If you happen to own a Verizon Palm Pre Plus or Palm Pixi Plus, then you likely know the pain of Verizon’s intentional GPS crippling. The culprit, at least on the technology side of things, is that when looking for its position, webOS first turns to aGPS (cellular tower assisted GPS) to get a general location, and then looks to the sky for the more accurate triangulated positioning. Verizon’s aGPS for whatever reason was set such that unless you have a VZ Navigator subscription your aGPS data is locked down, but you still have a connection that the phone will continue to ping, looking for a response it isn’t going to receive. Eventually webOS gives up and turns to satellite GPS, but it takes long enough that users will give up rather than wait several minutes (or longer) for their location.

Intrepid PreCentral forum member Troy Miller may have found one workable solution, and it comes in our favorite form: a homebrew patch. His idea was to block the aGPS ping, such that the phone would ask for the general location from Verizon, not even get the metaphorical dial tone, and immediately move on to trying with standalone GPS. The patch that Miller put together forcibly redirects an aGPS request to an IP where it will get no response, thus tricking webOS into thinking there’s no available aGPS data (whereas before the phone would sit patiently and wait for Verizon to not respond). Of course, that means that you won’t get aGPS at all and will need a clear view of the sky, but at least your fix will come in more quickly.

Several forum members have tried out the patch with varying degrees of success, but now at least many are getting a precise GPS lock in a minute or two. This is a huge improvement over what Verizon Pre and Pixi owners have been living with, and at the very least should serve as a stepping stone to getting Verizon GPS working properly. Of course, if Verizon would just stop being big meanie poo poo heads we wouldn’t have to be bothering with this.

Source: PreCentral Forums; Thanks be to Troy!

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Patching in webOS land is one of those areas where we can definitively gleefully mock declare our superiority claim a win over our friends with Android and iOS devices. The hundreds of patches available in Preware, through our forums, and even through some simple coding of your own provide customization options most platforms don’t even offer. WebOS Internals’ newest code magician, Sconix, has been hard at work whipping up a new mega patch that consolidates the functions of multiple patches into one neat little package. Unlike the much-lauded Advanced Configuration for Launcher patch, the new Advanced Configuration for System Preferences patch touches multiple apps in a multitude of ways. So many ways, in fact, that you’re going to have to head past the break to check it out.

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A month ago when webOS 1.4.5 first hit we quickly learned that there was a problem under the hood: the now-sandboxed PDK apps lacked the permissions to properly write to the media/internal partition. What this meant was fairly simple: it suddenly became difficult for PDK apps to save data, meaning that all that time you put into working your way through N.O.V.A. was lost.

Thankfully, the fine folks at WebOS Internals know their way around webOS fairly well, so they patched up webOS 1.4.5 in short order and released the Emergency Fstab Fixer. Simply put, Fstab Fixer fixes the problem, enabling PDK apps to write with ease.

webOS 1.4.5 hit in Europe first, bringing the problem to light, and Palm delayed the roll-out to fix it, giving birth to webOS 1.4.5.1. Except 1.4.5.1 never came. The world was shocked and blown away (okay, exaggerating there) when this week webOS 1.4.5 was pushed for Sprint, with the bug still intact a month after it was discovered and fixed. Thankfully, Emergency Fstab Fixer is still works and is still available for your PDK fun. With PDK apps of clear importance to Palm’s long-term strategy, here’s hoping that a quick update is pushed in short order to render the patch a moot point.

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Just the other day Palm pushed out a new app in the App Catalog called GPS Fix. The app, which aims to frequently ping the GPS system for fresh coordinates was designed to counteract whatever voodoo magic is preventing the Verizon Palm Pre Plus and Pixi Plus from providing accurate GPS data. The problem with those phones? For whatever reason, GPS is locked down on those phones, leaving VZ Navigator as the only app with unrestricted GPS access. Somehow, launching VZ Navigator (even without a subscription) magically enables other apps to access that GPS data.

Firing up one app to use another is obviously not an optimal solution, so that’s why developer James Harris whipped up GPS Fix. But even continual checking for fresh GPS data only can do so much before the phone craps out again and needs VZ Navigator to be launched again. James, being the awesome developer guy that he is, also whipped up a patch to supplement GPS Fix: GPS Fix for VZ Navigator.

The patch is fairly simple in concept and operation: it periodically launches VZ Navigator and then closes VZ Navigator. Due to the nature of webOS and VZ Navigator, a background session for VZ Navigator continues even after the app has been closed, allowing other GPS apps not authorized access on Verizon devices to piggyback off that service. Periodically pinging can keep the service alive, but even then it can still shut down without warning. Firing up VZ Navigator restarts the session and lets the ping-extending begin all over again.

So what’s the fuss about? James put the instructions for how to install the patch in his app, and Palm approved it as is. With all the caveats of ‘Palm doesn’t support or endorse homebrew,’ we supposed the Developer Relations team looked at that and said, “That’ll do,” and then fired up Preware and installed a few dozen patches. Okay, maybe it didn’t go quite like that, but do we need any more evidence of Palm’s continued acceptance and embrace of the homebrew community?

Source: GPS Fix

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Some people prefer substance; others, style. When it comes to speeding up the Palm Pre, “substance” means background garbage collecting, reducing the number of running processes, and more adventurous (and potentially warranty-risking) efforts in overclocking. On the style side, a user can tweak the Pre’s graphic user interface (GUI) so it looks faster and more streamlined, changing the experience without actually changing how quickly it is running.

One of the most effective “style” efforts is the Faster Card Animations patch by forum member Xanthinealkaloid. The patch alters the animation settings for the Pre’s cards. The basic patch (EXPRESS) slightly speeds up the icon pulse, while accelerating the card’s initial jump, switching and movement out of the way of another card. There are also two other versions: one that speeds up the icon flashing even more (“HYPER”), and another that eliminates the glow entirely (NONE). All three are available via the webos-patches feed in Preware and webOSQuickInstall.

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If there’s anything cooler than patches, it’s patching patches with patches (say that five times fast). One of the most popular patches for webOS is Enable LED Notifications, which merely uncomments (activates, if you will) a bit of code to allow the user to enable pulsing LED notifications on their phone. There’s just one problem: the LED flashes for any notification. For people like this blogger, the LED notifications are great, with the exception that I always get emails and don’t need constant and persistent notification of that. What I do need notifications for are things like missed calls, text messages, and other things that are not email.

Luckily, I’m not the only person with that problem (if you’ve listened to the PalmCast, you’d know that Dieter tends to rail on this oversight every other week). Developer Franz Rühmland put together a patch for the patch that allows the user to have the LED flash for notifications other than new emails. Huzzah!

Additionally, another patch by hape and jhoff80 has adapted the Enable LED Notifications patch for use on German webOS devices (Enable LED Notifications German). The more the merrier, eh? If you’re feeling like getting in on the action, go fire up your preferred patch installer and get to work!

Thanks to Yasasvi for the tip!

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We’ve heard it time and time again in the comments and forums: “Why doesn’t Palm incorporate these patches into webOS?” We get it, we dig patches as much as you do. It’s cool stuff, there’s no getting around that indisputable fact. With more and more patches coming out every week, the question only becomes a louder call – especially when the patch merely turns on something that’s already there in webOS (looking at you landscape email and LED notifications).

Even better: WebOS Internals dictates that the patches they help distribute have a software license that makes it easy and legal for Palm to adopt.

While we’re sure there’s some sort of complicated answer involving testing, compatibility, and the like, with more than 200 patches available from WebOS Internals, there’s also the question of what patches should Palm incorporate if they were to chose to do so. With that in mind, we think it’s megapoll time, and we’ve picked out thirty popular patches for your multiple-choice (up to five) voting pleasure.

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More and more patches arrive every week on WebOS Internals, and with each patch comes plenty of new and useful functionality. A new patch aims to alleviate a painful problem that has afflicted some Palm owners: getting your contacts out of the Palm Profile. As we’ve reported before, some users have run into an issue where a glitch between the Palm servers and your phone results in the Palm Profile’s personal data getting wiped.

The “Send All Contacts via Email” patch by bsiegel provides a way to get your contacts out of the Palm Profile and into whatever you want. The patch adds the menu option to export your contacts into a standard vCard file (which can take a while if you have a lot) and then attaches that file to an email for you to send to wherever you desire. We’ll use Google as an example here: once exported you can save the vCard file to your computer, and then upload all the contacts to Google by opening Contacts and clicking on Import.

Apart from transferring your contacts from the Palm Profile to Google, you can also use the patch to perform backups of your contacts data, as the patch does not discriminate between sources like Google, Palm, and Exchange.

Thanks to Matt for the tip!

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Preware Main Screen

Preware is a free Homebrew Installer from WebOS Internals for your Palm Pre or Pixi. Preware lets you download Homebrew Apps, patches, and themes directly to your phone. Once Preware is installed you do not need to be connected to a computer because Preware does it’s magic "Over The Air."

In a few minutes you will have access to hundreds of free Homebrew Applications, Patches, and Themes right from your phone!

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While every update to webOS has brought speed improvements in the form of cleaned up code, Palm Pre phones across the globe have been limited to running at 500 MHz. That is in spite of the fact that that these phones pack a beefy Texas Instruments OMAP3430 processor rated at 600 MHz. What gives? Mostly it’s power management, running at the full 600 MHz will drain batteries darned fast. Over at WebOS Internals they’ve whipped up a group of new patches that not only promise to boost your Pre’s speed, but also to save battery life at the same time. How do they do it? CPU scaling and dynamic voltage reduction.

Before we go any further, these patches carry more risk to them than the standard patch application. As it would turn out, the TI OMAP3430 CPU was purposefully set to 500 MHz by Palm after TI realized that a some of the early chips couldn’t handle the full 600 MHz. These chips had their useful lifespans reduced to less than six months. While there aren’t a lot of these chips out there, Palm was the first manufacturer to use the chip, and it’s enough of a concern that they’ve chosen to not let it run at full bore (the chip is also used in the Motorola Droid and Nokia N900).

While most users will reap benefits from installing these patches, there is the chance that – like some members of the PreCentral forums – installing these patches may seriously brick your Pre. Also, one should not install more than one of these patches at a time, doing so will likely result in serious borkage. We are tinkering with the processor here, folks, so tread lightly.

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