The new flagship Android phone from Google and Samsung, the Nexus S, was "rooted" from day one of its availability. Our pals at Android Central noted the event and today pointed us to a blog post by a security engineer who works on the Android team at Google, Nick Kralevich.

Kralevich notes that with the Nexus S and the Nexus One, it’s not quite right to call it "rooting" the phone, as those two Android devices are designed from the get-go to easily let developers get root access to hack away at the device. To say that you’ve "rooted’ the Nexus S is a bit of a misnomer, all you’ve really done is turn on the access that was there waiting for you. Other Android devices, he rightly notes, are locked down by manufacturers and carriers and so must be "rooted" by taking advantage of some kind of insecurity to open them up for full development playtime. 

….all of which should leave users in webOS land slightly bemused. Read on.

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I recently came across a book from 2002 that I hadn’t heard of before: Piloting Palm: The Inside Story of Palm, Handspring, and the Birth of the Billion-Dollar Handheld Industry, by Andrea Butter (former VP of marketing at Palm) and technology journalist David Pogue. While it is certainly a solid, detailed history of Palm from before its 1992 official founding through the heyday of PalmOS in late 2001, the book offers unexpected and significant insight into today’s smartphone market. It should be required reading for the management team at Palm and HP, and offers both perspective and some hope to the webOS community.

Keep reading below the break for the full review!

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CES 2011 is just a few weeks away, and we’re all assuming (and hoping) that Palm announces some awesome new devices to replace the aging hardware that’s out there right now. At this point, given the current marketshare numbers, what might be needed more than the new hardware is a new consumer mindset pertaining to Palm.

According to the latest numbers from Nielsen, Palm’s marketshare stands at a paltry 1.3% in the United States, and we’d reason that international marketshare is around that, if not lower in countries where Palm products are even available.

With Palm’s market penetration so low, the question weighing heavily on our minds right now is how do Palm and HP turn around their fortunes with webOS – especially if we need to wait some time for new hardware? The answer lies not with rebuilding marketshare. No, the answer is to reboot the public perception and start over. webOS is a fantastic operating system, but it was already fighting an uphill battle against iOS when it launched, and has since been eclipsed by Android and is facing competition for the bottom rung from, of all companies, Microsoft with their turn-the-smartphone-OS-on-its-ear Windows Phone 7.

In this mess of smartphone operating systems, how is Palm to differentiate itself and make the case for why Joe Consumer should buy a webOS phone over an iPhone or Droid? Reboot, reset, and start over. Palm needs to be aggressive with their advertising. It can’t be “We’re still here.” No, the message must be “We are here. This is why we’re awesome.”

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There’s been a lot of hypothesizing about where HP is taking webOS, and how it will help boost development, expand product offerings and ultimately leverage its $1.2 billion investment buying Palm in July. One really interesting possibility, that may provide a detailed roadmap of the strategy, is HP’s "Instant-On Enterprise," a series of initiatives first announced on November 2nd, and which will be featured in two major HP Discover conferences in 2011, first in Las Vegas during the week of June 6th (featuring Sir Paul McCartney, for whom HP is building a private cloud solution), and then in Vienna from November 29th through December 1st.

(Read on for more about the Instant-On Enterprise and webOS)

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When did smartphones become superphones?  To be precise, the term superphone was unofficially coined only this year with the launch of Google’s Nexus One back in January of 2010.  While one can argue whether or not a term like superphone vs. smartphone is warranted, what isn’t up for debate is that 2010 saw the release of a succession of groundbreaking devices sporting amazing hardware.  While the term began with the Nexus One it continued into the year with other well known “superphones” like the EVO 4G, iPhone 4, Galaxy S line and Droid X, to name only a few.  Palm and HP webOS devices, as we know all too well, were not only left behind but were literally left totally out of the mix during the year of the superphone.  Though various form factors and features made for a less than definitive case for what exactly constituted a superphone, one thing all of these devices had in common was this, a 1GHz CPU.

By this standard alone did Palm finally enter into the superphone arena with the late 2010 release of the Pre 2?  Obviously yes, as the Pre 2 does in fact feature a 1GHz processor in the Texas Instruments OMAP 3630. So should it have a shot to be considered in the same class as those other phones? Read on.

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Welcome to Round Table, which is in fact not a table at all. Round Table is a continuing series on PreCentral where we pose a question to the staff and they provide their thoughts and insights. The question could be something simple like “what’s your favorite use for the Pre’s mirror?” or something a bit more complicated, like “why are you sticking with webOS (or are you)?” Or maybe we’ll just end up discussing our sandwich workflow. Today, however, we’re diving into the latest version of webOS. While few have been able to handle webOS 2.0, the veritable cornucopia of videos, screenshots, and reviews have made it easy to draw some preliminary conclusions. After the break, see what the crew has to say about HP webOS 2.0.

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Welcome to Round Table, which is in fact not a table at all. Round Table is a continuing series on PreCentral where we pose a question to the staff and they provide their thoughts and insights. The question could be something simple like “what’s your favorite webOS RSS reader?” or something a bit more complicated, like “where do you see Palm in a year?” Or maybe we’ll just end up chatting about how we miss the cartoons of our childhood. Today, however, we’re going to take a look at the latest hardware from Palm: the Pre 2.

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You know and love @MrKal_El on Twitter, now know and love him here as he gives us his opinion on how Palm and HP need to make a splash, and soon.

Recently I’ve been engaged in a bit of a debate (on Twitter, naturally) regarding Palm and HP at CES 2011 and potential for the reveal of the much-rumored PalmPad. If you were to ask me, I’d say that January of next year is too late to reveal the PalmPad in what is fast becoming a crowded tablet market.

So I’m going to take a moment to expand a bit on what I feel would be a agressive (but possible) release schedule for webOS hardware and software to succeed in the current market.

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Léo Apotheker is the new CEO of HP, or at least will be in short order, and it’s a choice we don’t think anybody predicted. He certainly wasn’t on our radar. HP’s board says that Apotheker was the first and only person they offered the job, and according to recent SEC filings, he’s going to be making some serious money ($1.2 million annual salary, $4 million signing bonus, $4.6 million for moving expenses (buh?), and incentive bonuses ranging from 200%-500% of his salary). But just where did he come from, and what does his arrival at HP mean, especially for our favorite little business unit: Palm?

Apotheker is coming to HP off a short stint as CEO of German software monolith SAP. SAP is an enterprise software company, which as Sascha Segan of PC Magazine put it, sells “hideously boring but profitable enterprise software.” Apotheker spent twenty years at SAP, serving as “co-CEO” in 2008, before being elevated to CEO in May 2009. His reign at the top of SAP was not for long, as in February of 2010, the SAP board and Apotheker reached an agreement that saw him leaving the CEO position, the SAP board, and SAP as a company.

Now, you might be thinking, “only seven months and they already forced him to resign?” We were thinking that too, but that’s not what has as most worried. HP is a strong and seriously profitable company – if it turns out that the first and only choice for CEO is a dud, HP will be able to move on to somebody else without skipping a beat. And from what we can deduce from SAP’s carefully worded press releases over the years, Apotheker was dumped into a mess of a company when he took over as singular CEO. Shareholders demanded action, ignoring the fact that every company on the planet was suffering in February of 2010, and so he became the sacrificial lamb to the poor economy.

Here’s what has us concerned: Apotheker is a software guy. Not just a software guy, an enterprise software guy. His focus is selling complicated and expensive software solutions with serious regard to function, but little regard to form, to large firms. Divisions like printers and personal computers and handheld devices (i.e. Palm) have not factored into his management experience.

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Smartphones are tricky animals sometimes, especially if you’re a power user or geek (as many of us are these days). You want to get into the very guts of your device and find out all of the cool and secret things about it, try out leaked software and hack it all to hell. But unless you’ve got extra money lying around that you like to blow on new devices every few weeks, you definitely don’t want to do anything to actually brick your device.

Testing those limits is fun, but everyone gets upset when they go past the point of no return. Luckily for us webOS users, ‘bricking’ your device is near impossible aside from breaking the device in half. If you run into a problem with your device, just go to the Palm website and grab the webOS doctor for the version and carrier of your choice. There’s a very clear set of steps you can go through to fix nearly any serious webOS issue.

Win/Win. You get to mess with your device and not worry (too much) about breaking it beyond repair.

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