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 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.

Yesterday Palm announced their financial results for Q3 FY2010 and it was ugly. Worse news is that Q4 is going to be even uglier. Palm made a loss of $102.8m. In terms of cash flow, Palm burned through an additional $22m cash this past quarter, still spending more than they are managing to bring in. Nearly a million phones were shipped, while only 408,000 were actually sold. Ouch. This was also fewer than the 573,000 phones sold during Q2.

Given that Palm has an excellent software platform in WebOS and competitive hardware in the Pre, I blame their woes on:

1. Their initial exclusive tie-up with Sprint which was not good for them as Sprint did not invest enough in marketing the Pre. It also meant that by the time Palm launched on Verizon their moment had past, and the Droid had arrived in a big way, stealing what little thunder was left for the Palm. The Droid sold 1.05m units in the first 74 days after launch, more than the iPhone’s 1m units.
2. Their restrictive practices around developing WebOS apps as well as restricting access to the apps to users in the US.

How is Palm going to reverse their fortunes? They still have options, but will have to move quickly if they want to stay relevant.

They should launch in South Africa. That will be turn things around. Maybe not for Palm but it will for me and Alastair and Roland, the only 3 Palm Pre users in Africa.

WebOS does not provide a way to change the screen fonts. Pretty poor if you ask me. Anyway I have been struggling to read the text on my Pre’s tiny screen. Still struggling but can now at least read my sms text. Accomplished this by downloading from Precentral.net a patch to reduce the messaging text to 15 pixels. Edited the patch file, which is a normal text format file. Replaced 15 with 36 and voila – VERY BIG text. See picture below. Installed the patch using WebOSQuickInstaller, also available via precentral. Now just need to figure out how to increase font in emails and how to get web browser to wrap text when zoomed in.

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.