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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With webOS 2.0 due out before the end of the year, we thought it’d be fun to take a look back at how far webOS has come since version 1.0. So we’re going to do that, and we’re going to go back to the beginning to start. Actually, we’re going to go back to the first update, webOS version 1.0.2, which landed on June 5, 2009, otherwise known as the day before the much-anticipated release of the Palm Pre.

It was a different time, both literally and figuratively – one only need look at the modern smartphone landscape to see how drastically things have changed since June 2009. For perspective, the top-tier phones of the day: the iPhone 3GS, the HTC Hero (only in Europe), the BlackBerry Bold/Tour, and the Palm Pre. My, how things have changed. After the break, we chronicle just how webOS has changed over the past 16 months.

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As expected, Microsoft has turned on Exchange ActiveSync for Hotmail users. This means that Hotmail users can now get their email, calendar, and contacts fully pushed out to plenty of mobile devices, including webOS devices. 

To program Hotmail into Synergy, just start a new account in email and then punch in your hotmail credentials – but make sure you enter your password incorrectly. That part is crucial, as it will allow you to set up Hotmail manually instead of using webOS’s default POP settings. After automatic setup fails, select "Manual Setup."

*Facepalm*. Plenty of folks on Twitter and in the comments remind us: On the add account screen, you can hit the upper-left menu to go directly to ‘Manual Setup.’ (Thanks everybody!) Then, on the Manual Setup Screen:

• Tap "POP" and switch the account type to "Exchange (EAS)"
• Set the Incoming Mail Server to "https://m.hotmail.com" (no quotes)
• Leave Domain blank
• Set your username to your full @hotmail email address (i.e. include @hotmail.com or @live.com)
• Enter your password, correctly this time.

That’s it! You will now be getting all your Hotmail (or live.com mail) pushed out to you automatically and have your contacts and calendar sync’d up via Exchange.

More information from Microsoft here. Thanks to Joe for the tip!

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Multitasking. Unified email inboxes. Multiple Exchange accounts. Welcome to the future, our iPhone-toting friends. Well, eventually you’ll get there. Apple last week provided a preview of iPhone OS 4.0, and it looked vaguely familiar to those of us that have been using webOS. There are two truly big features that will be part of iPhone OS 4.0, with multitasking being the one that most users will care about. The implementation, however, is less than impressive.

Here’s the thing, as Rene Ritchie over at TiPb has pointed out before, webOS’ cards metaphor for multitasking seems to be an extension of what Apple did for managing multiple open pages in mobile Safari, with a dash of gestures thrown in for good measure. If you were to ask me, I’d say that’s more than likely what Steve Jobs and Co. would have preferred to do (and probably were preparing to do) for multitasking on the iPhone. But as important as multitasking is for the future of the iPhone platform, their perception as a leading innovator is also important, so just copying what Palm has done would be a PR disaster.

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Unless you’re already running an Exchange account of some variety, all of your tasks are syncing exclusively to your Palm Profile. While Palm Profile failures aren’t a common event (though they are still worrisome), we still worry about data integrity. More importantly, we want a way to manage our data off of the device as well, to truly leverage the whole “cloud” thing. The folks at NuevaSync have a solution, and that solution is to apply Exchange to the problem.

NuevaSync isn’t just Exchange tasks. It’s also calendar and contact sync, and push email if you opt for the $25/year premium package. You might be thinking that what you want is not just another account to keep track of. Lucky you, NuevaSync doesn’t work that way. It’s more of a conduit that wraps Exchange goodness around your Google, Yahoo, AOL, Toodledo, or just plain IMAP account. The good folks at NuevaSync have even put together a quick how-to on adding a NuevaSync Exchange account to your webOS device.

Thanks to Dan for the tip!

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More and more patches arrive every week on WebOS Internals, and with each patch comes plenty of new and useful functionality. A new patch aims to alleviate a painful problem that has afflicted some Palm owners: getting your contacts out of the Palm Profile. As we’ve reported before, some users have run into an issue where a glitch between the Palm servers and your phone results in the Palm Profile’s personal data getting wiped.

The “Send All Contacts via Email” patch by bsiegel provides a way to get your contacts out of the Palm Profile and into whatever you want. The patch adds the menu option to export your contacts into a standard vCard file (which can take a while if you have a lot) and then attaches that file to an email for you to send to wherever you desire. We’ll use Google as an example here: once exported you can save the vCard file to your computer, and then upload all the contacts to Google by opening Contacts and clicking on Import.

Apart from transferring your contacts from the Palm Profile to Google, you can also use the patch to perform backups of your contacts data, as the patch does not discriminate between sources like Google, Palm, and Exchange.

Thanks to Matt for the tip!

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Fire up your updaters (after you uninstall patches and themes, natch), for Palm has pushed out webOS 1.3.5.1 the Pre and Pixi on Sprint. The update is for one purpose and one purpose only, if the release notes are to be believed: fixing that nasty Exchange 2010 bug we’ve been telling you about and that Palm acknowledged earlier.

This release fixes an issue in which the Calendar app displayed no events for any account after a user synchronized Calendar with an Exchange account. With this update, Calendar events now appear correctly after an Exchange sync.

Good on you, Palm, for the quick turnaround on a critical bug. Next time, though, let’s leave the "bug / quick-turn-around" step out, mmkay? This  wasn’t the first time we saw Exchange busted (or the second, even), let’s make sure it was the last.

Thanks to everybody who sent this in!

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Palm has updated its support Web site with a confirmation of the Exchange/webOS calendar error and workaround previously discussed here:

Palm has discovered that the turn of the year 2010 has surfaced an issue that affects customers who use Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) to synchronize their calendars. Data remains intact on the device; however, this issue prevents the data from being displayed correctly in the Calendar application. It impacts all versions of webOS.

Customers synchronizing calendars using EAS are not able to see events from any calendar source on their webOS phone until they perform a manual workaround to correct the issue (see below for instructions). After performing the workaround, Calendar events from each source should display correctly.

This manual workaround may need to be performed again if the issue resurfaces. Palm is actively working on a software update and will provide a new version for download over the air as soon as possible.

The support article goes on to describe the year-shift workaround that others have found temporarily solves the problem.

We’re glad to see that Palm plans an OTA update to address this issue, and will let you know as soon as it becomes available.

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Thanks to Jim for the heads up!

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Do you want Microsoft Exchange for all that magical calendar, email, and contacts syncing and pushing onto your webOS phone, but don’t feel like paying for a server all your own? Mail2Web may be the solution you’ve been looking for. The service hooks into your current email accounts, including Gmail and Hotmail, as well as your ISP or business mails, pushes it through their Exchange servers, and down to your phone.

Mail2Web also provides you with something that your Palm Profile doesn’t give: online web browser access through a standard Outlook Web Access client. Mail2Web costs $4.95/month, though a 60-day free trial is currently available. For more information, check out Mail2Web’s website.

Of course, there are plenty of other hosted-exchange services out there like 4smartphone and 1and1 – which is your favorite?

Thanks to not-yet-pre for the tip!

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