TamsPalm – the Palm OS / web OS Blog

This seems to have slipped under my radar somehow – webOS 1.3.5 is the first to bring OpenGL-related packages.

A webOS head has twittered the following some time ago:

Could this be what the CES event is all about?

Tech journalists suffer from to perpetual rumors: the Apple tablet and Verizon’s webOS box. As this is not TamsIJungle, you get treated to #2 – the latest is below.

The Boy Genius reports the following:

We’ve heard that Verizon Wireless will be 100% carrying the Palm Pixi in addition to the Palm Pre, and that the official names will be the Palm Pre Plus and Palm Pixi Plus.

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As of now, nobody knows what justifies the Plus tag – stay tuned!

P.S. Want my personal guess? More RAM, maybe WiFi for the Pixi and maybe, maybe a better camera.

Network issues have plagued carriers all over the world. After AT&T made headlines, the issue is now more or less universal.

An FT.com interview now quoted a O2 head as follows:

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The head of O2 has apologised to customers who could not make phone calls because the mobile operator’s London network was overwhelmed by bandwidth-hungry smartphones.

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O 2 ran into difficulties in the capital during the second half of 2009 as customers with smartphones such as Apple’s iPhone ramped up use of applications that repeatedly pull data off the internet at short intervals.

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Even though the iPhone definitely is a bandwidth hog, reports of O2 bandwidth issues were covered by industry journals like Mobile ever since 2008.

IMHO, the iPhone is not to blame – instead, blame the overselling of mobile broadband. Today, many households are sold mobile bandwidth rather than wired service and a WiFi router without actually needing it.

This causes large-style network loads (think Windows updates) which are completely unneeded – and much more significant than one or two iPhones.

IMHO, the iPhone is used as a scapegoat here – what do you think?

Image: Wikimedia Commons / HMRC

Verizon has had its fair share of software issues in the past – and it looks like the Palm Pixi is the next victim.

DigiTimes now claims the following:

… Compal Communications in the fourth quarter of 2009 will total only 600,000 units instead of 800,000 units projected previously,

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The orders for Pixi smartphones were reduced as part of the cellphone’s software has failed to pass tests conducted by Palm’s client, Verizon Wireless, said the paper, noting that shipments to Verizon will be delayed to the first quarter of 2010.

Given DigiTimes once flawless track record, I am still somewhat inclined to believe them – but one never knows…

Open standards are lovely – not only because they enable interoperability, but also because the certification bodies frequently disclose information on upcoming devices.

The latest victim – likely a Pre for Verizon – is pictured below:

(No) Further information can be had in the PDF below:
http://certifications.wi-fi.org/pdf_certificate.php?cid=WFA8397

Looks like the Pre hasn’t sold too well after all – while its US sales were somewhat ok, their UK launch partner is said to be sitting on piles of unsold handsets.

In order to get rid of them, the folks at Carphone Warehouse have taken radical measures. The Guardian now reports the following:

Carphone Warehouse is giving away two free airline tickets to anyone who buys a Palm Pre before the end of January as speculation increases that sales of the mobile phone, seen as the closest competitor to Apple’s iPhone have fallen far short of expectations.

Any takers?

Whether you like it or not: China is a huge market for cell phones. Unfortunately, getting statistics on the market is somewhat difficult – which is why having China Mobile talk on 3G handset sales is especially interesting.

Marbridge Daily claims the following distribution:

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8% of procured handsets run Windows Mobile, 16% use the Symbian mobile OS, and 4% use Apple’s iPhone OS, while the rest operate either BREW or the manufacturer’s self-owned OS.
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So much for the death of Symbian and the dominance of iPhone / BlackBerry…

Image: Wikimedia commons / Edzhgz

Usually, Palm raises a little ruckus whenever a webOS update hits the road – their openness has surprised me more than once in the last few months. This time, the boys in Orange seem to be back to their usual selfs – an update to the Pre’s webOS has just been shipped.

According to Sprint, the following changes have been made:

This update includes enhancements to the following:
- Improvement in battery life optimization when in marginal coverage areas.
- QCELP capability fix to allow play and audio of video sent via MMS.
- Launch Google Maps or Sprint Nav when tapping an address from contacts.
- Minimized package of MR size through binary difference. Customers can now download over 2G connections if necessary.

As of this writing, Palm has not stated anything on its version history. Nevertheless, webOS 1.3.5 seems to be real – anybody got the update already?

Looks like the ebook game has just started off for good – Amazon reports that it sold more Kindle books than hardcopy books on the 24th of December.

The release goes as follows:

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) today announced that Kindle has become the most gifted item in Amazon’s history. On Christmas Day, for the first time ever, customers purchased more Kindle books than physical books. The Kindle Store now includes over 390,000 books and the largest selection of the most popular books people want to read, including New York Times Bestsellers and New Releases.

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Not much to add here…

As the web gets more and more interactive (AJAX, anyone?), having a fast JavaScript engine is one of the key elements in delivering a good web experience. On the desktop, browser makers work hard on optimizing their JavaScript engines due to public scrutiny – in mobile, this effect has not taken place so far.

Our friends at NS Basic Corp’s have performed a little benchmark of the various browsers, and ended up with the results outlined below – faster means higher score:

Anybody of you surprised by any of the results?

When it comes to smartphone battery life, the key method for increasing battery life is disabling unneeded functions like GPS, WiFi or Bluetooth. But the question remains: does turning off feature X really pay off, or is it better to leave it on for greater convenience?

The folks at AllAboutSymbian’s used Nokia’s freely available Energy Profiler to find out which feature drains how much power – they compared the amount of power needed before and after turning on the feature, and then posted the resulting charts.

Even though the figures were obtained on a Nokia N96 and thus can’t be interpolated to other devices (for example, larger screens tend to drain more power), they are nevertheless interesting – get the full load at the URL below:
http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/features/item/How_to_Know_how_…

It’s the end of the year. This means next to no news, and loads of top-XYZ lists.

While we usually ignore these beautiful critters on the Tamoggemon Content network, Gizmodo’s most-useless gadgets of the decade list struck my interest.

While most of the victims are weird, largely useless gadgets, the following boxen also made it on the list:

• Sony Clié PEG-NZ90 (IMHO undeserved)
• Nokia N-Gage (all incarnations)
• AppleTV (oh, the horror)
• Motorola Q9m (not sure about the Verizon UI)
• Omnia II (IMHO undeserved)

Feel that the ratings are justified? Let us know in the comments!

Traditional ESDs didn’t have too many troubles with app flooding – most sales came from analyst reviews, while new and toplists were not as important as they are in a centralized app store.

The iPhone is famous for its never-ending flow of crapware permutations out of the same code base – the problem is now on its way to the webOS.

First instances have been reported. Chuq van Rospach, Palm’s community development manager stated the following in response:

Rhetorical question — who do you want to decide what you can buy? Do you want to make that decision yourself? Or do you want someone else to start making that decision for you?

And if you do start letting someone else make that decision, what’s your recourse when that other entity starts making decision you don’t like?

I’m a firm believer in “let the market decide”, folks. If people don’t buy them, the developer won’t make money. If the developer won’t make money, they’ll stop doing it. Fact is, people are buying them. Enough for it to be profitable for the developer? you’ll have to ask the developer.

But be careful about calling for bans, lest whatever rules that get set up happen to draw the line on the wrong side of your applications – because once the gatekeeper decides not to allow something, nobody else gets a vote. Which is okay if you don’t like something (maybe), but definitely not okay if you are the something left outside in the cold. And that’s kinda the point here: you might be, because you won’t get a vote. Or a poll.

I’d rather give an application a chance to fail in the market any time over having someone (even myself) make a decision it’s not worthy of being given a chance to succeed, and as a consumer, I always want the chance to refuse to buy something rather than being told I’m not allowed to consider it.

Be careful what you wish for. You might get it. Me, I’ll stick with being inclusive, even of stuff I might not want, and letting the market have a chance to choose success or failure for it.

The point where I personally see the issue is that regular developers need the toplists to make money. If cheap, clone apps take up the places there, well, you get the ideal.

One solution I would suggest is to limit developers to one release per week. This should not hurt legitimate ones, but stem the flood of clones for good…

Don’t ask me why, but it looks like politicians in the US seem to have a collective alcohol problem, which gets magnified in the Winter due to the availability of various warm hard liquors.

Nope, I am not sarcastic – after the idiocy in Maine, we now have somebody wanting to force retailers to print SAR labels as big as device prices onto the device labels.

SFGate claims the following:

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San Francisco would become the first city in the country to require that cell phone retailers label the devices with the level of radiation they emit under a controversial proposal being discussed at the Department of the Environment and endorsed by Mayor Gavin Newsom.

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Anyone of you want t bet that we will see something dumber in a few days?