The latest on smartphones (and other gadgets)

HP is clearly meaning business with WebOS and Palm. A few days ago they launched the TouchPad, Palm Pre3 and Palm Veer, all running WebOS! The TouchPad is HP’s iPad competitor, the Pre 3 is the follow-up to the Pre and Pre 2, and the Veer is a tiny version of the Pre 3. Check the pictures below. Initial impressions are good. WebOS looks great on the tablet and the phones.

To top it off HP simultaneously announced they are going to ship all of their PCs with WebOS pre-installed! Instead of Windows! Bad news for Microsoft, as HP is one of the largest pc manufacturers in the world and has been a Windows faithful for many years. But good news for WebOS, as more devices means more incentive for developers to build apps for WebOS. To make development for the various WebOS devices easy, HP also announced a new developer toolkit which will enable development of WebOS apps that are screen resolution agnostic, i.e. the same app will work on WebOS phones, tablets and PCs. Way to go HP.

Latest on the upcoming Palm WebOS 2.0 device is that it will be code named Mansion, have an 800 x 480 screen, and no keyboard. I guess the Pre moniker was odd already so no reason to complain about Mansion, but no keyboard?! Hopefully this will be the first of a plethora of new Palm devices and some of them will have keyboards. Me, I like them qwerties.

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!

Alastair says the Palm Pre/Pixie Plus will be in SA within weeks. Iti Distributors (I think) is bringing them into the country officially. I would like to know who they are going to market the phones, and are they going to supply them to the local mobile network operators which can make them available on airtime contract upgrades. Let me know if you hear anything more Alastair.

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.

Bet you Palm did not see this one coming. While trying to register as a WebOS developer with Palm, psartini received an error message containing code with references to VAT – Value Added Tax, which is a tax used in many countries around the world, including South Africa. People are saying that this code points to the fact that Palm is getting ready to make paid apps on the App Catalog available to international users. Am holding all my thumbs, not all the time of course, only when I am not typing on my phone. In addition Electronic Arts are making their WebOS games available for free to international users, until end of this month apparently. This is another clue pointing towards international paid apps coming soon, maybe April. I received an email from O2 Germany this morning about EA games for the Pre. You may recall that my Pre is from O2 Germany. Unable to read much German at all ja, I assumed it was about paid apps, but now I know different. Am going to see if I can download the EA games via the App Catalog tonight. Exciting times ahead. Thanks to Alastair for passing this info on.

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.

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:

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