Sprint users, say goodbye to the NFL app: Sprint has lost their contract with the National Football League. The Wall Street Journal notes that Verizon users have reason to celebrate (if you are into such things), as Big Red has signed a new four-year contract with the NFL to bring all the coverage and the popular RedZone Channel to Verizon phones. The new deal is valued at $720 million, a 50% premium over what Sprint was paying the NFL. And that’s not all: Verizon users are getting more from the NFL than Sprint did: they’ll have access to live footage of every NFL game and plenty of additional content.

Football fans on Sprint need not fret, though you may find yourself disappointed. With the NFL contract gone, Sprint’s football app will cease functioning at the end of March, as was posted on SprintUsers.com. A new Sprint Football Live app will replace the NFL app, but all that exclusive video won’t be coming along with it. Apparently Sprint Football Live will provide all sorts of live coverage of the NFL draft, games, and more, but in the form of raw data, news, and commentary – not the official stuff with live audio and video that Sprint users have gotten used to.

Sprint Football Live is expected to be available before the end of the month, and we wouldn’t be surprised to see it mixed in with the next webOS update for Sprint devices. Verizon webOS users may be disappointed for a while, though, as Verizon marketing chief John Stratton noted to the Wall Street Journal that their new NFL service will be available for Android and BlackBerry devices. The equally capable webOS devices like the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus? Not mentioned.

Thanks to mu7efcer for the tip!

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Scenario. You’re gearing up to take a quick 20 minute nap.  You lay down, and just as you’re about to fall asleep, the inevitable happens: the phone rings, an important email hits, or some other distraction pops up to rob you of your well deserved rest.  Blast!  Now you’ve got to open the clock app, and reset the alarm for another 20 minutes away using the sometimes cumbersome number pickers.

Rinse, repeat, and soon enough you’ll just give up on napping and move on with the rest your day.  One solution to this rather inconvenient cycle comes in the form of PowerNap ($0.99 in the App Catalog), an application that allows you to quickly set the desired duration of your nap using a cleverly implemented dashboard control.  Tapping the plus or the minus instantly adds or subtracts 5 minutes from the duration of the alarm.  You can also select the duration of your nap by using a slider as opposed to the drop down pickers you’ll find in the clock app, making the  process of getting back to sleep even faster.  Custom alerts can of course be selected, and the program even randomizes the vibration pattern so you don’t confuse your nap alarm with other vibration alerts if you run with your phone on silent.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m feeling a little sleepy…

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Palm had a busy week with webOS v1.4 being rolled out to all carriers. That spawned a bunch of user created videos (one of the cool features of this new version).  There was also some air of excitement around games/apps. Sure, the financial picture was less than rosy. But the attitude now seems to be, "What? Me worry?"

So here’s a rundown of what went on this week in the world of Palm. Big thanks to Mike of balloongeek.com for the Pre image above!

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You got most of the deets yesterday on the news on Palm’s Plug-in Development Kit: it’s coming to the Pixi, regular developers will have to wait for a couple of months before they’re able to distribute PDK apps, and you’ll be able to mix and match the PDK with the regular SDK.

Rene from TiPb spoke with Joe Hayashi from Palm yesterday, detailing the PDK in broad strokes in a way that the rest of us non-developers can make sense of. Palm’s main message is a subtle dig on Android and iPhone: if you’re on Sprint or Verizon and want cool 3D games right now, your best bet is the Palm Pre.

What interests us the most is how much thought Palm is putting into integrating ‘native’ PDK stuff with the standard webOS web-app architecture. It will be pretty cool to see apps that utilize a combination of quick-to-code standard elements with the fancier and shinier PDK elements. Right now PDK apps are just games – but we’re excited to see utility and productivity apps.

We’d say we’re pretty bummed that developers won’t be able to release their PDK apps right away, but from how we understand how the PDK works right now, basically it looks like PDK apps completely un-sandboxed and able to do whatever they’d like to webOS’ linux underpinnings – potentially very bad. So a future update to webOS will definitely be necessary (and welcome, as it always is) to get a wider distribution for PDK apps.

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Engadget visited with Palm today at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco and were able to gather some rather interesting information regarding the PDK (Plug-in Development Kit) and Flash. First, that applications utilizing the PDK won’t be limited to the Pre and Pre Plus as previously thought, allowing developers to bring 3D games and applications that are built with a combination of the PDK and SDK to the Pixi with a performance difference similar to that of what you would  "see between the iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS."

We already know that the ability to release PDK based apps into the Catalog will come around the "second half of the year" with a webOS update, and we’re also familiar with some of  the finer technical details regarding SDL and that developers will be able to mix and match components of the PDK with the SDK.

Palm also told Engadget that Flash will only work in the Browser  and can’t be embedded into regular Mojo apps as components from the PDK can be, a revelation that’s surely to come as a dissapointment to developers that were looking forward to utilizing that functionality in their applications.  If Palm is planning on implementing deeper access is anyone’s guess, but Flash in the browser is better than no Flash at all, right?

Back to the PDK and the Pixi – we’re still confirming some details and should have video evidence of PDK based applications running on the Pixi up by tomorrow.  

We’ll have more details from our own meeting with Palm tomorrow, stay tuned!

Thanks to mrloserpunk for the tip!

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If there was any doubt that Verizon is looking to turn things around after sluggish initial sales of the Palm Pre Plus and Palm Pixi Plus, it’s time to put those to rest. After dropping the mail-in rebates in their own stores, it looks like The Network is making it easier for 3rd parties to sell the Pre Plus at lower prices. Our own Wirefly affiliate has the Palm Pre Plus for $39.99 for new Verizon customers after instant rebate and still has the Palm Pixi Plus for the low low price of free (yes, those are ’support PreCentral’ links). Amazon is also selling the Pre Plus for the $39.99 and the Pixi Plus for one cent.

The best part about the above options is that, unlike what seems to be happening at most Verizon retail locations, when you use them you won’t have a Verizon employee trying to convince you that you should get a Droid instead.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in!

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Palm has released their Plug-in Development Kit Beta for developers to allow them to create rich, 3D games and other native linux apps for webOS. The PDK is available now at the Developer Center.

Palm looks to be making a pretty big push with this – they’ve released at the Game Developer’s Conference and are pushing that they are offering great gaming experiences on multiple carriers:

"Palm webOS is the go-to platform for great games on two of the three leading carrier networks," said Katie Mitic, senior vice president, Product Marketing, Palm, Inc. "We have both the developer tools and the hardware necessary for a world-class gaming experience, and an impressive portfolio of webOS game titles from top-notch developers to show for it."

Full press release after the break. So, developers: how’s it look? Legend79 emailed us to note that Palm has chosen to use Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) for hardware access – which to us looks like yet another way to enable easy porting.

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Qt (pronounced ‘cute’) is Nokia’s attempt at creating a ‘write once, run anywhere’ programming platform – learn more here. It’s a big deal for them as they deal with supporting S60 and their new Meego linux platform (which Maemo will be merged into). The idea is that developers will be able to create their app in Qt and have it run on both S60 and Meego – and darn near everything else they can get it running on.

Add one more platform to that list – webOS. Darron Black successfully ported Qt to webOS in time for a demo at Mobile World Congress. Nokia was naturally thrilled and blogged it up themselves (twice).

We don’t know whether Qt is going to be a viable programming platform for Nokia – ‘write once, run anywhere’ has been a cruel, unreachable pipe dream to many would-be mobile moguls in the past - but now that it’s up and running on webOS, count us as behind it. We’ll take Qt apps, we’ll take iPhone ports, we’ll take it all. As Black noted in his post, webOS is ‘OPEN’ (but not, technically, open source). Add in that it’s arguably more accessible to more programmers than Android and we’re feeling pretty darn good about the platform’s potential.

We’ll have Matthew Miller of Nokia Experts and ZDNet on PalmCast Live tomorrow – you can bet that in addition to talking about his new Palm Pre Plus happiness, we’ll be talking Qt.

Thanks to muchtall for the tip!

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Palm loyalists out there will undoubtedly remember the name MetaView. Back in the days of PalmOS, he rose to fame with apps like PalmPDF (now named PDFmob), 2PlayMe, and notably Duke3D, a PalmOS Duke Nukem 3D port that won the Zodiac France Contest 2006.

MetaView has been developing for webOS for a while now, with releases like Match This!, MapTool, and ÜberRadio. Now, he’s returning to an old favourite and is bringing Duke3D to webOS.

Posted on his blog, Henk "MetaView" Jonas shares the above video of Duke3D working smoothly on his Pre. According to his post, the controls can be used all in the keyboard or alternatively use the screen as a virtual d-pad and have the rest of the controls in the keyboard (similar to Quake).

Interestingly, MetaView has told PreCentral that:

"The porting was really easy. Just some small source and makefile adjustments and both jfbuild and jfduke did compile and link. Not at all comparable with the old Palm OS where I needed several days just to get it compiled and another couple of days to have it running without crashes."

Seems the boasts of quick app porting to the webOS holds some weight. That certainly raises my spirits for the webOS platform as a whole.

Duke3D is now available for the Palm Pre and Pre Plus in the WebOS-Internals testing feed for those brave enough to try it while it’s still in-testing.

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Last week a story made its way around the blogosphere that Steve Jobs answered an email. Our pals at TiPb covered the iPad tethering question, originally from 9to5Mac:

First, the question from Jezper Söderlund:

Will the wifi-only version [of the iPad] somehow support tethering thru my iPhone?

And the answer?

No.

Sent from my iPhone

We thought it might be appropriate to send another email:

Dear Steve:

Will the wifi-only version [of the iPad] somehow support tethering through Mobile Hotspot on the Palm Pre Plus? Wait, don’t answer that, we already know that it will.

Love, PreCentral

…of course, we’ll be paying $40 per month for the privilege, but hey, it’s there. While we’re on the subject, we’ll note that webOS 1.4 seems to have busted up the hack to get the Verizon-only Mobile Hotspot app working on Sprint – the hackery required now is epic, to say the least. Win some, lose some – but for Verizon Palm Pre Plus owners thinking about the iPad, we’ll chalk it up as a win.

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