The latest on smartphones (and other gadgets)

The long-awaited v2 upgrade to Palm’s WebOS will be called HP WebOS 2. Sorry Palmfans but this is the next step in the demise of the Palm brand. The new WebOS will initially run on the soon to be released Palm Pre 2, but don’t expect a Palm Pre 3 to follow, it is likely to be an HP Pre 3 or some other moniker under the HP brand. Sad for Palm, but good for WebOS, and hopefully ultimately good for us the consumers.

I hope HP is going to sell their WebOS phones in South Africa. SA Palmfans had to get their Pres from all over the world (mine from Germany with a qwertz keyboard) and still don’t have access to the Palm App Catalog. Here’s hoping HP will remember the SA market. HP has a long history of selling laptops, desktop and printers in the SA market and has an established reseller and support network here. C’mon HP.

Take note Palm fans (all three of us in South Africa including me), the first evidence for new Palm phones are surfacing. Thanks to the German certification authority TUV Rheinland, we can now look forward to the P102UNA and P102EWW. These are likely to be the CDMA and GSM versions of a Palm Pre Plus successor. Happy days are here again.

If you are like me, and you have a Palm Pre, but cannot get any full WebOS apps from Palm’s app store, because Palm in their infinite wisdom has opened the store to users in selected countries only, then I have good news for you. Mosey on over to the website of India’s Reliance Mobile, check out the forums, and you may just find a bunch of full WebOS apps and 3D Games ready for download. Download the ipk files and install using WebOSQuickInstall. I have been desperate for a Twitter app that will give background notifications and lo and behold I manage to find the full version of Tweed at this website. Am still trawling through the forum pages, but have so far seen a long list of games and a few useful apps. Go crazy starved Palm people!

I hear HP may be launching a table, codename Hurricane, running Palm’s WebOS, later this year. Please let it be true. HP did say it has big plans for WebOS, and it did scrap its Windows tablet plans. It could look like this:

To my Palm readers, I hear there is an WebOS update coming soon.

I have always been a qwerty man, well at least since qwerty phones became available. I have had many, including Palm Treos, Blackberries, Nokia 9300, E90, E71, E72, N97, HTC TyTn I and II. And now I have the Motorola Milestone, which is the non-US incarnation of the Droid, and I think it may well be the best qwerty phone available today. Let’s take a look at the competition:

Blackberry

All the Blackberries, except the Pearl and the Storm, have qwerty keypads. They generally work well as phones, and the Blackberry signature dish, its push email, is legendary. However, the Blackberry OS’ age is starting to show and smartphone activities such as web browsing, youtubing and tweeting are less than satisfactory on the Blackberry.

HTC

HTC has not produced a qwerty phone in a while. I think their most recent one is the Touch Pro 2 which was released early last year already. If you can remember that far back, it runs the now pretty much defunct Windows Mobile, has a resistive touch screen and 528MHz processor. HTC also produced the G1 which was the first Android phone. A good device but very much first generation Android, while the Droid is 3rd or 4th generation.

Nokia

Nokia has produced many excellent qwerty phones, from the brickish 9500 to the latest and very sexy E72. All very good phones, but boy Symbian is old now and it shows. The internal mail client still cannot handle HTML mails properly. The user interface is clunky. The E72 looks gorgeous until you switch it on. The resistive touch screen on the N97 is junk. The list goes on.

Then there is N900. Doesn’t run Symbian which is good. Instead runs Maemo 5. Not many people has heard of Maemo, but it is an open-source development environment and may be Nokia’s strategy for high-end phones into the future. Maemo looks very promising, with over a 1000 apps available already, but the N900 is very much still a work in progress, and lacks too many features to be a serious contender for the top spot.

Palm

Palm has the Pre and Pixie, and the Plus version of each. The Pre is a portrait slider, which is novel. The keyboard is small but very usable. The WebOS software is a slick and very user friendly platform, arguably the best modern phone OS available today. The appstore is also growing by the day. Ignoring Palm’s financial woes, I’d put the Pre into the second spot after the Droid. Its small screen and keyboard counts against it. Also doesn’t help that the appstore is not available to all users, including yours truly

Motorola

Motorola has one or two other qwerty phones, such as the Devour, but the Droid/Milestone is their flagship, so it is safe to assume that it is their best.

The Droid/Milestone

The first time you clamp eyes on the Droid, I doubt that the words “this is the best qwerty phone in the world today” tumble from your lips. It is quite ugly at first glance, and at second and nth glance to be honest. But use it for a month or two, and you will be impressed. It has a large screen (480 x 854 pixels, 16million colours) making it a pleasure to view web pages and videos on. The screen is a capacitive touchscreen requiring the lightest of touches to interact with. It is fast with a 600MHz ARM Cortex processor. It runs the latest version of Android, namely 2.1, which provides multi-touch, excellent gmail integration, and thousands of apps via the Android market.

So there you have it. The best qwerty smartphone in the world today is the Motorola Droid/Milestone. C’mon HTC I know you can make a better one.

My Palm Pre got me very excited this morning when it announced that WebOS 1.4.1 was available and that it brings PAID APPS to my phone! So I hurriedly downloaded and installed the 12mb update. Only to find afterwards that my app catalog still shows 0 apps wtf? Could it have something to do with the fact that I am currently roaming in Switzerland on Orange?

Check this graph from Business Insider. Tells a story doesn’t it. RIM has been steadily increasing its smartphone market share in the US, mainly by expanding into the consumer market. I have been seeing this strategy here in South Africa as well, with multi-coloured Blackberries heavily advertised on TV and print media, clearly targeting non-business users. The fixed-price surf-all-you-can subscription is a good strategy that is winning many new users.

The graph also shows how badly Microsoft needs Windows Phone 7. Apple has had a strong run but have leveled off recently, maybe because people are waiting for the next OS release. Google’s Android going the right direction also. I guess Symbian has yet to break into the US market, but what can be said about Palm? Or more importantly what can Palm do to reverse the trend? WebOS is excellent, but I think Palm needs better hardware, it needs a killer device. In the meantime it needs to push the Pre/Pixie through as many networks as possible, in as many countries as possible, it needs to spend aggressively on advertising, and of course it needs to open its app store to everyone, not just to US users.

I thought I saw Mark Benford, played by Joseph Fiennes, use a Palm Pre in this week’s episode of Flashforward. Couldn’t be sure as the phone was not displayed prominently enough. Anyone else see it?

Thanks to Alastair, who today is getting what may be the second Palm Pre in Africa, I did a hard reset on my Pre, and reinstalled Preware. Now I can once again install patches using Preware, such as enabling landscape email. Preware still won’t install free apps for me, it launches the Palm App Catalog which is no good as it says that the app is not available in my country. Luckily some free apps, such as TweedFree, can be installed using WebOSQuickInstall. So all is good, as good as it can be until the App Cat becomes available here. Enjoy your new Pre Alastair. Go to www.seidio.com if you want to get an extended battery for your Pre.

WebOS was a pleasure to work with after a few days with the Blackberry. But then Palm had to mess it up. My Pre checked for system updates and then proceeded to install automatically updates for my 3rd party Homebrew apps. All the updates failed following which all the apps have stopped working. Re-installing them via Homebrew also fails now, and of course they are not available for me on the Palm appstore. Living in South Africa means I fall outside the areas that the appstore is currently available in. One the apps is TweeFree, my only access to Twitter on the Pre.  So now I am back on the Storm 2.  Even though RIM’s appstore is also not available in South Africa, I can at least get 3rd party apps elsewhere. Am using OpenBeak for tweeting on the Storm 2.