October 12th 2010 | Posted by
Derek Kessler
Palm Pre owners have been enjoying ridiculous overclocking benefits for some time now, while our Pixi-toting friends have been left to look in from the outside. Thanks to the work of WebOS Internals, that’s changing, with the possibility of the 600MHz Qualcomm MSM7627 processor hitting up to 900MHz. This is all thanks to, of all groups, the Android community’s hacking of the LG Ally, which uses the same processor. Who says we can’t all just get along?
Rod Whitby of WebOS Internals let us know that they’re still working on getting the overclocked Pixi kernel up to its full potential, but a recent teaser screenshot posted on their Twitter feed shows they’ve already broken the 800MHz barrier. Homebrew developer WartHog Kernel is taking the lead on development, which bodes well for the Pixi kernel. Further testing is in order, and for that more Pixi devices are needed.
As always, WebOS Internals provides all of their awesome kernels, services, and patches free of charge to the community, relying on your donations to stay in business. In particular, they’re looking for donations to help finance the purchase of a few Pixi devices to give the new kernel a thorough testing. So if you haven’t donated before (or are a Pixi owner with dreams of overclocking dancing through your head), head on over and give a few bucks to further the awesomeness they bring.
Thanks to Rod for the heads up!



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March 2nd 2010 | Posted by
Derek Kessler
Adobe’s been teasing us with Flash 10.1 on webOS for what seems like ages now. In fact, the first news about webOS and Flash came from Palm and Adobe more than a year ago. It’s been five months since we first saw Flash demoed on a Palm Pre and in the intervening months we’ve seen it shown off on all manner of Android devices as well. What we haven’t seen is Flash 10.1 on more lowly hardware, such as the Palm Pixi or HTC Hero. Now we might know why.
An Adobe employee, after revealing that they were not working on getting Flash 10.1 to work on Windows Mobile 6.5 (little surprise) recently declared that Adobe was only working to get Flash for Android working on ARMv7 processors. Processors that fall into that category include the Qualcomm Snapdragon powering devices like the Google Nexus One (and HTC Desire) and the TI OMAP3430 inside the Palm Pre, Pre Plus, and Motorola Droid/Milestone.
What doesn’t have an ARMv7 could be a problem for some webOS users: the Palm Pixi and Pixi Plus run off the Qualcomm MSM7627 processor, which is an ARMv6 chip. The MSM7627 is a beastly little chip, with two processing cores (600 MHz for processing, 400 MHz for the modem) and a 300 MHz graphics-core with Open GL 2.0 support – all packed into a tiny thumbnail-sized package. Has Adobe come out and said that they’re not working on Flash for the Pixi? Nope, but they haven’t said that they are. Even our man Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein, when showing off Flash 10.1 at CES 2010, was careful to say that Flash 10.1 would be coming to “all Pre phones.” Note the lack of Pixi in there.
[via: Engadget [via: Gizmodo]]
Thanks to Shadow-360 in the forums for the heads up!

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September 14th 2009 | Posted by
Derek Kessler

The Palm Pixi will be the first smartphone to ship with Qualcomm’s new MSM7627 chipset, so there are understandably a lot of questions about what the lower-cost processor will be capable of. While we’ve seen in action that the Pixi isn’t quite as snappy as the Pre, and Palm has said that it won’t support as many open cards (which would seem to be more of a RAM limitation than the processor), the MSM7627 has remained cloaked in mystery.
Over at PalmInfocenter they’ve gotten their hands on the full spec sheet for the MSM7627, which you’ll find below:
- Two ARM cores integrated into a single chip – a dedicated CPU core and a dedicated modem processor – for an unparalleled level of integration:
- 1. 600MHz applications processor with floating point unit and L2 cache
- 2. 400MHz modem processor
- Supports both CDMA2000® 1xEV-DO Rev. A and UMTS HSDPA 7.2Mbps/HSUPA 5.76Mbps, and GSM
- In addition to the two ARM cores, features 320MHz application DSP for multimedia supporting full 30 fps WVGA encode/decode, 200MHz hardware-accelerated 3D graphics core supporting OPEN GL 2.0, high-resolution camera, integrated GPS
- 12mm x 12mm footprint
- Optimized power consumption
Yup, you read that right: the modem chip will easily support both EVDO (on the currently announced Pixi) and HSDPA (for the GSM Pixi we all know has to eventually come) – so at least we can be pretty sure that when Palm slaps a GSM radio in this thing, we won’t have to guess about the chip again (Update, to clarify – the processor can play nice with both CDMA and GSM, but again, the Pixi is CDMA only). Also, the 320 MHz DSP (digital signal processor) and 200 MHz 3D graphics core should provide adequate oomph for gaming, once Palm gets around to whipping up an SDK to take advantage of the chip.

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