If you wondered where did the promised dual-core Snapdragon chipsets go this year, we actually found one right here at the MWC Expo, in the new HP TouchPad – the first tablet released with HP webOS 3.0.
Powered by a dual-core 1.2GHz Snapdragon CPU, the TouchPad is a fresh take on the tablet paradigm, [...]

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One of the tiniest smartphones in recent history has made an appearance here at MWC – we’re of course talking about the HP Veer, the upcoming webOS-powered smartphone introduced hand-in-hand with the HP Pre 3 and HP TouchPad a couple weeks ago.
Honestly, the Veer is one of the smallest handsets you’ll be able to [...]

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Back in the day, the original Palm Pre was an iconic device despite its delayed launch and Palm’s funding problems. WebOS undeniably has one of the most original concepts for a platform with the card-based webOS, but the Pre seemed to be always plagued with problems and the most important one of them is the [...]

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HP’s developers presentation didn’t bring any new mobile products after the announcement of the HP Veer, HP Pre 3 and the HP TouchPad recently, but it did show a preview of the updated App Catalog with a heap of new features for tablet use.
The most notable one seems to be the newly introduced “Browser” mode [...]

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Announced at MWC was yet another partnership between the world’s cellular carriers that will end up resulting in, well, very little. Networks around the world have banded together to create the Wholesale Applications Community, which in essence will be a global cross-platform app effort. And here’s why it’s going to fail: manufacturers, particularly the ones that are invested in an operating system (such as Apple, Palm, and Nokia), will have no interest in participating. Especially those that have created an app store, Apple in particular.

The Wholesale Applications Community (WAC) will end as a failure, at best withering away as a token gesture to interoperability. There are a million political reasons why it won’t work, but the biggest hurdles to overcome are the technical ones: programming languages and APIs. While we can see feature phone manufacturers rallying around the WAC, nobody buys a T9 flip phone to run apps. They lack the hardware to properly execute – that’s why they’re feature phones.

App developers too aren’t interested in feature phones, because the meager hardware will limit what they can do. Not to mention the varying screen sizes, processors, radios, keypads, and everything else. App developers are interested in smartphones, and that’s where the WAC starts to fall apart.

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There’s been precious little webOS news here at Mobile World Congress, while Android Central, CrackBerry.com, Nokia Experts, and WMExperts have been on fire – even TiPb will have some news in just a bit. But Akitayo reminded us that Adobe was here and likely showing off Flash – so we headed on over.

As you can see from the video above – it’s working but perhaps isn’t quite ready for prime time yet. Unfortunately, Flash is definitely not confirmed for February (looks like it was a miscommunication at Palm’s SFR launch). All Adobe is saying is ‘First Half of 2010,’ so it’s unclear what’ll happen there. We found that Flash on the Pre seemed to move just a bit quicker than Flash on a Droid – but the Nexus One beat them both.

Yes, that’s webOS 1.4 there on a GSM Palm Pre, near as we can tell. We didn’t spend a ton of time with the device, but a quick glance showed the video recording there, speed not significantly faster than what current webOS devices run at, and the new way of loading cards you can see in the video above.

Adobe is also showing off Air apps, but unfortunately they didn’t have them ready for the Pre yet.

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There was quite a bit of chatter this week covering reviews of the Pre Plus, reaction to the Verizon Pre Plus "Mom" ads, run-up to what may come at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and some PALM analyst movements. So let’s talk Palm!

Palm’s stock closed out the week at $9.99. There was a bit of uplifting news starting with Citi raising its rating to Hold from Sell. Another firm, Wedbush Morgan Securities initiated coverage of the shares with a Neutral rating and price target of $10.50.

The last bit of uplifting news was talk about the Pre possibly arriving at AT&T in May. Citibank’s analyst believes that more insight into carrier interest for Palm’s webOS devices may come out during the Mobile World Congress (Our own Dieter Bohn is attending and will be providing reports and insights).

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We already knew that Flash is coming to webOS, but today, during an Adobe conference at Moble World Congress, it was announced that Adobe is bring their Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) to smartphones, including webOS.

Adobe’s AIR lets developers create applications based on web programming languages like HTML and javascript, and naturally with support for Adobe Flash and Adobe Flex.

This move by Adobe is part of their efforts to entice developers over, and really it’s quite smart. Developers will only need to make a single AIR application and that will be deployable on all major smartphone platforms.

Keen readers might remember how back in September we reported on how Flash 10.1 would include support multi-touch and accelerometers. Well, evidently Adobe’s continuing down that route and Gizmodo is reporting multi-touch support is present in the Android port at the very least.

From the sounds of it, AIR will be debuting on the Android and will launch on other platforms, including webOS thereafter.  This is an interesting announcement to say the least. It’ll definitely be fascinating to see how events unravel from here.

[via: Gizmodo]

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Mobile World Congress will be getting underway tomorrow in Barcelona and Adobe’s going to be on hand to show off the latest version of Flash 10.1. Not only will the new Flash be shown running on Android and webOS devices, but if we’re reading Adobe’s words correctly, attendees to MWC will actually be able to try it out for themselves. Our own Dieter Bohn is headed to Barcelona to partake in the craziness that is the Mobile World Congress, hopefully he’ll be able to get a hands-on with this newness. If not, we’ll should be able to all get our hands on webOS Flash soon enough anyway.

Thanks to akitayo in our forums for the tip!

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