webOS users may shed that oh-so-familiar Palm shopping bag in favor of HP’s new App Catalog.
Living within the screwy reality of the subsidized phone world sometimes results in rather comical distortions.
Want a Pre 2 on Verizon? Too bad, you’ve gotta keep waiting — but it might be getting a little closer now that the mythical CDMA variant of Palm’s latest handset apparently has its own line item in Best Buy’s inventory system.
Palm’s current hardware situation — or the lack of it — is no laughing matter, but that doesn’t mean the software guys can’t have any fun.
Dang! That’s the theme for this week. Lots of dang news and a heck of a lot of dang phones, not to mention a new dang platform to get into, and a visit from the dang future courtesy of Vlad Slavov.
Resisting pressure from AT&T and Verizon , Sprint had stubbornly held out and refused to significantly lower pricing on its aging Palm Pre and Pixi — despite the fact that they’re not even the Plus versions offered by the other guys. Well, that finally changed a few days ago: you can now score a Pre for $50 and a Pixi for a nice, fat zilch on a new two-year contract after rebate (the Pre’s deal will require a $100 mail-in, unfortunately). With webOS 2.0 hardware presumably around the corner, buying any of this stuff might be a tricky proposition at the moment — but then again, it’s always hard to resist a free smartphone, isn’t it?
T-Mobile USA isn’t backing down with its somewhat controversial “4G speeds” rhetoric for its rapidly-growing HSPA+ network — and when you consider that real-world performance on it can meet or exceed what Clear and Sprint will get you in some markets on WiMAX , we can’t say we blame them. Next to enjoy the 4G-esque experience from the nation’s number four carrier are a few major markets — Boston, San Diego, and Miami — along with Erie, Pennsylvania, Fresno, Palm Springs, Richmond, Spokane, and Topeka. Though the G2 is lining up to be the carrier’s first true HSPA+ smartphone, T-Mobile’s quick to remind everyone that the upgrades also mean that over 15 current devices in its lineup will see some benefits as well; not “4G speeds,” of course, but better than the HSPA they’d had before.
Palm changed some system permissions in PDK -powered apps with the release of webOS 1.4.5 to prevent third-party apps from writing to the /media/internal partition of the phone’s storage, which is all well and good — except for the fact that a number of existing apps use it, which means they’re unable to save data post-upgrade. Amazingly, Palm went ahead with the first US rollout on Sprint a month later anyhow, even though not all apps are kosher with the change yet. Good thing the dev community is all over it, then, right?
We know that Palm plans on having webOS 2.0 out of the door this year — and that it’s “aggressively” cranking on its hardware roadmap — so they’ve got to be in the later stages of testing at this point if they hope for any retail launches in time for the holidays, right?
A few iterations beyond the last time we checked in , the Palm webOS Facebook app is now up to beta version 1.2.30. New features this time around include landscape viewing, improved photo tagging, and the ability to clear all notifications by selecting view all, then using a back gesture to exit the menu. Other changes that are more immediately noticeable are the news feed dropdown menu option (before & after picture after the break) which should be quite useful for those following our tips on managing your Facebook friends , plus the ability to see comments directly in the news feed, instead of just a number indicating how many there are.
Don’t get us wrong, Game Boy is a great platform that brings back some awesome memories of summer camp, but let’s be honest — at the end of the day, NES is where the action’s at.
PreCentral’s 50-app demo on the Pre Plus was insanely (if not excessively) impressive, but is it the only phone out there with the kind of multitasking prowess that mere mortals could never possibly need? No, turns out. Adam Fullerton of iUnlock does a pretty wild demo on Symbian-Guru where he flashes his i8910 HD with a custom ROM that significantly lowers power-on consumption of the phone’s 256MB of RAM, starts running apps, and makes it all the way to 50
We don’t yet know what’s new here, but GSM-flavored Pres are starting to get hooked up with webOS version 1.3.5.2 this evening — a whopping 0.0.0.1 more than the latest and greatest build floating around North America.
