It’s the curse of the modern smartphone: a zillion chips and sensors and a bright powerful screen and umpteen radios all sucking power from battery tech that hasn’t seen drastic improvement in the last decade. And it’s also one of the biggest Achilles’ heels of the Palm Pre and Pre Plus. It’s been a while since we last visited this area, with the Pre and Pixi having now launched onto several new networks across the world, it’s high time we revisit the land of electricity. After the break, we break it down…

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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 app?” or something a bit more complicated, like “what was Palm’s biggest mistake in getting here today?” Or maybe we’ll just end up chatting about our favorite recipe for pumpkin pie, you never know.

Today, however, we’re taking a critical look at our devices and webOS and asking, “If there was one thing you could improve about webOS, what would it be, and why?”

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CrackBerry Kevin takes out some aggression…

UPDATE: Google has issued a statement about this, and it turns out that it was kind of true.

“We share revenue on search, not on mobile applications. The same is true for non-Android devices that use Google as the default search engine.”

There you have it. Nothing to see here. Move along.

***

While we won’t fault anybody for choosing an Android phone over the other offerings (though with webOS soon on America’s three largest networks, you need not feel forced into it), we do wish there were a level playing field on the corporate side of things. We’ve seen revenue sharing from the carrier to the phone maker (hello, original iPhone), but it’s not often we see it in the opposite direction. But that’s what we’re seeing from Google, at least that’s what MocoNews is reporting.

According to their anonymous sources at two different carriers, Google has an agreement with those carriers and the device manufacturers that if they support certain Google functions (e.g. Gmail, maps, etc) with built-in advertising, Google will share those revenues with the carriers and manufacturers.

Obviously, nobody’s going to issue a comment in the affirmative of this, they rightfully refuse to discuss confidential agreements. It’s also no secret that we’re generally fans of Google’s services, but their implementation on webOS sometimes leaves something to be desired.

So here’s the question: is Google playing fair? We have no idea how much Google is paying to companies for their cooperation, nor how much those payments have influenced carrier or manufacturer decisions to support Android. What we do know is that Palm can’t be happy competing with somebody that is actively paying carriers and manufacturers to support their products and services. Or maybe that’s just one of the benefits of having pockets so deep they might as well be bottomless.

[via: Android Central, Phone Scoop]

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Many of us think sometimes that Google is not so kin on webOS devices as they are with other platforms, especially Android. But the search giant has a redesigned webOS-friendly interface to show that they have not forgotten about us as you can see on the image below.

The redesigned tab bar features more [...]

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Even in these days of instant communications through text messages, instant messaging, and Twitter, there’s something to be said for the robustness (and openness) of email. Thus, when email goes wonky you can be assured that there will be noise made of it. While this blogger’s Gmail-not-pushing issue managed to magically resolve itself, other users have noticed a different problem with their email: push simply doesn’t work over WiFi, and for some in that group their email pushes very late (10-15 minutes) over EVDO. And of course, there are those who simply can’t get push email to work at all.

We feel your pain, and even though signs point to the issue not being a widespread one, we would be remiss if we didn’t ask around. So here we are, asking, with the preferred mass data gathering method of politicians and the media alike: the poll. And as an added bonus, you can also comment on this article (like any other). In particular, if you’ve had this sort of issue and figured out how to resolve it, we’re all ears.

Are you having troubles with email?(polls)

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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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As we know that some of you have noticed, webOS 1.3.1 changed the way that email is handled with respect to POP access. If you’re not familiar with POP (Post Office Protocol) email, essentially the way the service is ‘supposed’ to work is that computers download the email from the server but do not communicate their status back to the server (e.g. the server will not know if you’ve read the email). This stands in contrast to IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol), in which read, flagged, and deleted statuses are synced back to the server and other clients accessing the same account. To deal with the amount of email that can amass on a server, many POP users choose to have the server delete messages after they’re downloaded by the computer.

Prior to the most recent webOS update, POP email status didn’t work quite the way it was ‘supposed’ to work. Email used to actually be checked back against the server, and if the email had been deleted there it was then deleted on the phone, even if you hadn’t read it on phone. From a design standpoint, that’s not ideal POP behavior, as POP is supposed to download messages and ignore what happens on the server after that. In essence, POP on webOS used to work sort of like IMAP ‘lite’ email. This worked well for users that relied on POP for their email access (many ISPs only offer POP), as handling emails in bulk on their computer subsequently handled them in bulk on their webOS phones.

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Google’s just-announced Android GPS navigation app is more than just impressive – it’s actually quite awesome. But right now, it’s just for Android (and only on Android 2.0), but it’s still awesome. The Google Maps-integrated satellite navigation app brings Google Maps’ satellite view to navigation, as well as Street View for snapshots of interchanges, intersections, and your destination. It also leverages Google Search with intelligent voice recognition to find your destination, even if you don’t even know where it is. Oh, and did we mention that it’s free?

So, how about other platforms, Google? We obviously would love to see this awesomeness make its way to webOS, but we all know that there’ll need to be more webOS users to justify the programming investment. But what about that other big advanced smartphone platform? Yeah, Apple iPhone. Google says it could happen, so long as Apple is willing to let it into the App Store. You know, like they did with Google Latitude and Google Voice. Oh… wait. Nevermind.

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Since webOS 1.2 landed, those of use that depend on our phones to run our lives have encountered a new oddity: we now get calendar reminders via email along with on our devices. While this confused me at first, I quickly realized what the culprit was: Synergy now syncs alarms with Google Calendar. Prior to webOS 1.2, alarms did not sync between Google Calendar and webOS Calendar, which most people didn’t notice, as we tend to manage our calendars from the phone. With 1.2, calendar alarms are now synced, but they push to Google Calendar as both a pop-up alert (in browser and on the phone) and an email alert from Google. Syncing our calendar alarms is a good thing, as the last time I had to get my Pre replaced (prior to 1.2) I nearly missed my next appointment because the phone didn’t alert me.

Right now there doesn’t seem to be any way to disable the email alerts without going to each alarmed calendar entry in Google Calendar and manually switching it off. Since I am dependent on the phone’s alerts to get me moving to where I need to go, I can’t simply go without the alarms. So I adapted and set up a filter in Gmail to automatically mark as read and delete all emails from calendar-notification@google.com. Once implemented it works seamlessly, though hopefully Palm will address this oversight in a future webOS update.

Edit: For clarification, my default reminder setting in Google Calendar is set to none, as it is on my phone. I set alarms for things that require timed action, so not everything in my calendar needs an alert. Prior to webOS 1.2 alarms created on the phone were not sent to Google Calendar.

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In all the years I’ve been watching technology, I have never seen a system update go off without a single hitch. There’s always something that goes wrong, and yesterday’s webOS update to 1.2.0 was no exception.

The majority of users have updated to 1.2.0 with nary a hitch to be found. But in the interests of full disclosure (and commiseration with your pain), here are some of the issues our members are facimg:

In the category of “things that don’t work the way they were supposed to work,” some 1.2 users have noted that when they receive a new IM/SMS message notification, only the message icon and the user’s picture are displayed – no text along with the notification. The launcher, which could previously be opened by swiping up in card view and closed by swiping down, now only responds to up swipes (open and close). The main reason for this is that a quick down-swipe on the top of the screen now will bring you either of the top menus. Similarly notifications cannot be minimized with a swipe down – you must either dismiss the notification or tap in the open app and hope you don’t touch an on-screen button.

And that’s not all, users have reported Google services location pinpointing their location up to ten miles off target (GPS works correctly), that IMAP Idle is not working, that email error messages keep repeating, and that Classic WiFi HotSync does not yet work (likely an update to Classic is also needed). There are several other issues that have affected a handful of users, ranging from issues with gDial to frozen web browsing to USB charging suddenly not working.

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