We aren’t trying to lump these two together or anything, but we figured we’d give those of you who opted for Palm’s second set of webOS handsets an opportunity to pool your thoughts in order to make the smartphone landscape an even better place to survey. We personally didn’t find too much new to laud on Verizon’s Palm-branded twofer compared to the original Pre and Pixi , and those of you who were hoping for all new hardware from the company at CES were undoubtedly let down. Still, there’s something to be said about a webOS product on America’s “largest 3G network,” and frankly, we’re interested in hearing how you’d change things
Just hours after we wrapped our mitts around what looked to be Palm’s official webOS 1.4 changelog , along comes this: confirmation from none other than Sprint itself. According to a post on the carrier’s official forums by Sprint Admin ‘izzyks,’ both the Pre and Pixi will see the long-awaited webOS 1.4 update hit sometime tomorrow evening. As always, users will see an OTA alert when the new files are ready for consumption, and you can find a full list of the fixes and changes just beyond the break
We hate to yell “Pre!” at the top of our lungs here, since we’d really like to see further exploration of the portrait QWERTY form factor for Android, but it’s hard to avoid the form factor and stylistic comparisons. The new “Smooth” phone from ZTE is a low-end handset running Android 1.6, with a 2.8-inch QVGA screen, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS and a love for Palm industrial design. The phone, which is being shown off at MWC, should retail under 1000 Yuan (about $146 US) and be released in August of this year as a low-end smartphone contender.
What do you call a long press in the gesture area on a webOS phone?
If you’re a Palm Pre owner who’s been craving some old-school distraction, rejoice! You can now play Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance games on your smartphone. Game Boy Advance games, like Mario Kart Short Circuit, aren’t quite running at full speed yet—about 60% of normal speed with sound or 90% without—but Game Boy and Game Boy Color games work just fine, and, as they say, emulators can’t be choosers. The VisualBoyAdvance for WebOS project only started two weeks ago, so hopefully updates and improvements will be quick to follow.
Yea, you read that right — fifty apps loaded side by side by freaking side on the Pre Plus , and the thing just kept on ticking. The chaps over at Pre Central decided to test out specifically how much of an improvement the doubling of RAM and storage in the new handset delivered, and they were not disappointed
Chris Ziegler. Sean Cooper. Together, again, at last – and this time, even in the same goshdarn room! Get the raw, uncensored take on new mobile communications technology developments from companies like Palm, LG, Samsung, and Sony! Almost live and direct from the showroom floor: It’s the Engadget Mobile Podcast, CES Edition 2010, Volume 1.0
Jon Rubinstein dropped the news only minutes ago that the new Palm devices—the slightly-upgraded Pre Plus and Pixi Plus—would be arriving on Verizon later this month. I got some hands-on time with them, and while the Pre Plus has had the navigational button removed, little else has been touched aesthetically.
We just had a chance to play around with the new Palm Pre Plus (and Palm Pixi Plus ), and we must say — they’ve made some solid improvements to these devices. We’re going to focus on the Pre, since it’s really had the bulk of the changes. Firstly, it’s now a Verizon branded (and bound) phone, which should bump the status of the device in many people’s minds
Yeah, yeah — we’ve seen a fairly weak effort to ape the Pre before, but this… this is the knockoff webOS device your shady side has been waiting for
Don’t expect anything awesome (like “new features” for example), but Pre and Pixi owners are getting a minor boost today in the form of webOS 1.3.5.1, being pushed out to handsets as we write this. The ultra-minor “.1″ on the end there portends the cold, hard reality here, which is that the new ROM does nothing but fix one absolutely critical bug that couldn’t wait for the next major release: the unceremonious clearing of all calendar events after syncing to an Exchange account
The Palm Pre is coming to Verizon early next year.
While Palm’s Pre is many things to many people it still can’t game. Oh sure, it’ll play Magic Fortune Ball like a champ but when it comes to intensive 3D action the Pre is as helpless as a would-be terrorist trying to ignite his underwear. See, webOS and the Mojo SDK currently can’t exploit the GPU the way other smartphone platforms can.
Well, we knew it was coming today , and it’s here now—Sprint is pushing WebOS’s latest update to Palm Pres and Pixis as you read this.
We always knew Palm would be bringing the Pre to Verizon sometime in early 2010 , and it looks like preparations are underway: check out this leaked internal training slide, which describes a 20-minute Palm / webOS training that runs until January 4th. Interestingly, that’s the day before CES, so we’re guessing we’ll be hearing something about all this during Palm’s CES event — and if we had to guess, we’d wager that that updated Pixi with WiFi will somehow figure into the mix as well. Verizon begins internal webOS training originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 16 Dec 2009 16:28:00 EST
