The latest on smartphones (and other gadgets)

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.