We’ve been testing the new version 1.5 of Bad Kitty and here’s what you need to know: it’s stupid-fast, crazy-pretty, and insanely-filled with features. If you are looking for all of the above in a Twitter client, just wait. It has been submitted to Palm for review and we expect to see it live soon.

Bad Kitty keeps its basic structure of showing classy overview pages that you drill into to get to your twitter lists, then back out of to switch. Many people prefer a button structure (I know I do) where you are one tap away from switching between your full list and your @ replies. What may surprise you is that Bad Kitty is So Fast that with this app, it’s not as painful as you might thing to do all those back swipes. The lack of a new tweet button is not a problem – you can "Just Type" to start a tweet.

But all that is old news with Bad Kitty – what’s new, including a photo gallery, a neat wallpaper for ya, and a video showing the speed, is after the break!

read more

READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

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.

read more

READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

Some months ago, developers created and released a number of patches for the Pre that were meant to speed it up in various ways (known as CPU scaling and SmartReflex) beyond its standard 500 MHz processor speed. Unfortunately, the patches were somewhat unstable, and caused a number of users (myself included) to brick their Pres to the point of needing to run webOS Doctor and restore their Pres to factory status before they could be used. These patches were also incompatible with more recent updates to webOS, and are not recommended (as indicated by the “Dangerous” category into which they’ve been put in Preware).

Over the past couple of weeks, though, there have been a series of forum posts describing and demonstrating new methods for accelerating the Pre that seem to be much more stable than the earlier efforts.

UPDATE: caj208 has provided some important additional detail about the development effort and extensive testing process for these patches and scripts, which may address many potential users’ concerns. Definitely read his comments below for the full scoop. If you’re not following caj208’s webOS development efforts, you really should be.
 

read more

READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

Strangely, the only new stuff in the App Catalog was old stuff – nineteen updates, but no new apps. So we held steady from Friday’s number of 843 apps, but as you may have seen from the Smartphone Round Robin videos posted last week and this week, that number is around double that in the Windows Mobile Marketplace. Of course, we’re still well behind the iPhone and Android app stores, and a few thousand behind BlackBerry App World, but then again Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein expects “several thousand” new apps with the release of the Ares development platform and the App Catalog’s emergence from beta. In the meantime, we’ve got a list of the updates, and it’s after the break for your perusal.

read more

READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

What, you didn’t think we were just going to cruise past 500, did you? No sir, we are on a rocket to the app moon! And with that oh-so-frustrating app limit soon to be history, the sky is indeed the limit for apps. Technically, 6.7 GB right now is the limit for apps, but that’s better than a few dozen MB, eh? We’ve got another list of new and updated apps from yesterday primed for your consideration, all after this here break.

read more

READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

Windzilla points us to this article over at Ajaxian [via EverythingPre] about a talk Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer gave out in London. Those two, you’ll remember, are the rockstar hires Palm made back in September. Apparently we can expect more speed to come to webOS, courtesy of CSS transformation support:

On ease of use, multitasking has been great; UI latency is still an issue even though the hardware is comparable to 3GS. The problem is the path to the GPU didn’t exist, but now with CSS transforms, that will be solved in the immediate future

CSS transformation is essentially animation using CSS (some examples here for you coders). The two also noted that Palm is still considering options for obfuscating code (since looking at another developer’s source code on webOS apps isn’t much more difficult than hitting ‘view source’ on your browser).

Back to the speed front, we are also pleased to hear that OpenGL support is very much on Palm’s collective mind:

However, they can’t say when all this will happen, as they’re evolving the platform pragmatically and they feel other things might have more immediate impact, e.g. OpenGL support.

We still hold out hope that OpenGL will come to webOS via WebGL, which is already in the latest builds of WebKit. Speed-hunters should also remember that Palm just hired Matthew Tippett, AMD’s now-former engineering manager.

Now that we’ve confirmed that webOS 1.3.1 is coming down the pike, we’ve been wondering what the ‘big new feature’ was that would justify a full point update. The whisper is speed, let’s hope that’s the case.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

Xenophonite in our forums engaged in one of our favorite pre-phone-launch activities for any phone: checking out DSL Reports Mobile Speed Test results and looking for browsers attached to unreleased phones.  To wit: the Palm Pre.  The results: fast.

• 1728 0.157s (1024k) spcsdns.net Mozilla/5.0 (webOS/1.0; U; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.27.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/1.0 Safari/525.27.1 Pre/1.0
• 1685 0.188s (1024k) spcsdns.net Mozilla/5.0 (webOS/1.0; U; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.27.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/1.0 Safari/525.27.1 Pre/1.0
• 533 0.125s (1024k) spcsdns.net Mozilla/5.0 (webOS/1.0; U; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.27.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/1.0 Safari/525.27.1 Pre/1.0
• 550 0.117s (1024k) spcsdns.net Mozilla/5.0 (webOS/1.0; U; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.27.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/1.0 Safari/525.27.1 Pre/1.0
• 711 0.134s (400k) spcsdns.net Mozilla/5.0 (webOS/1.0; U; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.27.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/1.0 Safari/525.27.1 Pre/1.0
• 1391 0.14s (1024k) spcsdns.net Mozilla/5.0 (webOS/1.0; U; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.27.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/1.0 Safari/525.27.1 Pre/1.0

In plain English, this means you’re looking at download speeds of between 500k and 1700k – which is mighty fast.  Faster, we think, than most people are managing on iPhones.

Just as important as speed is latency.  Speed is how fast your data comes down, Latency is how long it takes to get your connection going in the first place.  Latency is notoriously bad on mobile networks, but it’s darn good on Sprint’s EVDO network – coming in reliably under .2 seconds, while an iPhone’s latency on AT&T’s over-stretched network often is longer than a second.

Add in the Pre’s lightning fast rendering time and you can expect that your browsing experience on the Pre will be a joy.  Maybe, just maybe, it really will be 4 times faster than the iPhone.

Thanks xenophonite!

READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>