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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Palm's Jon Zilber got some time over at HP's official The Next Bench Blog and used the platform to talk a bit about you, the webOS community. Specifically, Zilber called out homebrew (which may not be the best term for the apps, patches, overclocking, and general white-hat-hackery it's meant to encompass, but it's the best we've got), writing:

[..] a robust community of developers and fans has evolved around homebrew apps, beta apps, and unofficial system tweaks. Palm generally can’t offer support for these apps, but we do support the community’s ability to create and use them (at their own risk).

We can't help but compare this to Apple's official stance that jailbreaking the iPhone violates their end user agreement (though it's still protected by the DMCA).

Speaking of homebrewers, there has been an annoying bug in the official App Catalog that breaks the automatic update checker for users who have non-Palm-feed apps installed (which is to say it affects developers and people who have installed homebrew apps). From what we can tell it's an innocent bug and Palm is pushing out a fix at this very moment.

So to sum up: HP / Palm: works together with the homebrew community to make sure everybody has a nice experience. Apple: files a patent for detecting and deactivating jailbroken phones. Just saying.

Source: The Next Bench; More on the App Update bug in our forums and Palm's forums.

Yesterday we celebrated hackers who have taken webOS software to new levels, so this morning it's only appropriate that we call out some incredible hardware hacking. PreCentral forum member gitit20 grabbed the radio board off a Verizon Palm Pixi Plus and transplanted it into a standard Sprint Palm Pixi. The result: A Sprint Pixi with a feature that we believe it should have had all along: WiFi.

Gitit20 reports that the two versions of the Pixi are virtually identical (excepting that WiFi chip) on the inside, all the way down to the Sprint Pixi not needing an extra GPS antenna to get its transplanted board a location fix. No serial numbers or coding  needed, apparently - just swap the boards and apply the Sprint webOS doctor. Unfortunately, Sprint Nav disappears and is replaced with Verizon Nav, which doesn't.

And we all were thinking it would be Palm that would bring new hardware to Sprint. Video after the break!

Source: PreCentral Forums, more information in this forum thread; thanks to everybody who sent this in!

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Once you get starting down the path of homebrew and patching, it can become pretty addicting to tweak the heck out of your device with your own mix of patches and apps. PreCentral forum member snowdizx put together his list of patches and tweaks that truly make his Pre a power user's dream.

After the break, find his list of patches and tweaks and settings, all done, we might add, without the need to flash a ROM, unlock a bootloader, or 'get root' on the device. Yeah, webOS is truly open even if it's not opensource.

Since today is the homebrew-aversary, we thought it would be a good time to ask our Power Users: what is the mix of patches and tweaks that make your webOS device yours?

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PreCentral user cdowers looks to have successfully booted up webOS on a Dell C600 laptop. The trick, apparently, is to take the webOS image from the emulator (which is compatible with x86 processors) and put it on an IDE hard drive (not the more modern SATA standard). Essentially what's happening here is that instead the webOS emulator running in a 'virtual' machine, it's running on the real machine.

Whether this will pan out into actual, usable builds of webOS for PC hardware remains to be seen - there are plenty of challenges to overcome, as tavik points out. Either way it's a great experiment and the webOS community is already busy planning patches to make the emulator operate at the proper resolution, get mouse input, and so on.

Thanks to Julian for the tip!

Now lets be clear, we all knew it was just a matter of time for the video recording capability to show up on the Pre. I mean, lets face it, the camera and other hardware are strong enough to support it. It was just a matter of time and upgrading the software. And we all know it took Apple about two years, new software and new hardware to get video recording capability working on the iPhone.

This of course is a hack, is not official from Palm, but lately, the WebOS-Internals wiki page on video recording has grown and video recording is looking like a more realistic possibility in the very near future. The video appears to be limited to 320×480 at 30 fps at this time, although the Pre’s hardware can reportedly handle up to 720×480 at 30fps easily. Another caveat is that the video is badly formatted, in a file that only one player seems to be able to handle, that player is SMPlayer.

[Via Precentral]

Now that our Theme Gallery is live, we thought we might show you how to install the suckers. We'll start with some disclaimers - installing themes will replace some system files (images) on your Pre, so we strongly recommend you uninstall them before an update. You're going to be going through a very similar process to the one we described when we told you How To Install Homebrew Apps on your Pre, including putting your Pre into developer mode.

If that doesn't scare you off, here's your how-to!

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So the big WebOS Quick Install v2.5 release happened today.  Aside from the theming support there were several other important and useful changes.

v2.5 - September 19, 09
- Completely redone patcher code
- Full theming support
- Added/updated many system mods
- Added "Messaging Mods" section
- Added virtual keyboard config settings

Theming is of course a very nice new addition (special thanks to madolen), but as you can see, it's not the only new feature.  The big thing of 2.5, that easily took the most time developing was the new patcher that powers the Tweaks section.  It's far more accurate, much more safe, and best of all has the ability to read standard unified format difference patches (the .patch files people also use with Qulit), though this functionality isn't exposed for custom patches yet.

What does this mean for the average person?  It means I can add new mods and update existing mods to the Tweak section very quickly.  When WebOS 1.2 hits, it'll take far less time to update and become compatible.

And of course, with a new patcher system comes more mods for the Tweaks section! Based on work done by fritos1406, there's a whole array of Messaging mods to customize it however you'd like; enabling landscape, adding an avatar, adding a character counter, and much more.

There also several updated tweaks, including clipcarl's iPhone user agent spoof.  As well, for those of you out there who use the Virtual-Keyboard, there's a section for extra configurations like adding haptic feedback and setting a click sound.

So go and try out the new v2.5 (be sure disable all Tweaks from previous versions first), it's got something for everyone.

The first video shows something that although very important to many, if not all of us, Palm for some reason did not make it available. I’m talking about LED notifications, it appears the code for this feature is commented out – similar to the add/remove pages hack – all the coding is done, it’s just disabled for some crazy reason. This of course is not acceptable to most of us Pre-owners, we really need some kind of LED notifications.

And for those who want to venture into hacking the Palm Pre to enable LED notifications, just remember to do so at your own risk. In a personal note; I love to see LED notifications not only with white light, but also blue and red for different kind of notifications, and a way for us to chose which color to use. I can only hope. The second video shows the calendar speed on webOS 1.2, which is supposed to have a faster response. There isn’t much to talk about this one, so watch the video.

[Via jhoff80's Channel]

Why would anybody want to track themselves? Well, for different reasons I reckon. It might be a great way to keep track of where your Palm Pre has been, in case it was stolen or taken with out your knowledge. According to Palm Pre Hacks, “You could probably even make a GoogleMaps using the Twitter RSS feed to show exactly where your Palm Pre has been traveling in the past.”

If you think about it, it might be helpful for parents keeping tabs on their kids. They might not like it, but is helpful regardless. Or hack your significant other’s Pre and see where he/she has been. Simply set the Twitter account to “private” and only YOU can see the updates. Anyway, like any other hack, you’ll need Linux access on your Pre. So be extra careful and do this at your own risk.

[Via Palm Pre Hacks]