Lately I’ve been traveling. Actually, I’ve been traveling a ton and expect that with the coming "show season" spanning Christmas, CES, CTIA, Mobile World Congress, and a few other trips in between, that trend is going to continue. The essential service for managing that travel is TripIt, which lets you forward any confirmation you get from airlines, hotels, and plenty others to an email address where TripIt automatically parses them into incredibly useful itineraries with flight information, hotel information, maps, networks of other travelers, and more. It’s a simple concept that has pretty much changed my travel life for the better.

The best part about using TripIt is that those itineraries are quickly available on your phone – often in an app. To date with webOS we’ve had to content with the (admittedly pretty good) TripIt mobile site. Soon, we’ll have an app just like the other guys. It’s not coming from TripIt directly, instead it’s coming from Syntactix. You may have heard they needed a name for the app? It’s been chosen, it’s now called TripKit, and it’s pretty great – even though it’s still in Beta.

Like any self-respecting TripIt app, it gives you quick and easy access to your itinerary items. If you subscribe to TripIt Pro, you can also track all your points for airlines and hotels. A few of the links open up the web browser in a separate card – but actually this isn’t all that far off from the iPhone version, which also often reverts to a mobile Safari view within the app.

It’s still in Beta and currently doesn’t work on webOS 2.0 due to some unexpected changes in how data is stored in the new OS (they’re working on a quality fix, fret not). No word when it will escape Beta and hit the App Catalog officially, but when it does it’ll be a must-buy for frequent flyers. 

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Recently Google Voice made its return to webOS in app form and it looks and feels like it was part of the OS all along. What is even more remarkable than the fact that it took this long for a developer to find a workaround for the problems that killed the old Google Voice apps, is the revelation that the developer who finally figured it out is only 14 years old.

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webOS Developer Geoff Gauchet (aka @zhephree) has brought plenty of goodness to us all, most famously with his FourSquare app and Neato! for shooting data to and from webOS devices and computers. For his next trick, Gauchet is planning on bringing a new app called Incredible! that will serve as an aggregated social media reading tool.

Incredible! will pull in Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare, Flickr, Gowalla, Picasa, Delicious, LinkedIn, YouTube, Untappd, and, yes, a few other streams into a single unified app. Rather than try to be a full-featured client for all of these services, Incredible! will focus on providing a single way to read your entire social stream in an interface that is able to give you all those services in something actually readable.

There have been attempts to do similar things on other platforms (MotoBlur on Android comes to mind) and even on the desktop. Based on the screenshots and plans for the app, we’re optimistic that Gauchet just may have done a better job than any of them. Read on for our exclusive preview of Incredible!

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A​straware’s newest release for webOS, an old PC classic Tradewinds 2, has a depth not found on a lot of mobile games, although it is not the prettiest presentation.

The game sets you in the Caribbean at the start of the 18th century. You are a merchant traveler sailing between the islands to make money and battling pirate ships in between. You can outfit your ship with a few different weapon types and as you progress, you will be able to buy better ships. Each time you sail to a different port, time passes. You will be able to see the date as you travel around and that will have an effect on the game sometimes.

Read on for the full review!

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PreCentral forum member jackofspeed submits this review of the Spotify webOS app and service, as he’s from the UK and can use Spotify

Here in Europe (the land from whence this author hails), Spotify is kind of a big deal. When their webOS app became available last week, it was the end of a 12-month wait for those of us lucky enough to be able to get the Spotify service. To most of you though (i.e. the United States) it may be an unknown commodity, and this is as much a review of the service as it is the app.

A quick summary is in order: Spotify is a cloud-based music streaming service, not unlike Pandora, but with one key difference – you can choose exactly the music you want to play. It’s as simple as that; if you want to listen to a specific artist’s new album, you just search for it and play it. What’s more, if you don’t mind a few adverts, it’s free to do so! Alternatively, you can pay £4.99 a month for ad-free streaming to a computer at 160kbps, or £9.99 per month for ad-free streaming at 320kbps to a computer or mobile device.

The more expensive of these services also allows for offline storage of playlists (limited to around 3000 tracks) so playback can continue in the absence of a data connection. The service also supports collaboratively editable playlists, scrobbling, and social links via Facebook or as web links which can be used in any way you wish. Incorporation of local music into playlists is now supported as well, so the Spotify app can really act as a hub for all your music on your Pre or your desktop. Yes, you understood that correctly, Spotify does what iTunes does, but with a subscription service like Zune Pass built right in.

But what about webOS? Well the Spotify app supports all the features described above, provided you have a Premium subscription. You can build playlists on the phone or on the desktop app, and they sync through the cloud between devices in a totally transparent way. Got a good Spotify playlist already? Install the app and it’s there, ready to go. You can hit play straightaway and it’s off, playing your music pretty much instantly. This works flawlessly over Wi-Fi, and pretty much flawlessly over 3G GSM.

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Soft music of a gentle tinkling on the piano, raindrops pattering against the window as you sit before the fire in your country home doing a puzzle. This is the serenity into which you are dropped as you launch Quell, a puzzler that just hit the App Catalog from developer Fallen Tree Games.

The game play of Quell is most closely related to Droplets, though in terms of its peaceful atmosphere and pretty visuals, it is more akin to Ancient Frog, at least in terms of the way it leaves you feeling mellow and refreshed. It is a fun, addicting puzzler that is not too hard for those of you who are easily frustrated by puzzles yet challenging enough to keep a pro puzzle solver interested.

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I depend on (and love in a weird sort of way) Google Reader. Yes, it’s part of my job to keep up on a lot of news, but it’s also great for following your favorite sites. So I’m persnickety when it comes to using RSS on the go. It has to, in this order:

1. Sync with Google Reader
2. Be FAST, showing me new stories from my 200+ feeds in a matter of seconds
3. Allow me to quickly view entire folders, not just individual feeds
4. Make it easy to open the site up in a browser
5. Make it easy to share over email and twitter
6. Make it east to send to Instapaper
7. Have a readable interface

The speed is the main thing. With that many feeds an app that fully syncs content for local storage before you can get to reading is just not tenable.

Enter the latest version of Feeder, now in a Beta form you can download and use for around 10 days, and should be updated in the App Catalog soon at $1.99. The latest beta, which you can see above, pretty much hits every single one of those requirements – hits them hard. Feeder is fast, responsive, able to share via Twitter and email, links to SpareTime and Relego for later reading, supports Google Starring and Sharing (if you use those features), and is, finally, fast.

Recommended, and kudos to Semicolon apps for some rapid updating and feature-inclusion that have made this my favorite RSS reader on webOS and possibly my favorite RSS reader on any platform. It gives iOS’ Reeder and run for its money and blows away anything available on Android.

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If the webOS 2.0 review and a bevy of other videos wasn’t enough to whet your appetite for webOS 2.0, here’s one more. Above, I give a quick run-through of the workspace I’ve settled on with webOS 2.0. Stacking up cards that go together, like Memos/Tasks/Calendar and ordering them on your screen in a way that makes sense to you is one of those "I didn’t know I wanted it until I used it for a few days" kinds of features – hopefully seeing one example of how it’s useful day-to-day for one user (me) will help you think about how it will make a difference for you.

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Amid the many videos and other content we brought to you along with our webOS 2.0 review, there was at least one thing we whiffed on, as @PalmFlashCards gently reminded us: the all new App Catalog. Above, we humbly present a video showing the new interface and saner app search, sort, and discovery options. We also take a look at the all new Software Manager where you can get your updates, report problems, and review apps directly.

Thanks for the reminder, James!

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Just how much faster is webOS 2.0 on the 1GHz Palm Pre 2 compared to the Palm Pre Plus? We won’t say it’s twice as fast, but it’s close. That’s not the whole story, however, as many of you homebrewers out there are already running your Palm Pre and Pre Plus phones at 1GHz with overclocking.

Is stock webOS 2.0 on the Pre 2 any faster than an overclocked Palm Pre Plus? The answer is ….sometimes. Check out the video above to see what we mean.

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