Category Archives: PALM / webOS

HP’s Todd Bradley has all, but confirmed that a webOS tablet will be announced on February 9th, but there may be some other surprises if you listen to his words careful in the video below. More at Pre Central.

Phone Arena is running with a story suggesting that the Palm Pre 2 will be a very brief affair in the world of smartphones. The suggestion is that it will be discontinued after 2 months on Verizon so that HP can concentrate on its own line of webOS devices.

You do need to take this story with a huge grain of salt, but long term the idea that the ‘Palm’ name could disappear does not seem to terrible as it once did. With so little traction in the worldwide market and no major news coverage for some time now, it seems to me as if ‘Palm’ as a brand is not going to last long at all…

Astraware Mahjong has been released for the Palm Pre and Pre Plus and is currently selling for $0.99. A good price for a good game.

Astraware Mahjong is a full-featured Mahjong Solitaire game that includes these unique features:

Plus
Full tutorial with photos to help you learn how to play
More than 30 different puzzle layouts
Fun achievements – earn them all to unlock the Golden Tile Set
Optional tile highlighting – removable tiles appear lighter in colour. This can be adjusted in Settings
Helpful assistance features including the ability to shuffle the tiles or undo moves
A choice of decorative tile sets and traditional backgrounds (select from the Settings menu)
Automatically saves when you exit.

PreCentral has announced its best of 2010 award winners. The results are somewhat predictable, but do highlight some of the very good apps available for webOS.

“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the PreCentral.net Best of 2010 Awards. We received more than 27,000 votes for this year’s awards, and the wide array of winners reflects the variety and ingenuity of the webOS developer community, both official and homebrew. Dozens of apps to choose from, made by dozens of skilled developers, but in the end, there can be only one Best of 2010.

So, without further ado, the winners are… listed after the break. Yeah, such a tease.”

Fox News, of all places, has nabbed an exclusive on the upcoming PalmPad. It isn’t confirmed yet, but it does look feasible- it will run on Sprint’s 4G network, has a mini HDMI port and front and rear cameras (1.3 and 3 Megapixels) with LED flashes each.

The PalmPad is slightly thinner than the iPad with rounded edges closer to the Amazon Kindle. At 1.25 lbs, the PalmPad also sports a USB 3.0 port and a “multi-switch” just like the one on the Palm Pre.

The three versions being shown off at CES haven’t been finalized yet, but will probably have a larger screen than the university version, one nearly identical to the 9.7-inch LCD on the iPad.

Angry Birds Seasons is now available for webOS for $1.99. That’s the boring days before Christmas sorted for Pre and Pixi owners…

Angry Birds Seasons: What Everybody Wants For Christmas From now on, every season is an Angry Birds season. After the special treats of Halloween, Angry Birds Seasons returns with another gift that keeps on giving: Season’s Greetings for the Holidays! Count down the 25 days of Christmas with Angry Birds! Frolic in the fun new levels in a snow-filled winter wonderland! A very merry Golden Egg full of holiday spirit! Angry Birds Seasons also contains all 45 Halloween levels!

Rebooting the consumer perception of Palm is a lengthy new editorial at Pre Central which is worth dumping onto InstaPaper for when you have a few minutes spare. Many think that HP needs to act with urgency, but I tend to take the view that the right product will succeed whatever the timing.

CES 2011 is just a few weeks away, and we’re all assuming (and hoping) that Palm announces some awesome new devices to replace the aging hardware that’s out there right now. At this point, given the current marketshare numbers, what might be needed more than the new hardware is a new consumer mindset pertaining to Palm.

In this mess of smartphone operating systems, how is Palm to differentiate itself and make the case for why Joe Consumer should buy a webOS phone over an iPhone or Droid? Reboot, reset, and start over. Palm needs to be aggressive with their advertising. It can’t be “We’re still here.” No, the message must be “We are here. This is why we’re awesome.”

DigiTimes has posted an article claiming that Inventec is in line to win a contract to build 6-7 million webOS tablets next year. As much as I believe webOS to be an ideal candidate for the tablet form I suspect this information came from one place- thin air.

Doug Reid from Stifel Nicolaus is predicting that a webOS tablet will appear in March 2011 and that it will have a 10.1″ screen. The idea is nice, I must say, and the prospect of webOS on a tablet would seem to work well, but time will tell as to if it turns out to be true. More at webOSroundup.

Don’t ditch your Pre or Pixi just yet, because webOS 2.0 will be available for your Palm phone in the coming months. Josh Marinacci announced it in a recent speech which you can watch below. via pre central.

ZDNet has posted a hands-on review of the Palm Pre 2 and it attains a decidedly average outcome. It is not looking good for a 247 review of the Pre 2 anytime soon- will explain all next week, should make for an interesting explanation…

Regular readers know that I have a very long history with Palm devices, having started using them in 1997. Like many folks, I was very excited after seeing the webOS announcement at CES 2009 and stood in line to buy my own Sprint Palm Pre later in the Summer of 2009. I returned it after a couple of weeks because I just did not have great Sprint coverage in my area at the time (this has improved significantly over the last year). I missed the functionality of webOS and switched from a MyFi to a Palm Pre Plus on Verizon in early 2010. Sprint then released the EVO 4G and I gave my Pre Plus to my sister-in-law and dropped Verizon because the Pre Plus hardware was problematic, Sprint was much cheaper than Verizon, and the EVO 4G had everything I wanted in a single device.

I have to admit that I have been missing webOS and became even more interested in the platform after seeing the new features in webOS 2.0. Palm announced that the new Palm Pre 2 would coming to Verizon soon (likely early 2011), but I have no plans to leave Sprint and go back to Verizon. I was surprised by a Tweet last Thursday that a GSM SIM-unlocked version of the Palm Pre 2 was for sale at the HP store. I jumped over to the HP site on my Nokia N8 and ordered one for myself because I wanted to try out webOS 2.0 and also did not want to switch carriers. My Pre 2 arrived the next day and I have been using it with T-Mobile since then. Check out my image gallery and thoughts below on why I am pleased with my new Pre 2, but think HP still has some work to do when it comes to the hardware.