Well this is interesting. HP is bundling webOS phones with laptops? Yep… all you have to do is buy their performance ProBook notebook, and you get a Palm Pixi (pictured above) or the Pre Plus, free of charge. This move has us saying a collective “… huh.” But hey, we’re not the ones behind the switch. Perhaps it’s the last push people need to scoop up an HP laptop? You tell us.
[Source: HP's website]
How many times did you beg your parents to get you a drum set when you were a kid? I’ve lost count. My parents wouldn’t let me get drums, but they did let me have a trumpet instead (which in retrospect is probably just as loud….). The trumpet never took away my desire to play around around on a drum set, and because my Sprint Pre now has 1.4.5, I can.
I can drum all I want and not make an absolute racket with Natural Drums by Evil Ananas. It’s not a very complicated app, but it is fun nonetheless. You basically get a virtual drum set to play around with: a snare drum, a bass drum, and two tom-toms. You also get a hi-hat cymbal, a ride cymbal, and a crash cymbal. (Sorry Blue Oyster Cult fans, there is no cowbell!)
Attention Hackathon Developers and Testers: we need your information so that you, your company, or your app logo can be featured on the official Hackathon 2010 commemorative poster.
As we mentioned in an earlier post, this will be a 7″ x 11 ” downloadable image that will be available once we have all participants have submitted their information.
Here is the information we need:
Please email all this information to david@webosroundup.com. We are really excited about this poster, and think you will love it too. Once again, thank you very much to not only the developers, designers, and testers, but to each and every one of you that participated in our Hackathon last Saturday. It couldn’t have been a success without you.
Update: Oh it’s on now! BusinessWire posted that HP raised its bid to $27/share. Shortly after, Dell matched their offer. HP has again raised its bid to $30/share!!! … Someone is gonna make quite the payday by the end of this…
Hewlett-Packard is on quite the shopping spree lately. After acquiring music streaming service company Melodeo in July, HP this week laid out a large bid for cloud services and storage specialist 3PAR – outbidding Dell handily in the process. But Dell has come back in force, upping their offer to 30 cents per share over HP’s bid of $24 per share. Rather then counter-bid, today HP simply acquired a different company, Stratvia Databases, that offers similar services to 3PAR. The terms of the deal are undisclosed as of this writing.
This is but one move in a series of many made by many mobile-industry stalwarts including HP, Dell, Google, and Apple with its purchase of Melodeo competitor LaLa to leverage the cloud to provide through mobile devices an always-on connected experience to user content. webOS is already well known for its Synergy service which preserves and maintains among many things your contacts, accounts and app information independently of your physical device. It is apparent HP intends to expand and develop upon the model of and success of Synergy with these corporate acquisitions. If this trend continues, soon all of our information and content may be hopping on the cloud-wagon.
[Sources: @5xBear, Industry Week, UKFAST, Engadget]
So this week the biggest game on the mobile planet made its way to little ole webOS (before Android, to boot!). With all the hype surrounding it you would think that the little
birds were the C40.
Alas… they aren’t a new phone, but they sure will make playing with the old one an absolute blast. Simply put, Angry Birds is the most fun you can have on a Pre (and later a Pixi), but before I start gushing too much (that will come later), lets start at the beginning.
Can’t decide whether to buy a Palm Pre or an iPhone? How about both in one device. Check out this obvious rip-off on the Palm Pre from China(?). The hardware design is almost exactly like the Pre, but it’s rocking an iPhone Home button. But there is no webOS running on this Palm Pre clone. This GSM only device has an OS that is a very bad copy of iOS.
It may be a bad copy, but at least it tries to make up for it by packing in the features. It’s got a 3″ 240×400 resolution screen, 2 cameras, dual SIM support, a microSD card slot, Bluetooth, Wifi, and an FM radio tuner. If you happen to live in the far east somewhere, you actually may be able to get your hands on one of these babies.
Don’t worry folks, we are pretty sure that this is not a leaked version of the upcoming and unreleased next-gen Palm phone. Be sure to hit up the source link to see more pictures.
[Source: MicGadaget via UberGizmo]
Date: #4 (Wednesday, August 25th)
Synopsis: This episode will focus on app analytics and what to do with them.
Special Note: We call this episode #5 in the broadcast. There are actually reasons behind this, but we are really just going to blame it on the fact that Greg doesn’t know how to count.
You can play and download the podcast from our usual suspects:
webOS Internals has done it again. We’ve all seen the great things that they have done with some of the more experimental overclocking kernels. All of the alpha testing in those kernels has brought some nice features to the more stable (and more for the masses) UberKernel. If you already have UberKernel installed, you may want to go check Preware for updates, because a new version of UberKernel was just released, along with a new version of Govnah.
Read the rest of this entry »
The Palm App Catalog hasn’t been the greatest when it comes to finding exactly what you’re looking for, nor has it been very good at filtering out the fuzz of “spam apps” as we like to call them. Until recently, the search capabilities were sub par and frustrating to use, if useful at all.
Some developers have risen to the occasion by creating applications that hook into the catalog to provide features such as search and filters. UberAppCat (free) by MetaViewSoft is one of them.
Of all the many uses for your Palm Pre or Pixi smartphone did you ever think of using it as a live picture frame? Slide RSS by developer Appsotutely ($2.99) puts an interesting spin on creating random slideshows for you to enjoy on your Palm Pre or Pixi while it’s on the Touchstone or sitting on your desk.
If you don’t mind scanning through photos of random items on the Internet, you may enjoy this app. For personal photos? Not so much. I’ll explain in a bit.
The apparently eco-conscious carrier O2 UK has put phones from HTC, Palm, LG, Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Samsung through a battery of tests to determine their environmental friendliness. Unfortunately only 93 percent of O2 UK’s phone lot is represented, with Apple and RIM both absent from the results.
The results concluded that while phones like the purposefully ‘Green’ Sony Ericsson Elm performed very well, the Palm Pre Plus tied with the LG Etna for the title of least eco friendly. While this is one test from one carrier with a hobbled list of tested phones compared with some of Palm’s competition here in the US, it is still troubling news. Apple, after taking some huge pubic relations hits to its image in 2006 from information released by Greenpeace, has made a concerted effort to be seen as a ‘Green’ company. If the results produced by the O2 UK study are accurate, Palm needs to react swiftly and strongly to correct this potentially huge issue. With new hardware almost certainly to be released in the near future, Palm can ill afford any missteps on their road back to profitability.
[Source: Gizmodo]
When a large software company creates a product and ships it, and then their users complain about the bugs that are prevalent throughout said software, you expect them to take some time to fix the problems rather than let them sit. This is, obviously, not the case with the Evernote app, and a lot of webOS users are starting to call the company out on it.
If you’ve been following this for the last few days, though, you know that this isn’t really news to anyone. What would be news, though, is if the company began to start feeling some of the effects of hundreds of their users suddenly deciding to not use their service anymore. And again, that’s exactly what is happening with our ‘friends’ at Evernote.
Apparently, @tklr has sent an email to some people at Evernote to inform them that he was downgrading his account until they gave some attention to their webOS app (rather than let it ‘sit on the backburner’ like they recently said). As you can imagine, that got someone’s attention, and it seems that there is an email sitting in the CEO’s inbox about this very issue.
Will Evernote finally make the fixes necessary to make their product usable (we don’t necessarily need a new app, just some bug fixes), or will they continue to ignore their customers and leave the app alone?
I guess we’ll just have to wait (and hope) and see.
