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Editorials, Round Table, Wallpaper

Round Table: Wallpaper

March 3rd 2010 | Posted by Derek Kessler

Round Table

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 app?” or something a bit more complicated, like “why did Palm choose the creepy lady?” Or maybe we’ll just end up chatting about our favorite version of Law & Order, you never know. Today, however, we’re taking a more personal look at ourselves and our devices and putting our wallpapers on the line. Check it out, after the break.

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4g, C40, Editorials, Featured Articles, GPU, Motorola Droid, Nexus One, OLED, Palm, Palm Pre, Pixi, Pre Plus, Round Table, Snapdragon, Sprint, Swype, Tegra 2, Verizon, Virtual Keyboard, WiMAX, android, blackberry, iPhone, ipad, microSD, palm pixi, palm pre plus, pre, webOS, webOS 2.0

Round Table: The Palm C40

February 19th 2010 | Posted by Derek Kessler

Round Table

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 app?” or something a bit more complicated, like “where does Palm go from here?” Or maybe we’ll just end up chatting about our favorite movies, you never know. This time around we’re dispensing thoughts on something that has puzzled and eluded us for months: the Palm C40.

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AT&T, Bada, China Unicom, Editorials, Featured Articles, Intel, J2ME, Java, LG, MWC, MeeGo, Orange, Samsung, Softbank Mobile, Sony Ericsson, Sprint, Verizon, Wholesale Applications Community, Wind, Windows Mobile, Windows Phone 7 Series, android, api, blackberry, iPhone, news, nokia, webOS

Carriers band together for cross-platform apps, manufacturers laugh heartily

February 17th 2010 | Posted by Derek Kessler

Wholesale Application Community

Announced at MWC was yet another partnership between the world’s cellular carriers that will end up resulting in, well, very little. Networks around the world have banded together to create the Wholesale Applications Community, which in essence will be a global cross-platform app effort. And here’s why it’s going to fail: manufacturers, particularly the ones that are invested in an operating system (such as Apple, Palm, and Nokia), will have no interest in participating. Especially those that have created an app store, Apple in particular.

The Wholesale Applications Community (WAC) will end as a failure, at best withering away as a token gesture to interoperability. There are a million political reasons why it won’t work, but the biggest hurdles to overcome are the technical ones: programming languages and APIs. While we can see feature phone manufacturers rallying around the WAC, nobody buys a T9 flip phone to run apps. They lack the hardware to properly execute – that’s why they’re feature phones.

App developers too aren’t interested in feature phones, because the meager hardware will limit what they can do. Not to mention the varying screen sizes, processors, radios, keypads, and everything else. App developers are interested in smartphones, and that’s where the WAC starts to fall apart.

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Buzz, CSS, Editorials, Featured Articles, Google Buzz, Google Maps Street View, Google Voice, HTML5, Java, Mojo SDK, Objective-C, PDK, Palm, Palm OS, Street View, Visual C++, Windows Mobile, android, flash, gDial Pro, google, google maps, iPhone, javascript, maps, news, webOS

Does Google care about webOS, or is webOS just not there yet?

February 15th 2010 | Posted by Derek Kessler

Google Maps Street View

It’s a question we’ve been pondering for a while, and with much more intensity in recent days: does Google care about Palm webOS? It is something we have to wonder about, with Google Maps on webOS lagging greatly behind its iPhone and Android counterparts, webOS being at first excluded from the Buzz party and then only invited inside the lobby, and the general lack of effort Google seems to be publicly exerting in getting their products to work to their full potential on webOS.

It all came to a head last week, with Google making a change to the way Google Voice works that ended up breaking webOS Google Voice clients, such as the popular gDial Pro. Nathan, the developer of gDial, learned that the change was not a move to break compatibility with unofficial Voice clients like gDial, but a natural progression of the development of the Google Voice system. In fact, Google has no problems with such unofficial clients and is pretty much willing to turn a blind eye to them so long as they aren’t acting in nefarious ways. Unfortunately, that blind eye doesn’t come with any support.

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Editorials, smartphone round robin, sperr

webOS: Smartphone Round Robin Responses

February 8th 2010 | Posted by Dieter Bohn

It’s time to round up what my colleagues at SPE had to say about webOS for the Smartphone Round Robin. After the break, their take, my take on their take, and then your take (in the form of comments, naturally). Later this week: we’ll announce the Round Robin winners!

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Editorials, Round Table, apps, best webOS apps, top apps

Round Table: PreCentral Editor Top 10 webOS Apps

February 4th 2010 | Posted by Dieter Bohn

 

It’s time we made the rounds again – this week we’re opening the kimono (metaphorically, thank god) and showing you which apps your PreCentral.net editors use every day. After the break, take a gander at what we’re using every day and be sure to tell us what you’re using in the comments.

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App Catalog, Editorials, anger management, frustration, international, webOS

It’s Frustrating Being An International webOS Lover

February 3rd 2010 | Posted by Jason Robitaille

When Palm announced the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus were going to be exclusives to Verizon, a large number of Sprint users were utterly frustrated. While that’s understandable, it’s worth pointing out American users have, overall, had a much better webOS experience than the rest of the world.

As they say, every so often, it’s best to air the frustrations. Done not to put down, but rather put things in perspective and raise issues some might not know about.

So with that in mind, let’s take a little trip around the world.

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AT&Sprizon-Mobile, AT&T, Amazon MP3, Chris Riley, Editorials, Featured Articles, Free Press, Friends & Family, LTE, Lowell McAdam, Mobile to Mobile, Ralph de la Vega, Rollover Minutes, Sprint, T-Mobile, Tether, Verizon, WiMAX, data, email, fcc, fiber optic, im, sms, video chat, webOS

Editorial: Voice rate cuts, data rate hikes, and the case for metered billing

January 26th 2010 | Posted by Derek Kessler

Overage

Both Verizon and AT&T have recently dropped the price of their unlimited voice plans from $100 to $70 a month. While we (we being the tech media) generally assumed that the price cuts were an attempt to lure more customers. We tend to forget a few days after their conference calls that the #1 and #2 US cellular networks are having no trouble picking up and retaining new customers, even with their rates considerably higher than #3 Sprint and #4 T-Mobile (T-Mobile is at least still gaining subscribers, unlike Sprint). So why the price cuts?

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Editorials, palm pixi, palm webos

Thoughts on the Pixi: Why I will Miss my Centro…

January 4th 2010 | Posted by Annie Latham

When the Palm rep emailed to pry the Pixi out of my hands, I was bummed. I had been taking it with me everywhere — to the local farmer’s market, to the gym, on my quest to find a golf course with an available tee time the day after Thanksgiving (Is there an app for that?), etc. The Pixi had become quite the pal. But alas, I sent it back knowing that we’d meet again (perhaps in the form of the rumored Verizon Pixi Plus).

It has been a while since my initial thoughts on the Pixi appeared.  With the New Year upon us, as well as the one-year anniversary of the webOS hoopla at the Consumer Electronics Show, the time seemed right to do Part 2, where I focus on the Pixi from the perspective of a Centro owner.

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CES, Editorials, Featured Articles, Round Table, ces2010, roundtable

Round Table: What do you expect at CES?

January 4th 2010 | Posted by Dieter Bohn

We’re back with another PreCentral Round Table, where your favorite webOS dorks + one guest prognosticate about, well, something interesting. Today we figured it was time to get on the record about what we’re really expecting on January 7th at Palm’s CES announcement. Come on in and see what we’re thinking and then let us know what you’re thinking.

Hopes and dreams will be confirmed, dashed, or ignored completely… after the break! (Updated with one more prediction)

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