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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It looks like Google will continue its long history of "forgetting" about the existence of webOS by enabling Google Instant on Android and iOS 4 devices (only in Safari) but not webOS. The new feature can be turned on with a link on those devices… a link that is nowhere to be found anywhere on the Google page or in the settings page when you open it on your webOS device.

For those of you not familiar with Google Instant, Google display results for you as you are typing. As if scouring the web with the press of the enter key was not fast enough, now you do not even have to type your whole search query before seeing results.

On the bright side, we suppose, Google Instant is practically useless on an iOS device, because as you can see in the image above, you cannot see any of the instant results until you get rid of the keyboard. Therefore you end up with the same number of clicks you had before. I suspect the result would be the same on any device with an on screen keyboard, although it does look pretty slick in Google’s demo, which you can watch after the break.

Google Suggest does work on webOS devices and has for several months now. When I tested Google on my Pre, it remembered my search history from my computer. It had search queries in the list that I had just searched on my computer only a couple minutes before.

Because we have Universal Search, and Google Suggest works so well on webOS (and it’s integrated into Just Type in webOS 2.0), it seems the webOS community is not missing much. Still, let us hope that at some point in the future, Google will stop snubbing its customers who use devices that Google deems unworthy.

Source: Google; Via: Engadget

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If the question “What platform do you see yourself developing for in 12 months?” had been posed a few months ago, the responses for webOS would have plummeted through the floor. But with the power, scale, and enormous bags of cash of HP at Palm’s back, it turns out that developer interest has turned around. In fact, it’s a doubling of interest, though that’s not saying a lot when you were standing at 3% current interest (dead last).

The doubling to 6% ties webOS with Symbian for one-year-out developer intent, but it pales in comparison to Android (up 56% to 61-out-of-100) and of course iOS (still leading with a resounding 82%. Interestingly, it appears that developers are looking to expand their reach across multiple platforms, with interest in HTML5, Windows Phone, BlackBerry OS, and even Symbian up. The only platforms that are staring down the tunnel of declining developer intent are Java and Flash, which comes as little surprise to us. Now all we need is some kick-ass hardware from Palm and some gangbusters sales to get devices in hands and developer interest up.

Source: GigaOM; Thanks to Jimmy for the tip!

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Finally, Palm and webOS gets a nice #2 ranking among smartphone platforms for anything. When you start talking about the likes of 3D mobile gaming, it’s obvious who number one is: Apple and iOS. What is unclear is who follows, and it depends on which group exactly we’re talking about.

If you’re talking all mobile devices, it’s murky whether Nintendo or Sony follow, or is there another smartphone contender they have to deal with. “Android?” you might postulate. HP senior exec and former PalmOne CEO Todd Bradley would disagree, he’ll tell you that webOS is the number two 3D gaming platform. In fact, he did just that during a TechCrunch Disrupt interview:

“We’re the second largest 3D gaming platform in the world today.”

Of course, the question then becomes, what metric is Bradley using? Is he talking about available titles, device unit sales, or some combination of the two? It’s hard to pin down exactly how many 3D apps are available for iOS, webOS, or Android (nobody’s got the patience to sort through thousands of apps like that), but we’ll side with Bradley and say it’s safe to declare webOS #2 in that race. Of course, there are still a dozen other ways that Palm and webOS fall behind (for instance, there are some 5,000 apps available for webOS, vs. the 80,000 in the Android Market and 250,000 in the iOS App Store), but it’s nice to be able to claim number two for something.

Source: TechCrunch

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The good folks over at the universal commenting house of Disqus today announced that they’re bringing their excellent tools to webOS. This isn’t news for commenters, so much as it is for the bloggers that use Disqus’ comments system on their site (Engadget, for example). Disqus’ soon-to-be-launched webOS app (Android has already launched, iOS is in review) will enable blog administrators to manage comments and commenters on the go. And we would be remiss to not mention how awesome it is that webOS is being included in a significant cross-platform launch like this. We’re fans of cross-platform launches, even more so when they include our favorite OS.

Included in the app will be tools to approve comments, mark spam (for use across all Disqus comments), delete content, filter by status, search, view context, and post replies on your blog posts. Oh, and it’ll be complete with background notifications too, presumably so you can be notified if somebody’s actually thinking enough of what you post to leave a comment. Or spam, you never know these days.

Source: Disqus; Via: Lisa Brewster on Twitter

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That screen you see above, that’s what shows up when you point a webOS phone to get.adobe.com/flashplayer. We’ve gone through many iterations of this screen, with the text prior to this one promising that Palm and Adobe were working to get Flash Player 10.1 onto webOS “as quickly as possible.” That came in July, and before that it was the second half of 2010, or the first half of 2010, or February, or by the end of 2009.

Obviously, not a single one of those has panned out (excepting the "second half of 2010"), despite the fact that we’ve been seeing Flash running on webOS devices since October of last year. And Adobe announced in June (of this year) that the finished version of Flash 10.1 had been released to their mobile platform partners, Palm included. It’s been three months since Palm supposedly received Flash, and in the meantime we’ve seen Adobe tinkering with download redirects. But now the message presented to webOS users is nearly as depressing as that given to iPhone users. It now reads:

Sorry Adobe® Flash® Player is not available from Adobe.com for your device’s operating system or browser.

Sad, eh? Having received this message ourselves and a number of tips from users like yourself, we decided to investigate, only to be met with nothingness. Our contacts at Palm had nothing to report, which is better than what we got from Adobe. Despite repeated requests for comment, we were met with stony silence from the folks at Adobe.

So the question remains, do we even care anymore? Sure, Android has Flash Player 10.1, so long as you’re running the right version of the OS on the right device. Even then, with the massively superior hardware that we’re seeing crammed into more and more Android devices, the Flash experience is still less than ideal. It’s slow, it’s cranky, it’s resource hogging. It’s, well, it’s Flash.

Android devices may be selling like gangbusters, but there’s still a large and influential player in the smartphone market that wants nothing to do with Flash: Apple. We’re not the biggest cheerleaders of the bitten fruit brand and their iOS operating system (though will continue to laud them for outstanding advertising), but at this point we’re understanding their position on Flash. In fact, we’re moving from understanding to agreeing.

Do we want a slow and painful experience on our mobile devices? No. Nobody wants that. It’s not like Flash is really a great experience on our desktop computers, and they’re several times more powerful than anything you can fit in your pocket. There are still some things that modern HTML5 browsers cannot do that Flash can, but here’s the question: between increasingly capable HTML5 websites and fully capable PDK apps, is there any need for Flash?

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Market research firm IDC determined that the smartphone market this year will increase from 2009 by 55.4%. To better illustrate, that’s a shipment of 269.6 million units in 2010 versus 173.5 million in 2009. They attribute much of this forecast growth to models such as the BlackBerry Torch, the HTC EVO 4G, and the Apple [...]

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The latest version of webOS, that was released by Sprint for its Palm phones, seems to have unlocked some gaming capabilities on the Palm Pixi munchkin. Since webOS 1.4.5 brings OpenGL support to the handset, it is now able to run 3D games for mobile. Need for Speed: Undercover was installed on it to test [...]

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A&E’s freshman crime drama The Glades’ medical examiner Carlos Sanchez (played by Carlos Gomez) is dead, then not dead, and uses a Pre. No idea what carrier or whether it’s a Pre Plus, but that shiny mirrored slider is unmistakably Pre. And he looks up info with the typical fast-paced speed of a crime drama, but unlike finding something with an Android or iOS device, we know that webOS’s Universal Search really does work that fast.

Have you spotted the Pre, Pixi, or other Palm device on your favorite show? Drop us a note at pretips@precentral.net with the show and a few relevant details like air date, time in the episode, and an online video link if you’ve got one!

Source: The Glades on A&E; Thanks to Stephen for the tip!

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In June we first brought to you news that Astraware was beginning work to bring some of their titles over to webOS via the magic of the PDK. We haven’t heard a whole lot in the intervening weeks, but it looks like things are starting to heat up. Astraware’s website now shows the popular games OddBlob, Astraware Casino, and Astraware Sudoku as “coming soon for Palm webOS.”

To add the fuel of encouragement to our fire of desire, Astraware admitted on Twitter that they’re working with Palm on a press announcement about games they’ve submitted for inclusion in the App Catalog. Additionally, mobile apps blog MobiObie was able to squeeze a bit more info out of Astraware: they’re also planning on bringing Police Range, Astraware Solitaire, and Astraware Boardgames to the webOS party.

There’s one thing to note, and it’ll likely disappoint those of you toting Palm Pixi phones: the Sudoku page indicates that the supported display resolution will be 320×480 pixels, otherwise known as the size of the Pre screens (the Pixi has a 320×400 screen). While none of the other games have stated system requirements (webOS 1.4.5 is a given at this point), we expect given Astraware’s heavy investment in iOS development that 320×480 will be the only webOS resolution supported for some time after launch.

Source: Astraware, Astraware on Twitter, MobiObie; Thanks to John for the tips!

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