The latest on smartphones (and other gadgets)

A few days ago I thought the Novatel MiFi personal 3G wifi router was a cool gadget. If you missed that post, read it here. Now I hear that Verizon is bringing a new app to the brand new Palm Pre/Pixie Plus that turns the phone into a wifi hotspot that up to five devices (laptops etc) can use to access the internet via the phone’s 3G connection. How cool is that? Why has no one else done this before? Conceptually any phone with support for wifi and 3g should be able to do this.

Verizon is going to charge an extra US$40 for this, which will include a 5Gb a month allowance. And I thought broadband allowances were a unique feature of the South African networking landscape (we call them caps). Here’s hoping that the independent developer community will run with the idea and develop the same type of app for all the mobile platforms.

When I zoom in on a page in the web browser, which I frequently have to do as my eyes cannot cope with the default small font, the Palm Pre does not wrap the text to fit the screen. Ok, that is not entirely true. Zooming in by double-tapping the screen results in a wrapped screen, but the font is still too small for my eyes, and subsequent double-taps have the same effect as asking Santa to this year remember that special present you asked for last year.  As a result I have to zoom in using the two finger stretch gesture which gives nice big font but requires scrolling left and right again and again in order to read the text. It is a major drawback that I hope Palm will fix soon. Try the same thing on the HTC Hero, running Android 1.5, and it re-formats the page beautifully, both in the default browser and the brilliant new Dolphin browser. See what I mean in the picture below:

It finally happened – happened
It finally happened – ooh woh
It finally happened – I’m slightly mad – oh dear !

This is what Freddie Mercury sang in the Queen song I’m Going Slightly Mad. Well, I’m not mad, but the unthinkable has happened. The iPhone is now copying the Palm Pre! Who would have thought. Everyone has been copying the iPhone, but no longer. The Pre’s multi-tasking card based UI is very good, and if you can’t wait till your contract expires before replacing your aging iPhone with the Pre, get Proswitcher for your iPhone. Together with Backgrounder, another cool app by Cydia, your iPhone will behave just like a Pre, running apps in the background and letting you view them as cards and switch between them.  If you don’t know Cydia, think Appstore but with apps you cannot get through iTunes. Read about Cydia here.

To install Proswitcher follow these steps:

• Yes, you need to jailbreak iPhone first.
• Install Installer.app
• Install Cydia
• You need backgrounder app installed from Cydia. Launch Cydia > Select “Sections” at haptic menu > Select “System” category > and select “Backgrounder” or you can tap “Search” in Cydia and type “Backgrounder” > Select “install” button at the right top and confirm it to install.
• Then add the following source/Repo to Cydia:
  http://booleanmagic.com/repo
  (How to: add source to cydia)
• Search for ProSwitcher in Cydia and install it.

What was Palm thinking when they put that 1150mAh battery into the Pre. It looks like an after-dinner chocolate wafer and generates approximately the same amount of energy. Running your Pre on that battery is like being a dog on a leash. Can’t stray further than the length of the charger cable. Late last night I introduced my Pre to Mr Seidio, all 2800mAh of him. He made a huge impact as you can see from the photos below, and after a long night which involved a cable also, Pre and her new beau can be seen here, very much the happy and expectant couple. When asked Pre confessed that she quite likes Seidio’s rough exterior.

Palm provides updates to its OS over the air to the Palm Pre. The latest version 1.3.1 is now available to European models, including mine which was imported from Germany. The update is 126MB large so may be a challenge for the local mobile phone network. Will see how it goes.