Note that this only works on webOS 1.4.5 and below. This functionality appears to be disabled in webOS 2.0 and above

While searching for contacts in webOS is already an easy task using Universal Search and searching by a contact’s initials, it can get even easier by using a wildcard in your search. By substituting one or more "%" in the beginning or middle of a search as a wildcard, you can perform even more complex searches. For example, searching for "w%os" finds "WebOS Internals", but also other contacts with a "w" and then an "os" later in the name. And just as Universal Search looks in a person’s nickname and company name, these wildcards can also be used to search those, so searching for "%Experts" would return anyone with "Smartphone Experts" as their company. Unfortunately, it only appears to search for contacts within Universal Search, and not apps, but this functionality is usually somewhat consistent across the rest of webOS. Keep reading after the break to see how this differs in various areas of the OS.

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Do you miss the ability to "tab" between fields using a D-Pad or would just like to be able to move between fields using the keyboard? You actually have this ability by pressing Shift () and Enter () at the same time, but note that this does not universally work throughout webOS. In fact, it appears to work only in some of the stock webOS apps, and only for text-entry fields (i.e. no drop-downs). Here are the apps that it does appear to work in:

• Messaging: When sending a new message, switches between the "To:" address bar and the "Enter message here…" area
• Email: When sending a new email, switches between the "To:" address bar (and the "CC:" and "BCC:" areas if shown), the "Subject", and the Body of the email.
• Calendar: When editing a calendar entry, switches between the "Name" of the event, "Event Location", and "Event notes"
• Tasks: When editing a task, switches between the "Name" of the task and "Task notes"
• Know of any other apps this will work in?

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Unless you’re already running an Exchange account of some variety, all of your tasks are syncing exclusively to your Palm Profile. While Palm Profile failures aren’t a common event (though they are still worrisome), we still worry about data integrity. More importantly, we want a way to manage our data off of the device as well, to truly leverage the whole “cloud” thing. The folks at NuevaSync have a solution, and that solution is to apply Exchange to the problem.

NuevaSync isn’t just Exchange tasks. It’s also calendar and contact sync, and push email if you opt for the $25/year premium package. You might be thinking that what you want is not just another account to keep track of. Lucky you, NuevaSync doesn’t work that way. It’s more of a conduit that wraps Exchange goodness around your Google, Yahoo, AOL, Toodledo, or just plain IMAP account. The good folks at NuevaSync have even put together a quick how-to on adding a NuevaSync Exchange account to your webOS device.

Thanks to Dan for the tip!

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In my earlier review of Chapura’s PocketMirror program, I noted that while memos had been added to the data types that the program could synchronize between the Pre/Pixi and Microsoft Outlook, tasks were still only a promised upgrade. There were also some performance issues I noted.

Recently, version 2.0.0 of PocketMirror hit the App Catalog and, along with the latest version of the Windows desktop portion (which can be downloaded here), the program now syncs tasks as well as memos, calendar events and contacts. As with memos/notes, PocketMirror’s syncing maintains categories across the two platforms, and can also support timed notifications (which work on the Pre even when the program’s card is not open). Also as with memos, though, Chapura provides/requires its own standalone application for tasks, which is understandable, given the limits of the Pre’s own native Tasks and Memos programs.

In my brief look at the new version, it appears that the memo application has been improved as well. The noticeable delay between the app launching and the memos being displayed is essentially gone, and the synchronization of memos seems speedier. The program still lacks sorting capabilities beyond categories (I would like to be able to sort by date created, not just alphabetically), but hopefully that will appear in a future release. There is also still no way to put a separate icon for Chapura Memos and Tasks on the launcher screen, but the Preferences menu does allow you to choose which element (Memos, Tasks or Sync) will appear when the program is first launched, with the others easily accessible via icons at the bottom of the screen.

Unfortunately, with the new tasks feature set comes an increase in price, from the former $29.95 to $39.95 (although the upgrade is free for purchasers of the earlier versions.) While it is certainly pricier than most standalone Pre apps, it is comparable to other desktop utility software, or to similar synchronization packages such as Mark/Space’s The Missing Sync, and likely reflects the greater complexity and support burden of a desktop/smartphone combination software product.

Even at its higher new price, PocketMirror remains an extremely useful addition to webOS for users of notes (and now tasks) in Microsoft Outlook, as it adds the synchronization features for those elements that Palm failed to provide for the Pre and Pixi. For previous purchasers, the upgrade is both free and quite welcome.

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We at PreCentral receive a lot of tips throughout the day, but more and more over the past few weeks our inbox has been flooding with stories of users having just reset or replaced their webOS phones only to find that their Palm Profile did not back up all their data as promised. If you haven’t experienced this issue you’re in the lucky majority, but it seems the rate of the backup failures is accelerating and spreading.

We do feel your pain – one of our own staff members was hit by this bug and lost all of his contacts, calendar events, memos, and tasks. The only thing that was saved were his apps, which is a small consolation when you’ve just lost hundreds of phone numbers and email addresses accumulated over the years.

While we’re waiting for a third-party backup solution to land, we did some investigating. It turns out that the problem stems from corrupted backups, which is nothing new in the backup industry. Corrupted data happens all the time, but there are always safeguards to ensure that it doesn’t corrupt the system. Usually, that’s a prior backup. The issue is that the Palm Profile doesn’t keep anything other than the most recent backup, corrupted or not. Since your phone doesn’t provide any feedback on backups, even when they end up as corrupted, webOS users have no idea whether or not their backup was successfully completed. That is, until you reset your phone and realize that everything is lost.

Update: Palm has issued an official statement on the situation:

We are seeing a small number of customers who have experienced issues transferring their Palm Profile information to another Palm webOS device. Palm and Sprint are working closely together to support these customers to successfully transfer their information to the new device

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The prospects of a cloud-connected phone were obvious from the day that the Palm Pre and webOS were announced. Apart from being always connected, having all your data backed up in multiple places was an alluring concept. Fast-forward to today’s webOS and while the always-connected bit is more or less true, there are still some glaring holes in the backup abilities of the OS. PreCentral forum member DrewPre decided that having things like your call logs, SMS conversations, and whatnot not backed up wasn’t good enough and set out to create a backup app for webOS.

And create it he did. For his first webOS app, Palm Pre Backup is quite impressive. Currently the app takes data from your phone (call logs, contacts, tasks, memos, and SMS conversations) web browser (bookmarks, cookies, and history), bundles them up with your apps and patches, and spits out a nice little zip package onto your phone’s USB drive partition. From there you can copy it to your desktop computer and have a handy backup at the ready for the next time you need to reset or replace your webOS phone.

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The core functions of any Palm device have always been the PIMs: Personal Information Management. That’s your contacts, memos, tasks, and calendar. The contacts app is quite good with the Synergy unified contract, Tasks is has seen some minor improvements, while Memos feels almost toy-like. But that’s not what bothers us the most, for that you have to look at Calendar.

Don’t get us wrong, we think its great that you can pull down our calendars from Google and Exchange and show it all in one view. We like how easy it is to use, but to be frank, it’s simply too slow and too limited. What do I mean by too slow? When I swipe to a new day, it can take seconds for the gray loading overlay to disappear. That wouldn’t be so bad if I could still swipe to another day, but I have to wait for that day to load before I can move to the next. When I move to a day that has several events scheduled it takes even longer to load, which leads me to suspect that the calendar is checking for changes of for each event before letting me interact with or move on from that day.

This makes me wonder where that background multi-tasking is happening; calendar data is on the order a handful of kilobytes, couldn’t this all be synced regularly behind the scenes? Maybe it is, but then I have to wonder why I have to wait for each day to check for changes first – just start a full sync of upcoming days the instant I load the calendar.

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Certain key elements remain every bit as instrumental to smartphones today as they did when the first Palm Pilot became available: Email, Contacts, Calendar, and Tasks.

Although many of you are familiar with the idea that every smartphone has these basic features, perhaps there is no more important topic to discuss in a real review than a real-world day-to-day account of how these key components work in harmony on the job.

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We know that webOS and the Palm Pre are 1.0 1.1 products, so we’re going to cut you some slack for now. But that slack is starting to run out, and looking at the competition there are some areas where I think you could improve the Pre to both catch up to and leap frog over iPhone and BlackBerry and Android. So here’s what I’d like to see in the way of software updates before that slack runs out and the real complaining starts.

My list is after the break, and it’s by no means comprehensive. Feel free to sound off in the comments if there’s something you think should be added in!

Oh, and Palm, this isn’t an ultimatum or anything. It’s a wishlist. Of stuff I want. So consider it a shopping list, and you’re the grocery store. Some things we can do without, but others are staple items that we need to get through the week, and if you don’t have it, we might have to go across town to the other grocery to get it. After a while, that can get kind of old and we might consider just going to the other store. We don’t want to, as it’s simply not as nice, but they have a lot of what we need.

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Want to sync Notes and Memos from your Pre to your Desktop and vice versa? I wish I could tell you that you could actually synchronize the notes from the Memos application on your Pre, but then I’d be lying to you. For whatever disappointing reason, the Pre in its current form does not support the synchronization of Memos and there’s not much that we can do about that. There are at least four different ways to deal with this. The first way is to just deal with it. The built-in memos application is both easy-to-use and plenty fast, plus it comes with type-to-search. But… it doesn’t sync with anything.

And then there’s Evernote, currently in free beta form in the App Catalog. You can take the notes in Evernote, in addition to snapping pictures to storing tasks, and all of it will sync with your PC, Mac, and even Evernote’s web services. But, as is so often the reality of betas, Evernote is a touch slow and occasionally buggy.

Have a Microsoft Exchange account? Then you can sync your notes, so long as you’re willing to make them notes attached to your tasks. And we know what you’re thinking, it’s kind of hacky. And we agree, it is hacky, and we shouldn’t have to stoop to using applications Tasks to sync our memos. Palm, are you listening?

Lastly, there’s email. If you’re a Gmail user, you can send messages to yourself with the subject prefix of “Note:”, and then using Gmail’s filters and labels you can have your notes automatically sorted into folders on the Pre. It’s a great magical sync and lets you use the Pre’s fantastic email program, but like the aforementioned Tasks notes syncing, it’s a hacky work-around that we should have to deal with.

So there’s four solutions, and we’re sure there’s more out there. We want to know, how do you sync your memos?

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