So it turns out that this week is App Catalog Access Week for the webOS Wish List. We already touched on the need to expand the App Catalog to more than the less-than-a-dozen countries currently covered and revamping the app promo code system with global and shorter codes. Now it's time to supplement the current app-based promo codes with promo codes based around the one thing that makes the world go round: money.

HP has already demonstrated the ability to create monetary App Catalog promo codes - TouchPad early adopters received a promo code for $50 in apps back in August. The infrastructure is there, and it's already been exercised on a mass scale. The only thing missing is the ability for average Joe users to create their own App Catalog gift cards.

We'd like to propose two types of gifting for the App Catalog. We know that the chance of there being physical App Catalog gift cards like there are for the iOS App Store is practically nil, so we're totally cool with this being all digital. The first type is the monetary type, where through the hpwebos.com website users can create an App Catalog gift card for whatever amount they want and send it to a desired user. The second is the ability to gift a specific app, which one would be able to do through the website or through the App Catalog app itself. both would quite simply generate the appropriate promo code and email it to the recipient with appropriate flavor text about what it is and who sent it to them.

Like the global promo codes, this would make our lives at webOS Nation and that of developers quite a bit easier, but it would also give our friends and family new options for quick-and-easy gifts. Certainly it'd be less silly than the app gifting suggestion we had to include in our Holiday Gift Guides - forcibly acquire their device, download and install the app and pay for it with their registered credit card, and then give them the app price plus applicable sales tax as compensation.

Have your own thoughts on this webOS Wish List entry? Of course you do - the comments are below. Surely you have your own ideas as to what ought be on the webOS wish list, and so we've created a forum thread just for what has proven to be an awesome discussion.

It hasn't been that long since we kicked off our name change, and as promised, 2012 is bringing more than just a new name to the site. Last night our extraordinary team pulled off a combination site redesign and back-end overhaul. The goal of the redesign is simple: give webOS Nation a clean and modern look that is both easy on the eyes and the browser. For the most part things haven't changed from the user perspective, though you should be able to access our much more functional mobile site with webOS devices now. Also, commenting now works across the full range of webOS devices - huzzah!

As always with a redesign like this there are bound to be some hiccups or tweaks to be made. If you notice anything off kilter, please sound off in the comments. Or just drop us a note about how awesome this all is, that's cool too.

Enjoy the new site!

The quest to get thinner, stronger, faster, and healthier with iMore and Mobile Nations continues!

We’ve survived the first week of Mobile Nations Fitness Month. We’ve set our goals and whether we achieved them (yay!) or are still working on them (take that!), we’re feeling better and doing better because of it. And we’re getting tons of great feedback. This might just be the year where mobile and lifestyle fully come together, where eHealth and eFitness — or iHealth and iFitness — finally start making the impact we’ve all been waiting for. It’s gone from being a token arm band case to being an entire ecosystem of highly specialized companion apps and accessories.

We recorded a special edition of ZEN and TECH with CrackBerry.com’ Kevin Michaluk, where we answered a lot of questions, cleared up some big misconceptions, and went over a lot of dos and don’ts to get things going.

Also Kevin produced the single greatest (or most terrifying) fitness video in the history of YouTube. Watch his Sexy and you know it workout.

So let’s keep it going! Once again, we’re setting reasonable, attainable goals, and we’re going to take advantage of our awesome community to make sure we attain them. We have a special edition of our Superfunctional podcast coming your way this weekend to help keep you motivated. Since it's a new week, we've got a new Fitness Month thread in the forums to keep us focused, keep us accountable, and keep us keeping on!

Oh, and we’re still giving away a lot of great prizes!

• Weekly drawings for an TouchPad Touchstone. We’re giving away 4 total, one each week!
• Grand prize drawing for a 32GB TouchPad Bundle (includes Touchstone, Bluetooth Keyboard, and Folio Case)!

Our ZEN and TECH podcast has also added to the pot with an Xbox 360 Kinect giveaway, so be sure to enter that as well!

So hurry up and jump into the forums and pick your goal for week 2. Mobile Nations fitness month continues!

This time last year, Derek, Dieter, and Riz were running around San Francisco's Fort Mason Center covering what turned out to be the biggest planned event in the history of webOS. It was the coming out party for webOS under HP, and it came to be known as "Think Beyond." One year ago, HP SVP and Palm Global Business Unit manager Jon Rubinstein got up on the stage to introduce, in order, the tiny HP Veer smartphone, the HP Pre3 - larger, thinner, and more powerful webOS smartphone that the faithful had been waiting for - and the first webOS tablet, the HP TouchPad, all slated by the end of Summer 2011

That day brought more than hardware announcements. We got our first look at webOS 3.0 on the TouchPad, met the new VP of Developer Relations Richard Kerris, found out that HP was not going to update older handsets to webOS 2.0, and said goodbye to the Palm brand. Things were looking up - even if the TouchPad wasn't a mind-blowing piece of hardware, it was the first of what we hoped would be several products to take the market by storm.

The Veer shipped to middling reviews in May and the TouchPad followed in July. And then everything went downhill from there. After just a month on the market, HP cut the TouchPad's price by $100, and ten days after that pulled the rug out from under the webOS community by canceling all webOS hardware development. Since then we've gone through a hardware fire sale, a fired CEO, the loss of Kerris, Rubinstein, and many others, questions about the future of the platform, and emerged on the other side with plans for going open source with a new Open webOS.

My, what a year it has been.

We'll be honest - this one is more for the developers and our own lazy purposes. Right now, webOS App Catalog developers are only able to generate promo codes for their apps on a per-country basis, i.e. a promo code can only be generated for a specific country, and doing so for other countries requires a different promo code. Here's a glimpse into the headache of country-specific promo codes.

When we do our weekly app giveaways here on webOS Nation, we have to get a multi-use USA code from the developer to send out to the winners, knowing that the majority will be on the American App Catalog. But should they be an international user on, say, the German App Catalog? Then that code won't work for them and they need a German promo code. Not a problem, we'll get one from the developer. Now do that for 15-20% of the winners in our giveaways. It can escalate a migraine to a headache real fast keeping track of which winners need a code for which country.

It's even worse if you're a developer who wants to just put a promo code out there but still cover all the international bases - you have to make one for each of the ten countries that support promo codes and hope that people pick them up. Amusingly/frustratingly, even though HP supports app sales to Singapore, they never got around to adding Singapore to the promo code selection list.

The time has come to overhaul the promo code system. The first step is to institute global promo codes - one code to cover every country. We can forgive not supporting promo codes in countries where app sales aren't happening, though that's something that needs to be worked on too. The second step is to eliminate the requirement for having a payment method on file with the App Catalog in order to use a promo code. Best Buy doesn't require that I have cash on me when I use a Best Buy gift card, why should the App Catalog need a credit card to use a promo code?

And step the third: make them shorter. The current 32-digit alpha-numeric promo code system is both ridiculously hard to manually enter and overkill - it allows for 1.9 quattuordecillion (that's 1.9 billion trillion trillion trillion) possibilities. Note only would it be near impossible to guess a promo code, even with a computer doing the inputting, but HP is never ever going to run out of combinations. Our humble suggestion: cut it down to eight alpha-numeric characters. That's still 2.8 trillion possibilities. Go for ten (3.6 quadrillion) or twelve (4.7 quintillion) if you're feeling antsy about hackability.

Have your own thoughts on this webOS Wish List entry? Of course you do - the comments are below. Surely you have your own ideas as to what ought be on the webOS wish list, and so we've created a forum thread just for what is sure to be an awesome discussion.

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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