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 “what do you want from the next Palm device?” Or maybe we’ll just end up chatting about our favorite sandwiches, you never know. This time around we’re looking back at six months of life with the Palm Pre and webOS.

Check it all out after the break: What was the most important event for Palm in the last six months, and what will be the most important in the next six months?

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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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Before you panic, we’re not saying that the Palm’s cloud services are in as much Danger (pun intended) as what Sidekick owners experienced, but we do have a couple oddities to report — patchers especially should take note.

We’re well past time to write about this given the number of tips we’ve received, so here it is: it looks like a lot of users have had their Pre phones offer them the webOS 1.2.1 update (and the webOS 1.2 update before it) multiple times – despite having the update already applied.

There’s a big old thread in our forums discussing the issue and as near as we can tell the bug only seems to be affecting users who have applied patches to their phone.  We haven’t been able to pin down the culprit yet, but if a diligent Pre patcher who is experiencing the issue has managed to stop it, please do let us know in the comments.

More disconcertingly, we have plenty of reports of users whose Pre phones haven’t been automatically backing up despite having that setting set to ‘on.’ If you haven’t recently, we recommend you take a quick look at your backup app to see if its most recent backup date is yesterday. This issue seems to pop up sporadically and has happened to at least one non-patcher.

We’ll also note that a couple of users have had Palm’s profile lose some of their data, but right now it looks like a two isolated cases. Our advice: your key data should always be in a minimum of three places:

1. Your Pre (where it’s persistent as long as you don’t erase anything)
2. A cloud service (Palm, Google, Exchange, etc)
3. Someplace ‘else.’ For most of us that will be your desktop, where hopefully you’re pulling down your data from Google or Exchange. If you’re using Palm’s profile exclusively, we suggest you take a look at one of the several desktop sync apps that are available now.

So there you go, a small set of strange bugs for a Thursday afternoon. Any of them bugging you?

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Welcome to the third and last installment of "There’s a Patch for That!" Part 1 and Part 2 have already shown 28 of the top patches. Today we’ll be exploring more of these user patches (tweaks), including Calendar, Camera, Clock, and Email patches.  

Patches are modifications that add key features to existing Palm webOS applications. Maybe you wish you could change sounds or add a feature. Fortunately many of our Pre users are also talented developers who didn’t just wish for these fixes. They made them! Note that the Homebrew Apps are separate programs, not patches.

Again, patches can be installed using webOS Quick Install or Preware using these instructions.As always, the usual warnings apply.  You’re patching system webOS files, so stuff can break here. Plus the patching system is constantly evolving. For many Pre users, though, the risk is well worth the reward. (See: How to Revive a Pre.)

To remove a patch, click on the same patch again.  You can even remove all patches at once before an upgrade or any time you like. Using WebOS Quick Install, click Tools, Tweaks, "Online Repository" tab, and then install the Emergency Patch Recovery (EPR).  In Preware, install the Emergency Patch Recovery patch and restart your Pre to remove all patches. For much more see Patches.

And now for today’s patches…

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The fine folks over in Europe are finally getting in on the review fun that we had over here during the summer. Over at Golem.de they got some extended quality time with the phone, long enough to write up a 20-page review that covers just about every aspect of the phone. The conclusions are pretty much the same as ours, though there seems to be little difference between webOS 1.1.3 on O2’s Pre phones and the 1.1.0 version that we had on Sprint and Bell before webOS 1.2 hit. It is worth noting that webOS 1.1.3 does not come with the iTunes sync fix that 1.2.1 brought, so the Pre will be hitting Europe sans out-of-the-box music synchronization. An update to correct that and “bring parity” with the North American Pre is expected some time next month.

Heise.de aren’t the only ones that got their hands on the GSM Pre, as Trusted Reviews also put the phone through its paces. Their extensive review covered a lot of nitpicky items, but it’s the sign of a good product (or at least a product with good potential) when nitpicks are what take up space on the page and not huge glaring problems. Strangly, O2 sent United Kingdom-based Trusted Reviews a QWERTZ (i.e. German) Pre for their review. Slashgear did take a look at the UK edition and found no surprises.

Generally the reviews have come to the same conclusion as most stateside observers: the star of the Palm Pre is webOS. The build quality still leaves something to be desired, though we can easily point to the moving parts slider design as the culprit in the feels-flimsy category.

Thanks to Gizmo21 and Terry for the tips!

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This just continues to get more and more weird. Reader JC recently found himself in need of a new Pre and stopped by his local Best Buy to pick up a brand new unit. He booted up his new phone, found that it was running webOS 1.1.0, and then discovered that there was an option for Yahoo Instant Messenger in the Messaging app. We frankly are at a loss as to why some Pre owners gained Yahoo access with 1.2 and others didn’t, but the strangeness was just kicked up a notch by a webOS 1.1 Pre coming with Yahoo support right out of the box.

Either way, we know it’s coming officially by the end of the year, as it was announced alongside the Pixi.

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Welcome to the second installment of "There’s a Patch for That." Patches are modifications (tweaks) that add key features to existing Palm applications. For instance, have you wished for message forwarding or landscape mode for messaging, email, or PDF’s? Do you wish the Palm Pre webOS had other key features? Pre users have developed over 60 patches to make these and other wishes a reality!

In There’s a Patch for That (Part 1) we saw 14 of our favorite patches including the On Screen Keyboard, LED Notification, Launcher, and Email patches. Today we will explore patches that customize alerts and notifications, as well as the Messaging, Calendar, Contacts, and Phone Apps.   Note that the 250 Homebrew Apps are separate programs, not patches.  

Again, patches can be installed using webOS Quick Install (or Preware using these instructions). As always, the usual warnings apply.  You’re patching system webOS files, so stuff can break here. Plus the patching system is constantly evolving. For many Pre users, though, the risk is well worth the reward. (See: How to Revive a Pre.)

To remove a patch, click on the same patch again. You can even remove all patches at once before an upgrade or any time you like. Using WebOS Quick Install, click Tools, Tweaks, "Online Repository" tab, and then install the Emergency Patch Recovery (EPR).  In Preware, install the Emergency Patch Recovery patch and restart your Pre to remove all patches.   For much more see Patches.

Here are more of our favorite patches…

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So while it is rather cool and all that all of the data on your webOS phone is also stored on some remote server somewhere that’ll keep it safe in the event of your phone’s untimely demise, it turns out there’s a dark side to that coolness. Recently owners of T-Mobile Sidekicks have experienced that dark side first hand, and quite brutally. Starting late last week Sidekick owners were faced with a server breakdown that greatly inhibited their ability to do just about anything with their phones. The Sidekick line is surprisingly cloud-centric, with your contacts, tasks, web browsing and just about everything else handled through Danger’s (the OS builder, now owned by Microsoft) servers. The server broke, and took down Sidekicks nationwide with it.

As if not being able to manage basic tasks like looking up contacts was injury enough, today T-Mobile added the insult on top of it: the server meltdown was enough that it seems that all server-side data has been irretrievably lost:

“Regrettably, based on Microsoft/Danger’s latest recovery assessment of their systems, we must now inform you that personal information stored on your device – such as contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists or photos – that is no longer on your Sidekick almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger. That said, our teams continue to work around-the-clock in hopes of discovering some way to recover this information. However, the likelihood of a successful outcome is extremely low.”

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Since webOS 1.2 landed, those of use that depend on our phones to run our lives have encountered a new oddity: we now get calendar reminders via email along with on our devices. While this confused me at first, I quickly realized what the culprit was: Synergy now syncs alarms with Google Calendar. Prior to webOS 1.2, alarms did not sync between Google Calendar and webOS Calendar, which most people didn’t notice, as we tend to manage our calendars from the phone. With 1.2, calendar alarms are now synced, but they push to Google Calendar as both a pop-up alert (in browser and on the phone) and an email alert from Google. Syncing our calendar alarms is a good thing, as the last time I had to get my Pre replaced (prior to 1.2) I nearly missed my next appointment because the phone didn’t alert me.

Right now there doesn’t seem to be any way to disable the email alerts without going to each alarmed calendar entry in Google Calendar and manually switching it off. Since I am dependent on the phone’s alerts to get me moving to where I need to go, I can’t simply go without the alarms. So I adapted and set up a filter in Gmail to automatically mark as read and delete all emails from calendar-notification@google.com. Once implemented it works seamlessly, though hopefully Palm will address this oversight in a future webOS update.

Edit: For clarification, my default reminder setting in Google Calendar is set to none, as it is on my phone. I set alarms for things that require timed action, so not everything in my calendar needs an alert. Prior to webOS 1.2 alarms created on the phone were not sent to Google Calendar.

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Members in our forums are reporting improvements in battery life since updating to webOS 1.2, to the extent that some are even going from a nearly dead battery after a full day of use on webOS 1.1, to having 20-30% battery left by the end of the day.

Measuring battery life can be a fickle thing, though, what with different usage patterns, perceptions, and whether or not Venus is rising. However, using this battery life monitoring utility in the homebrew section, you can get a bit more info to see if what the situation is. (Also, be sure to check out this guide on how to optimize battery life.)

How’s 1.2’s battery life seem to you?

Have you noticed a difference in battery life since updating to 1.2?(survey)

 [Thanks to everyone who sent this in!]

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