March 5th 2010 | Posted by
Derek Kessler
Have a Palm Pre or Pixi on Sprint and wishing that you’d signed up for the $7 a month Total Equipment Protection plan during the first 30 days of your contract when you still had a chance? Sprint’s giving you a second chance: for the entire month of March Sprint has opened up TEP to all subscribers. If you’re not feeling like pushing your luck any further, you can sign up until the end of the month. For those unfamiliar, TEP has two components: hardware failures are completely covered and accidental damage or loss replacement comes with just a $100 deductible. Having replaced his own Pre three times – taking advantage of TEP each time – this blogger knows all too well how useful of a tool TEP is.
[via: Palm News Daily]
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March 3rd 2010 | Posted by
Juventino Quinones
As you all know by now the webOS update to version 1.4 has finally arrived to Sprint Pre owners after many GSM Pre owners reported they received the update a day in advance. And it brings one of the most important features a mobile handset could ever have, video recording capabilities.
Another very important arrival [...]
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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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March 2nd 2010 | Posted by
Derek Kessler
“This is cool, is it new?” No, oh Hannah (Kristin Kreuk), that is not new. It’s the Palm Pre (with some fancy skinning). You call yourself a Nerd Herder? Okay, so maybe this season’s episodes of Chuck were filmed several months ago (they were) when the Pre was still new, but that’s no excuse for a hot little geekette like yourself to not recognize a hot little smartphone like the Pre on sight. Unless you were commenting on the theme job, in which case, yes, that is new. Now put down the cool assassin smartphone and move along. After the break: the fancy pants ‘I’m an assassin’s smartphone’ theme.
read more
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March 1st 2010 | Posted by
Annie Latham
Ouch and Yea!… That’s the way the last week was for Palm. Ouch was the pummeling the PALM stock took as guidance was lowered and analysts speculated on what the true meaning was behind the numbers. Things got especially ugly when CNBC’s Jim Goldman reported that Palm management was not truthful about the reason why work was suspended at a Chinese manufacturing partner.
"Palm’s got a credibility problem, and it’s the kind of thing that seems so insidious, and so systemic, that it might pose a deep threat to the company’s ability to keep going. That’s because the number of people who believe what this company is saying seems to be dwindling."
Things are not looking good. At the end of the trading day on Friday, PALM was down to $6.09, which is perilously close to the company’s 52-week low ($5.85 on March 9, 2009). Not a pretty picture.
read more
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February 28th 2010 | Posted by
Derek Kessler
Everybody who can get their webOS 1.4.0 jollies on can now also ‘doctor’ their way back to a fresh OS install. Palm has released the webOS 1.4.0 doctors for the Palm Pre and Pixi on Sprint and O2 as well as the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus on Verizon. If you’re not familiar with what the Doctor does, here’s a quick brief: the webOS Doctor is a Java-based computer application (works on PC or Mac) that overwrites corrupted or altered OS files with a fresh install of webOS. The Doctor is essentially the last best hope to restore a bricked phone (because of this, webOS phones are near impossible to brick from a software standpoint). While the webOS Doctor will perform a clean install of the OS, newer versions no longer wipe clean any files you have stored on the Media partition, so no worries about destroying those vacation pictures you forgot to backup.
The following webOS Doctors for 1.4 are available (direct download links):
And to go along with all this doctoring fun, the folks at WebOS Internals have whipped up new versions of their Meta-Doctor tool for webOS 1.4 on Sprint and Verizon.
Thanks to Shadow 360 for the tip!
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February 26th 2010 | Posted by
Juventino Quinones
It seems like a long time since we found out about webOS 1.4 and the video capabilities coming with it for our Palm Pre handsets. And apparently the lucky owners of the GSM Pre phones are already getting the update while we still wait here in the US to get our webOS update.
On the [...]
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February 26th 2010 | Posted by
Chris Davies
Having revealed that sales of their webOS smartphones have proved disappointing in the past financial quarter, and downgrading their revenue expectations to “well below” the $1.6bn to $1.8bn initially predicted, Palm don’t look to be ready to give up the fight quite yet. An email from Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein to the company’s employees has [...]
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February 24th 2010 | Posted by
Robert Werlinger
It’s official – there are over 2000 applications (not including the multitude of patches and tweaks) available to US Pre and Pre Plus owners, and just under that number for Pixi owners. How’s that possible, you ask, when the App Catalog only reports about 1600 available apps?
Here’s how it works: Palm has a unique
application distribution program that allows developers to distribute their apps in three different ways – The on-device App Catalog, the web-only feed, and the beta feed. Combine that with the multitude of applications available from third party repositories such as the PreCentral homebrew gallery, and the options quickly balloon to over 2,000.
Sure, 2000 apps is a drop in the bucket for companies who pull 5,000 applications out of their App Store in one fell swoop based on what are
arbitrary double standards, but it represents solid momentum for Palm who has added over 600 applications in the last 2 months.
And hang in there, international webOS users. We have heard your
frustrations about not having access to everything we do here in the States, but remember: Paid apps should be available everywhere the Pre is sold sometime next month.
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February 24th 2010 | Posted by
Juventino Quinones
Since the Palm Pre Plus and Pixi Plus were launched by Big Red they had the same sticker price as their Sprint cousins. But that doesn’t mean any other vendor cannot change the price or lowered it, which is now the case with Best Buy as you can see on the image below.
We [...]
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