UPDATE: In the end, it was no contest. The Pre Plus struck out an early lead and never let up. Even with four days of voting and more than 32,000 votes cast, the Pre held a commanding 65% to 35% lead over the Motorola Droid from the opening bell. Congrats to Palm, and big ups to the webOS community for rallying like you did. It’s over now – and the Pre Plus is the champion!

***

It’s been a grueling challenge that’s seen more than it’s share of upsets (BlackBerry Tour topping the iPhone 3GS, Palm Pre Plus trouncing the Nexus One (and BlackBerry Bold (and HTC HD2))), but now it’s all come down to one final match-up. For the championship. Of the world.

Laptop Magazine’s March Smartphone Madness has come to the finals, with the Palm Pre Plus taking on the Motorola Droid (hot off of crushing the iPhone-beating BlackBerry Tour). In many ways, it’s unsurprising to see two Verizon phones going head-to-head for the championship, but we have to admit that the groundswell of support for the Pre Plus has been overwhelming. Now it all comes down to this – after handily trumping the heavily-favored Nexus One during the first round, the Pre Plus is gunning for the next-best Android phone on the market today. It’s guaranteed to be a good fight.

For this to be a good fight, we need everybody to play clean. If it’s not a fair win, it doesn’t mean much, now does it?. Voting is open from now until 9 AM Eastern April 5th.

(And before you ask, no, we’re not going to pin this – but we’ll toss it up in the sidebar, which makes the poll appear on darn near every page on the site.)

Thanks to everybody that has sent (and will send) this in.

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In two independent tests conducted by CNET and MOTO Development Group (not to be confused with Motorola) pitted the screen of the Palm Pre against several competitors, and we ended up with a mixed bag of results for the flagship webOS handset.

We’ll start with the good, and that’s CNET’s test of color accuracy. CNET tested maximum brightness, black level, and contrast ratio electronically, displayed test pattern screens to check for errors and 24-bit compatibility, and then tooled around with games, photos, and the sun for some anecdotal evidence. The top-ranked screen came from the Motorola Droid, which had great colors, an impressive contrast ratio, and sharp text. Number two was the Palm Pre Plus (the Pre and Pre Plus have identical screens), which came in right behind the Droid. Color-wise, the Pre was spot on, with fuller tones than the iPhone 3GS, but not oversaturated like the Nexus One. While the Pre’s extra-bright backlight to produce some clouding, the Pre’s screen was hands-down the best outdoor sunlight performer.

MOTO Development Group took a different aspect of screen testing: touch accuracy. Previously, they had a tester trace a diagonal grid across a number of smartphone screens to test their tracking accuracy. The results for most, with the exception of the iPhone, were disappointing. But we like consistency, and consistency goes hand-in-hand with robots. So MOTO rigged up a robot with a false capacitive finger and went about tracing a test pattern on the same phones again, this time with uniform speed and pressure. While the Palm Pre performed quite well under medium pressure (with the exception of the bottom and bottom right corner), once the robot eased up to the “light” level (narrowing pseudo-finger), things started to fall apart. Granted, tracking was nearly as bad as the Motorola Droid or the BlackBerry Storm 2, but to call the light results good would be quite the stretch. General rule: More finger contact = better tracking accuracy.

[via: Engadget]

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UPDATE: The Palm Pre Plus has felled the Nexus One with 56% of the vote. 4317 votes were cast for the flagship webOS device vs. 3397 for the flagship Android phone. The next victim: the BlackBerry Bold 9700 on T-Mobile. Bring it!

While the Sprint Palm Pixi understandably fell to the BlackBerry Bold in the second match of the first round of Laptop Magazine’s 2010 March Madness smartphone showdown, this week is a new week (week #6, to be specific), and we’ve got another Palm webOS phone in the mix. This week, it’s the Palm Pre Plus (on Verizon, naturally) up against Google’s Nexus One, the powerhouse Android phone hailing from the T-Mobile camp.

Does the Pre Plus have what it takes to handle the Nexus One? We like to think so, but the only way to prove it (and show our frienemies at sister site Android Central who’s the boss (hint: us)) is for the voters (you) to put in a ballot in favor of the Pre Plus.

As of this writing the Pre Plus is in the lead, but just barely, with only a few hundred votes cast so far. Added bonus: if the Pre Plus wins, we get the chance to take on the Bold in the semi-semi-finals and avenge the Pixi’s defeat. And the right to gloat over trouncing the flagship Android phone in an all-important online poll (don’t judge; these days we’ll take whatever victories we can get).

Thanks to everybody that sent this in!

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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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Welcome to Round Table, which is in fact not a table at all. Round Table is a continuing series on PreCentral where we pose a question to the staff and they provide their thoughts and insights. The question could be something simple like “what’s your favorite webOS app?” or something a bit more complicated, like “where does Palm go from here?” Or maybe we’ll just end up chatting about our favorite movies, you never know. This time around we’re dispensing thoughts on something that has puzzled and eluded us for months: the Palm C40.

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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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Windows users can finally get in on the integrated Amazon MP3 that doubleTwist users on Macs have been enjoying for what seems like ages. The latest update to the media sync software brings it to version 2.6 on PC (Mac users get a feature-similar 1.0b14), and in addition to the expected bug fixes and Amazon MP3 integration also adds supports for the unannounced Google Nexus One. Seeing as it’s just an Android phone, adding support for one more Android device couldn’t have been a tall order for doubleTwist. doubleTwist added support for the Palm Pre and Palm Pixi soon after they launched.

With Amazon MP3’s music store integration doubleTwist can serve as a full-fledged iTunes sync and store replacement. Its playback controls are a bit lacking, but we have little doubt that ramping doubleTwist up to complete iTunes/Windows Media Player replacement is very much on doubleTwist’s radar.

[via: Gizmodo]

Thanks to gksspot555 for the tip!

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[Image via Engadget]

Over the weekend, numerous press reports (such as this one from sister-site Android Central) have been brewing about the "Google Phone." Whether Google intends to brand and market it to the public is still an open question, but what one thing that does appear to be settled is that the phone is meant to be a developer phone, as happened with versions of the G1 and Magic before it. All the buzz reminded us at PreCentral that we haven’t said this stridently enough yet: Palm needs to release a webOS developer phone sooner rather than later.

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