After Jon Rubinstein (former CEO of Palm, now SVP and General Manager of the Palm Global Business Unit) left the stage the other night at All Things Digital’s D: Dive Into Mobile conference, he sat down for a more detailed interview with AllThingsD’s John Paczkowski. Although Ruby did not reveal too much more than the little we’ve heard in recent appearances, there were a few tidbits scattered in the interview that were of interest.

First, in response to a question about bandwidth, Ruby all but confirmed that there will be 4G devices coming from Palm:

I am very excited to [be] getting to LTE and HSDPA+ (two faster cellular networks). We have some really interesting visions on where webOS can go as you get more and more bandwidth.

There was also a fair amount of discussion about cloud services, no surprise given webOS’ deep integration with the cloud, but it wasn’t just about webOS devices. Paczkowski asked Rubinstein, "A lot of data is going to be on laptops and desktops. Do you need to build a cloud device to have webOS talk to them?" Rubinstein’s cryptic (but intriguing) response? "Stay tuned," his usual answer for products and services that are coming but may not be ready for announcements.

Ruby gave a nice shoutout to the new generation of webOS developers (like these fine young men):

We have a lot of really interesting ways to develop for webOS. It’s very easy to develop for and people like developing for it. We are getting a whole new generation of developers.

We had this developer conference in New York. If you look at the audience, a lot of them were under 17 and they were making enough money selling applications to come from wherever they were–they weren’t from New York–to bring one of their parents or both of their parents to come to the developer conference.

He also directly addressed questions and concerns about Palm’s staffing in the wake of the HP acquisition:

Since we closed the deal we have hired over 70 people. Two hundred-plus people from HP have joined us and other divisions at HP are busy working on helping us make webOS successful. So while yes, we lost a few people along the way, we gained a lot of people.

There’s more from Ruby via the source link below. Here’s hoping we don’t have to "stay tuned" a whole lot longer for some real information.

Source: AllThingsD’s Mobilized Blog

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A data loss bug that has crippled the webOS Evernote app finally has a fix available and more updates are on the way.

Evernote is one of the most powerful and popular cross platform note taking apps out there and was one of the first apps to hit the App Catalog when the Pre first launched. But it has stagnated in version 1.0 ever since and until recently, seemed abandoned by its developers. Evernote employee Dave Engberg said in the Evernote forums as recently as late August that ‘the WebOS client is currently on the "back burner" while we wait to see what happens with the platform.’

This was sad news for Evernote fans in the webOS community since version 1.o is virtually unusable. Notes created in the webOS app would sometimes fail to sync with the server and get stuck in the pending queue forever. The only solution was to delete the note and start over again. There is also an issue where it fails to scroll all the way to the end of a note and thus some of the text cannot be seen. I could not even run Evernote on my Sprint Pre because it would cause my phone to freeze up every time I launched it, so badly that I had to take the battery out to restart it. All of this on top of many limitations in the app’s feature set, such as a lack of copy and paste or full editing features available in other versions like bulleted lists.

At long last, version 1.1 is available for download, though not yet in the official App Catalog. It is available via a download link posted in the Evernote forums. You will need webOS Quick Install or other installer to get it on your device.This version fixes some of the data loss bugs and ‘more significant improvements’ are promised in future updates.

Source: Evernote User Forum; Thanks to user xImtc for the tip!

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Patrick Scaglia, CTO of Cloud Services & Applications at HP, recently penned an editorial for Forbes on the future of cloud services and mobile computing, and it’s a good read. While Scaglia never mentions webOS by name, it’s clear what he’s talking about: as mobile bandwidth and power increases, so will the capabilities of devices augmented by cloud-based computing services.

While Scaglia speaks at length about the future of cloud services as they could pertain to corporations (this is for Forbes, after all), he does dabble in where the cloud could directly benefit the consumer, and that’s in the developing world. As he notes, despite the more than one billion persons living in India, only 80 million own computers that are connected to the internet. Yet, there are more than 600 million cell phones in use in India. The power of a smartphone, no matter how advanced, will always fall behind that of a desktop, if merely due to the size and power needs of components. But by utilizing cloud services, Scaglia argues that mobile devices could become the only devices needed: “As those phones become more sophisticated, connected and are backed by the cloud, that disparity will be wiped away.”

Quite rightly, Scaglia and HP see information as the most valuable resource of the 21st century. With HP’s recent purchase of firms like 3PAR and Stratavia, it’s good to know that they’re backing up their words with dollars. And let’s not forget about the cloud potential of webOS. Between Palm Profile backups and the Synergy combinations of tasks, calendars, and contacts, there’s a lot of cloud already baked into webOS, with potential for much more.

Source: Forbes

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Robert Knight sent in this review of the Box.net app, if that’s your cloud storage of choice, you’re going to like what you see here. It’s been submitted to Palm for review and we hope to see it soon. Thanks Robert!

Box.net provides online storage that can be accessed from any computer and some mobile phones. webOS has two applications to my knowledge that provide mobile access to Box.net. The first application is Boxalicious which I have installed and used when needed. The new webOS app is simply called Box.net for webOS. Although it’s still in beta, Box.net users will want it. 

Read on for the full review!

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HP has just spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $30 million to snap up Melodeo, according to TechCrunch. Melodeo offers a service to stream your music from the cloud – much like Grooveshark.

You can check them out now on their nuTsie service (get the joke there?). You can give nuTsie access to see your iTunes library and they will automatically make all the songs on their servers that match your library available for mobile streaming. TechCrunch claims that the next version will allow you to actually upload your songs to the cloud for streaming anywhere. Remember when HP said they loved the cloud and hinted that it was an integral part of their webOS strategy? Not fooling around.

Palm may have had to give up on direct iTunes sync, but it looks like HP is planning on doing them one better by purchasing a service that will let you get your entire iTunes (or whatever) library into the cloud and streamed to your webOS device. Sounds like a good trade to us – we can’t wait to see what comes of this buyout.

Source: TechCrunch

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One of the more exciting recent developments for webOS has been the ability to access real-time online storage from anywhere, to extend the non-expandable 8-16 GB of available on-device storage for the Pre and Pixi. First, Grooveshark enabled uploading of one’s music collection for access via its webOS software, and now, technology firm Zecter has released a new webOS client for its ZumoDrive remote storage service.

It is, as mrkalel says, hot.

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One of the nice features of using a webOS-based handset like the Palm Pre or Pixi is that it is always connected to the “cloud”, keeping your data safe and backed-up via the Palm Profile. Connecting with the “cloud” is effective for those pesky times when you accidentally run over your Pre or Pixi with [...]

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If the recent mess with Palm Profile backups has shown us anything, it’s that you all still want a desktop sync app. We don’t blame you – the cloud is nice until it starts to rain. With that in mind, we thought it time to take a look at the possibilities for a desktop syncing app, especially with respect to your Palm Profile. The question is “how do we get this data from your webOS phone to your computer?”

There are a couple of options, the most obvious being the classic-style Palm Desktop sync. You plug your phone into the computer, hit a button, and sync away. This provides a backup and sync of your data on your desktop, but it locks you into using Palm Desktop.

Given Palm’s emphasis on syncing with the cloud, we think that if there were any chance of there being desktop syncing it would come from the clouds. So that opens up two possibilities: sync to a proprietary app like Palm Desktop, or simply providing open standard feeds like CalDAV. The later would provide Palm an opportunity to flex their open source muscles by helping the WebDAV group expand to support more feeds, such as contacts, memos, and tasks. It would also take the pressure of building a desktop app off Palm’s shoulders – all you would need is any one of several compatible desktop apps to handle the syncing.

Lastly, there’s the Google-esque solution, which would be to provide a way for you to access all of your synced data from the web, through a Palm Profile version of the Google PIM webapps (e.g. Google Contacts, Google Calendar, etc).

So the question we find ourselves pondering is: which would you prefer?

What kind of webOS backup/sync solution do you want?(polls)

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While we have no evidence to suggest that the failure of Palm Profiles to successfully sync contacts to newly activated webOS devices is a widespread phenomena , it is widespread enough to be a cause of concern.  These recent developments, compounded with the Danger fiasco last month, should serve to reinforce the importance of data redundancy, even in the days of "cloud computing." To echo Dieter’s sentiments on the issue:

Our advice: your key data should always be in a minimum of three places:

1. Your Pre (where it’s persistent as long as you don’t erase anything)

2. A cloud service (Palm, Google, Exchange, etc)

3. Someplace ‘else.’ For most of us that will be your desktop, where hopefully you’re pulling down your data from Google or Exchange. If you’re using Palm’s profile exclusively, we suggest you take a look at one of the several desktop sync apps that are available now.

Aside from using third party programs like Mark/Space’s The Missing Sync or Chapura’s PocketMirror, there really isn’t an easy to take the contact information stored in the Palm Profile and export it for use in other services, such as gmail or Yahoo.  There is a utility in the works by DrewPre that’s intended to fill this void, as first reported by Derek earlier this week, but it has yet to be released to the public as of this writing.

Those who want to back up their data without parting with money are still in luck, however: utilizing the tools and resources already made available to us by members of the webOS community, it is possible to back up the contents of your Palm Profile, and even export the contacts contained therein to the cloud service of your choice.

Here’s how.

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Leave it to an enterprising precentral forum member, DrewPre, to create backup functionality where Palm and the “cloud” fall a little short. The webOS platform ingeniously remains always-connected to the cloud and stores your critical data in several locations, adding valuable convenience and peace of mind should you lose or accidentally destroy your device. This [...]

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