Category Archives: PALM / webOS

Palm: Pre, Treo, Centro, TX…

The HP TouchPad now on Amazon. No price, no pre-order, no point

Posted on March 7, 2011 by Shaun

The HP Touchpad has appeared on Amazon without a price or a pre-order icon so the appearance is pointless. Still, it may indicate that it is a little closer to release than previously thought.

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Palm Pre 2 review: hardware

Posted on March 7, 2011 by Shaun

Available from Clove for £342

Highlights-

* webOS 2.0 platform
* True Multitasking
* 3.1″ multitouch screen
* Slide-out 4-row QWERTY keyboard
* Just Type
* HP Synergy for cloud back up
* Cut, Copy & Paste feature
* Set-up up to 16 Exchange Server email accounts
* Over 3000 Apps available
* 3.5mm headphone jack
* 16GB internal storage

The Palm Pre 2 is a curious device. It is following in the footsteps of the original Palm Pres which failed to set the smartphone world alight and is preceding the much anticipated Pre3. This puts the Pre 2 in a position that no company should ever put one of its products in. HP was so determined to demonstrate its strategy for the year ahead that it has ended up making the Pre 2 look like the last of the original bunch and not a patch on what is to come. I don’t understand why this phone has been released at all, or at least I didn’t until I used it for a few days.

My experience with webOS is much less than with any other mobile operating system and has consisted of a few hours here and there which never gave me a true insight into what the operating was about. This is my chance to look at webOS as much as the Pre 2 and the results have been unexpected on so many levels. Let’s start with the hardware-

Picking up the Pre 2 for the first time felt like I had jumped back in time to the pre-iPhone era. There is little doubt that this is a Palm designed product because every aspect from the box through to the accessories to the phone itself screams Palm. The small touches of cuteness are everywhere and while I don’t appreciate them all, they are unique in a market dominated by large screen slabs of uber technology, most of which look the same.

The stubbiness of the Pre 2 is hard to ignore on the first day of use and I have no qualms in saying that I hated the shape of it. It just didn’t feel like a phone at all; too small height and width wise and too deep. It resembles a pocket radio from the early 1980’s and has almost no sharp angles at all. However, over the past few days I have grown to like the form of the phone and found it to be quite natural to pick up and use. It’s a nice feeling to be clicking open a keyboard again when I get a call or a new email arrives- some don’t like this action and find it cumbersome, but I see it as making the Pre 2 feel more like a real phone than the touch screen only rivals it is trying hard to compete with. It also feels more natural to hold and I have quickly become accustomed to the form which has shown me that there is life outside of touch once more.

In the box

Everything from the main charger with its quirky adaptor to the USB cable with the clever binder screams of innovation and carefulness of thought. Even the documentation is cute and the box is very similar to the Centro efforts from years ago. The headphones are not great, but feel free to find me a manufacturer who bundles decent headphones with their smartphones.

Second impressions

I won’t do first impressions because they were not very good and will instead concentrate on how I have found the hardware after prolonged use. It’s pretty good all round barring one major problem. The external speaker has a deep and rounded sound and the screen works very well in all conditions. I don’t like the size of the screen because it hampers many tasks that would work so much better on a larger screen. Despite my preference for real keyboards I would love to see webOS running on a larger touch screen device. I believe that this would show people what the OS is really like and enable them to compare it with iOS, Android and the rest. At the moment the hardware is too different for many people to see past and they often fail to get past the first hurdle.

I have to say that the biggest hurdle is the keyboard which is exceptionally small and far too difficult to use. It is a throwback to Palm design from the past where there was always an inconvenience built in. On the Treo 650 it was the lack of dynamic memory, the Treo 680 had an appalling battery, the Centro had a tiny keyboard and the Treo Pro was just crap all round. The Pre 2 keyboard suffers from the keys being too small, too close together, too close to the bottom of the screen and even the key legends are not always centred. It is a bizarre series of data entry compromises on a phone that is designed to communicate. On the plus side it feels perfectly weighted and comfortable in the hand, but that is a shallow plus indeed.

The mirror on the back is almost as crazy as the keyboard design. With no sexist intent at all, is this phone only designed for women? How many men do you know that want a mirror on their smartphone? I don’t need a mirror on a phone to tell me that I have lost my hair and that I have gotten fatter recently. I need a mirror on the wall because I have gotten fatter recently and the Pre 2 mirror is too small for my fat face. You could argue that the mirror is not seen when in use, but everyone else can see you talking into a mirror when you are on a call. Strange indeed.

So it’s not good is it? I will publish part two in a few days and explain why this is the second best phone I have ever used.



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HP TouchPad video demo

Posted on March 4, 2011 by Shaun

engadget grabbed a personal demo of the HP TouchPad and it is looking very, very good indeed. Watch the video here to the end and you will see what I mean- this is the nearest I have seen to an iPad competitor yet.

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Crypto Lists for webOS

Posted on February 24, 2011 by Shaun

Crypto Lists has been released for webOS and looks like an effective and efficient organiser to me. I particularly like the way it works so well with the webOS environment to bring out the content.

Save passwords, checklists, notes, and more with Crypto Lists for the Palm Pre. Keep personal data encrypted on your phone and look it up whenever and wherever you need it.

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webOS 2.1 now available for Pre Plus O2 Germany customers

Posted on February 22, 2011 by Shaun

O2 Germany is now offering a webOS 2.1 update for the Palm Pre Plus which goes against HP’s stated position on pairing the latest OS with older hardware. Hopefully other areas will get it soon. More at engadget.

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HP walks on the wild side

Posted on February 17, 2011 by Janine

I like Lou Reed. I like webOS. And I like the new advert from HP which proclaims the goodness in both. Shame the advert is a few months early (video below). Janine.

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Palm Pre 2 now available

Posted on February 14, 2011 by Shaun

Clove is now selling the Palm Pre 2 for £354. A difficult sell perhaps after HP’s announcement this week, but still a good phone with a lovely OS.

The HP Palm Pre 2 is a powerful smartphone running the webOS platform on a 1GHz processor, with 16GB of internal storage and 512MB of RAM. The unique features of the Pre 2 and its ability to offer true multitasking make it a device that can rival any other.

So what makes the Pre 2 stand out from its competitors? In terms of hardware, it is on a par with any other high-end device. However, it is the webOS platform that separates it from handsets running the likes of Android, BlackBerry & Windows Phone 7.

With webOS, multi-tasking on a smartphone is better than ever. Pause a game to write an email, open a web page to add content to the email, check your calendar and then switch back to the email without having to close a single program. Apps are grouped together in card stacks and are simple to navigate thanks to the multitouch screen and gesture support.

The Pre 2 features a 3.1″ HVGA screen with 24-bit colour. Using multitouch gestures, you can zoom in & out on a web page, move open apps around as if in a card deck, or close apps simply by flicking them off the screen. This intuitive smartphone also has a universal search feature called Just Type, which can start an email, update your status or search your entire device – all from the homescreen.

It’s not just the operating system that is unique about the HP Palm Pre 2, it’s also the form factor. The 4-row slide out QWERTY keyboard slants as it opens and can be used in conjunction with the touchscreen. Also available is the HP Palm Touchstone charging dock, another nice feature that docks your phone wirelessly. Even when placed on the Touchstone the Pre 2 can multitask – allowing you to talk over speakerphone while utilising the devices other functions.

Of course, no device would be complete without a range of Apps & Games to choose from. While the HP Palm App market is not as large as that of its competitors, it has over 3000 apps to offer, including some of the most popular such as Spotify and Angry Birds. The HP Synergy feature backs up your purchases from the market to the cloud, as it does your contacts & details for social networking and email.

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Do webOS developers now have no users to sell to?

Posted on February 10, 2011 by Shaun

Peter sent over a link to a debate that is raging on pre central among some webOS developers. The announcement that webOS 2.0 will not be coming to older Palm devices leaves developers in a bit of a predicament.


Here are some of the choice comments-

  • “Virtually nobody has a pre 2, the pre 3,Touchpad are coming out “in the summer”, the veer is promised for ‘early spring’ but with absolutely no dates, carriers or prices. So you develop an app for the ‘current’ phones – which nobody has and there no firm dates on arrival – how do you make any money from this strategy?”
  • “exactly what i’ve been screaming this whole time… posted this in another developer thread: That developers now have a ZERO user base? and we need to “unlearn” mojo. Current userbase will NOT get 2.0 and there are NO WebOS2.0 devices out there, ok Pre2 but with No marketing no hype how good will it sell, and iPhone just announced? Pre2 is an afterthough/proof of concept…it’s a developer phone. And there is no SDK for 2.0 so we can’t write anything but on an ALPHA SDK? Def a HUGE setback. Makes me want to pick up a book for andriod or dare i say iPhone.”
  • “I am a developer and I am abandoning webOS because of this.”

Ouch!

UPDATE: webOS users may have a small pot of gold at the end of the rainbow though. HP will make a ‘special offer’ to current webOS users when the latest devices announced yesterday are released.

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webOS 2.0 not coming to original Palm line-up

Posted on February 10, 2011 by Shaun

Bad news for those of you currently running the first webOS Palm smartphones. webOS 2.0 will not be available for the original Palm Pre or Pixi due to the power needed to run the updated version. I guess this should be expected, but will no doubt have a few discenting voices crying ‘fragmentation’ as has happened in Android world.

“Sorry Palm Pre and Pixi fans, it looks like you’ll be left out in the cold when it comes to the upcoming Web OS 2.0 update, Engadget confirmed today in a conversation with HP’s (and former Palm CEO) Jon Rubinstein.

Owners of the faster Pre Plus and Pixi Plus phones also won’t be able to upgrade to the new OS. According to Rubinstein, the older devices just didn’t have the power to run Web OS 2.0. That leaves Palm’s upcoming Pre 2, which is available for preorder now on Verizon, and its future phones — the Veer and Pre 3 announced today — as the only phones running Palm’s new OS.”

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QOTD: What does the Palm brand mean to you?

Posted on February 10, 2011 by Shaun

Now that HP has ditched the Palm brand, presumably forever, this seems like the ideal time to ask what the Palm brand means to you?

I don’t believe that the loss of the Palm brand is a terrible thing. It has been on the decline for many years now and even with the advent of webOS it never reached the peak that it did back in the Treo days. The fact is that Palm is not even the same company that it was- new senior people, new operating system and it isn’t even a company in its own right any more.

Despite originally setting up this site to focus on the Palm OS driven Clies, I never felt an emotional attachment to Palm OS like I did with Psion or iOS today. It always felt like it should do more than it did to me and the hardware was at times not worthy of the OS. The Treo 650 was the best of the bunch and despite some memory problems it was without doubt the first mass market smartphone to prove the theory we know today. The Palm m500 series was brilliant, as was the V and Vx at the time, but others like the LifeDrive and T5 were so unreliable as to be almost insulting.

Most people who feel an attachment to the Palm brand feel an attachment to Palm OS, not webOS. Palm OS was never going to survive in the modern world, mainly due to technical restrictions, but webOS is more than capable of holding its own in the current market. Hardware is the key here and despite not feeling overwhelmed by yesterday’s announcement the idea of webOS on every device you own could prove to be a much bigger hit than many believe at this time.

Above all else I will remember Palm for inventing the simplistic PIM method that is so popular today and a brand that felt human in a world of highly technical products. Apple learned a lot from Palm and drove some of these essential ideas forward. It is unfortunate that Palm did not learn from its own successes and get their first.

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HP announces the Veer, Pre 3 and TouchPad

Posted on February 9, 2011 by Shaun

HP Palm has announced three new very different mobile products today which are designed to make the webOS brand competitive in a highly charged sector.


First up is the Veer which is a credit card sized mobile phone capable of 5MP photos, Wi-Fi, running Flash and acting as a Wi-Fi hotspot. It looks like one of the phone I enjoy seeing announced, but I’m not convinced I would necessarily enjoy using it. The keyboard looks soooo tiny!

Next we have the Pre3 which demonstrates that Palm may have finally learned lessons from the original Pre keyboard. This one looks similar to the BlackBerry keyboards and you also get a 3.6″ WVGA screen, 5 Megapixel camera with HD video and a forward facing camera for video calling. This is a definite improvement on previous Pres, but looks like a catch up phone to me. Even with a mighty 1.4GHz processor, I don’t see much here that would make me want to rush out and buy one.

And then there is the TouchPad which looks remarkably similar to the iPad in design. It has a 9.7″ display with a 1024 x 768 pixel resolution, video calling, a dual core 1.2GHz processor and a nice stand keyboard to go with it. This would be the easiest new product to criticise, but it really does look like the first tablet to genuinely give the iPad a run for its money. iPad 2 may have something to say about that, but the fact that these devices work together so well and that they look like lessons learned from the past gives them a chance.

AND webOS IS COMING TO PC’s!!! This is due later this year, but could be a great move for HP-Palm. Everything tied together on one operating system. Something Apple has been building towards, but is not quite there yet. This is the most important part of the announcements today by far. Each part may not look incredible, but put them all together and the story is different. Your thoughts?

P.S. Palm is dead. RIP, Palm 1992-2011.

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HP/Palm teaser video

Posted on February 3, 2011 by Shaun

Palm (HP) has published a teaser video of its next webOS device. Is it a phone or a tablet? You decide.

What’s on the horizon in the world of webOS? We’ll be sharing some details one week from today. You’ll be able to catch all our news right here (or via @palm on Twitter or at facebook.com/palm), and if your name happens to be Ben McGinnis, you’ll be joining us in person in San Francisco.

Ben (aka @benmacguinness), a graduate student from Columbus, Ohio, pursuing a Masters degree in Instruction Technology at Duquesne Unviersity, was the winner in our “Think Beyond” contest. He’s especially excited to see what HP and webOS can do for tomorrow’s classroom.

Meanwhile, as a little thank you to the many, many of you who entered our contest, how about a little sneak peek at part of what we’ll be sharing next week (along with a handy countdown timer)?

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GetGlue coming to webOS

Posted on January 28, 2011 by Shaun

GetGlue is becoming almost as famous as Glee and has been a huge hit on iOS and Android. Now webOS users can soon experience the phenomenon when it arrives, hopefully soon. More at Syntacti.

Today we are pleased to announce the “GotPaste” project that will bring GetGlue to the HP Palm webOS platform.  This project will also be our first project to use the new Enyo framework (once released) that is designed from the ground up by HP Palm to support the plethora of devices and their screen sizes going forward.

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HP Palm Topaz: good enough to compete?

Posted on January 25, 2011 by Shaun

Now that the specifications of the HP Palm Topaz have been leaked, has it got enough for you to consider it? I have to say that it looks pretty good to me and the OS should make for a very addictive proposition. I suspect the release date will be a disappointment though…

Processor Dual-core Qualcomm MSM8660 at 1.2GHz
Graphics Integrated Adreno 220 GPU
Screen     9.7″ XGA 1024 x 768
Dimensions 190mm x 240mm x 13.7mm
Weight 700g / 1.5lb (estimated)
RAM 512MB DDR2
Storage 16g / 32g / 64g eMMC
Camera     Front-facing 1.3mp camera for Video Chat
Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR
WiFi Dual-band 802.11 b/g/n
Other Radios Optional WWAN for HSPA, LTE, perhaps CDMA later
Sensors Accelerometer, eCompass, Gyro, Light Sensor, Microphone
Speakers 2 integrated speakers with Beats Audio, 3.5mm audio jack
Battery 24WHr for >8hrs, using two 3150mAh cells

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webOS tablet: first images surface

Posted on January 18, 2011 by Shaun

engadget has nabbed some images of the upcoming webOS tablet and they looks very pretty indeed. There is one potential issue though- the expected release date is September 2011. That is a looooooong time in this industry.

“We’re told that units will start to arrive at Palm HQ in June as production ramps up for launch later this year — a timeline backed up by an internal marketing slide we received that lists WiFi-only, AT&T 3G, and Verizon LTE versions of the Opal arriving in September 2011, and on AT&T LTE in July 2012. The slide also indicates the Opal will have a particular e-reading focus, which makes sense for a 7-inch device, and there’s a mention of “premium audio,” which nicely reinforces our speaker hypothesis. Unfortunately, we don’t have any word on specs or pricing yet…”

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