Archive for the ‘ South Africa ’ Category

My Palm Pre is purring again :)

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.

Palm Pre WebOS 1.4 update takes more apps away

The just-released 1.4 update for Palm WebOS appeared on my Pre a day or so after it was released in the states on Sprint. Pretty impressive. It was only 38mb so I downloaded it right away. The download and installation went without hiccups, but now none of my patches work and I cannot install or update any patch of homebrew app via Preware. The latter simply opens the Palm App Catalog which as my readers will know is not available on my Palm. I wonder if there is a way I can downgrade my Palm to an older version of WebOS. Think I will first try to uninstall and reinstall Preware. Will let you know.

Kindle arrives in 5 days

Remember my post of a few days ago? Well the promised Kindle arrived here in Cape Town 5 days later. I am seriously impressed.

Amazon promises to send me a new Kindle

So my Kindle’s screen stopped working the other day. Well not the whole screen, but a section of it sort of froze with bits of images on it. I tried all the self-help stuff, like pressing the power switch for 30 seconds, then pressing the Home screen, and so on. Nothing worked. Eventually I phoned Amazon’s customer service number. Within 5 minutes of quizzing me and getting me to perform diagnostics on the device, the guy on the phone said Amazon will ship me a new Kindle! All the way to Cape Town! At no cost!  If that is not mind-blowingly impressive then I don’t know. Especially for a South African. Will it be too much to hope that they send it via courier and not via the postal service?

Storm needs a stiff sausage

Korean iPhone users are reportedly using meat sausages to poke their phone screens as an alternative to taking off their gloves and using their own meaty digits. Too cold there.  Sausage sales are up. Neat if slightly gross trick. I wonder if the Koreans replace their meat sticks before expiry? Or maybe they eat them.

These sausages won’t work on my Storm 2 though. Needs a much stiffer poker to get the SurePress screen to respond. I haven’t tried them, but a solid piece of biltong or dro”ewors may work. These salted and dried South African delicacies will also last much longer – won’t find expiry dates on them.

Day 4 with Storm 2

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.

Who needs a MiFi when you can have a Pre Plus instead

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.

Nokia N900 not coming to South Africa, but…

According to Tania Steenkamp, Communications Manager for Nokia South Africa, the company does not plan to bring the Maemo-based N900 to South Africa. This is bad news all round for South Africans, especially if you were hoping to get it on a network contract upgrade, but if you are really desperate you can pick one up at Johannesburg-based Ca-Cellular for ZAR6,399.00.

Palm Pre over the air OS update worked!

My Palm Pre downloaded the new 1.3.1 version of WebOS over the air, installed itself, and the phone still works. Pretty impressive given that the download was nearly 130MB and that the phone did the download by itself in the background. It took 2 days. Hard to know exactly how much the download cost, but probably not much less ZAR130.

1.3.1 contains a long list of improvements, one of them the ability to manually configure the mobile network settings for MMS. This is great as I should be able to send and receive MMS messages once I have configured it. The settings for my mobile network MTN are:

  • APN : myMTN
  • Username: mtnmms
  • Password: mtnmms
  • MMSC: http://mms.mtn.co.za/mms/wapenc
  • MMS Proxy: 196.011.240.241:8080

126MB download over MTN South Africa network. Really?

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.

Is this the first Pre in Africa?

I bought O2 German-version GSM Palm Pre a couple of weeks ago from my trusty importer and on-line cellphone retailer Ca-Cellular www.cacell.co.za. The keyboard layout is qwertz not qwerty, but I have been following the Palm Pre’s journey with interest for a long time so wasn’t going to be put off by one misplaced key. Been a Palm fan since way back; still take my Treo 650 out of its box from time to time; and have high hopes of WebOS and the Palm Pre/Pixi.

Have been using the Pre for a couple of weeks now, and have mixed feelings about it. More about that later, but I was just wondering if my Pre could be the first one in use in Africa? Wonder how I could find out.

 

Search engine optimization by SEO Design Solutions