BGR yesterday, today Verizon has dropped the mail-in rebate on the Palm Pre Plus and the Palm Pixi Plus. The price for the Pre Plus is $149.99 with a new two-year contract, the Pixi Plus clocks in at $79.99. Wireless Week reports that a Verizon spokeswoman said they were responding to consumer demand: "there was ‘a brief period where we tested mail-in rebates on some phones. We have found that online customers expect instant rebates and since this is a very competitive arena in which to do business, we responded accordingly.’"
Whether this is a response to poor initial sales on Verizon or just a sign that Veriozn is doing right by getting rid of a source of annoyance for customers is an open question – but either way we’re pleased to see the mail-in rebate go away.
Thanks to everybody who sent this in!
@palm and PreCentral reader dantex both let us know that Palm webOS devices on Telcel’s network in Mexico can now get webOS 1.4. In just under a week Palm has managed to release webOS 1.4 for all devices on all networks – a significant feat given all the complications of carrier testing and given that there are technically five different webOS hardware types out there (CDMA Pre, CDMA Pre Plus, CDMA Pixi, CDMA Pixi Plus, GSM Pre). Palm has also released the webOS 1.4 SDK and the webOS doctor for 1.4 in the same span.
The wait is now on for the next revision of webOS – many are hoping for a small ‘point’ upgrade to fix some bugs that appear to have cropped up in 1.4 – including phone freezes, bluetooth compatibility (especially with cars), email bugs (setup screen popping up), Luna crashes, mysterious battery drain, volume pop-ups, and more. Yeah, that’s a long list of bugs and it’s tough to say which are universal and which are per-user flukes – but our official webOS 1.4 issues thread is up to 83 pages and we’ve gotten emails aplenty on the above, so we’re sure some of them are real.
So kudos to Palm for getting 1.4 through all the carriers, now let’s kill some bugs.
