Author: Derek Kessler

We’ve seen those “Project Pink” phones floating around for a while now, and they’ve finally come to the surface. Named Kin One and Kin Two, the two phones slot somewhere between the feature phone and the smartphone. To be offered on Verizon and Vodaphone, manufactured by Sharp, and running software from Microsoft, the Kin phones are more social media devices that happen to make calls than smartphones with social media grafted on (ala Motoblur).

The Kins, which seem to be built off of the same guts as the Zune and also seem to run an extension of the Zune OS, are easily the most social networking-oriented phones we’ve seen to date. But where the slot between feature phone and smartphone is a bit hazy. If anything, seeing as they are very much inspired by Microsoft’s acquisition of Danger a few years back, we’d have to say that these suckers are the new Sidekicks. Which, incidentally, Sharp also built.

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If you were asked to list the premiere games on the iPhone, it’s likely that N.O.V.A. – Near Orbit Vanguard Alliance would be on that list. The otherwordly first person shooter, often described as the Halo of the iPhone, is now available for Palm Pre and Pre Plus owners. With thirteen levels, five environments, six weapons and more, N.O.V.A. brings near console-quality gameplay to mobile platforms. And not only can you engage in the single-player campaign mode, you can also hook up over Wi-Fi and take on up to three of your friends in an all-out death match. Don’t have friends nearby? No worries, because you can log into Gameloft Live and take on anybody anywhere at any time.

N.O.V.A. – Near Orbit Vanguard Alliance is available now from the Palm App Catalog for $6.99.

So there’s plenty of goodness to be had today, with several many new apps, and a massive batch up updates to match. Among those new apps, the popular and all-around awesome N.O.V.A. space-age shooter from Gameloft. Yeah, N.O.V.A.’s here. Of course, there’s more to the App Catalog than kick-ass 3D games – yesterday’s app drop came with a fine slew of reference materials, basic-but-always-fun games, and even a way to track the top 100 tracks on iTunes, assuming that you haven’t updated iTunes past compatibility with your webOS phone. It’s all a list, as usual, and it’s all waiting for you after the break.

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Yup, that’s Firefox of the Linux variety, running on a Palm Pre. It’s the work of Dave Townsend, a developer for Mozilla that works on Firefox (among other open source projects). We don’t have much other info on it, but given the interface, we and Palm Developer Relations Team chief Dion Almaer came to a pretty easy conclusion about it: this is the kind of stuff you can do with the PDK. To quote Kool-Aid Man, OH YEAH!

UPDATE: Dave has posted a "how I did it" article on his blog. Instructions are absent, which is understandable given the hobby project not-even-in-alpha status of this project. All-in-all, it was about two days of work porting the Android project version of Firefox onto webOS, and it’s still buggy and the cramming of the Firefox UI onto the Pre’s screen isn’t exactly a great system. But it’s potential, and potential is something we’re rather fond of here.

Thanks to Bo for the tip!

Launched at the beginning of February, Palm’s Hot Apps competition promises to award $1 million to the top free and paid apps in the Palm App Catalog. Since then, the competition has chugged quietly along, but today got a boost in the arm from Palm. The newly-launched PalmHotApps.com lets you, me, and anybody else with one of those fancy-pants web browser things hop onto the interwebs and track the competition for themselves.

The website breaks down both halves of the competition, paid and free apps, listing the most-downloaded free apps since the start of the competition (currently lead by MojoJungle’s The Helicopter Game) and the highest-revenue paid apps since up to this point in the competition (YouView’s Visual Voicemail at the front). The site also tracks the progress of apps qualifying for the Hot Apps competition, rating their change in ranking from day-to-day and listing up-and-coming apps.

We also have gotten a better idea of what it’ll take to qualify for a piece of the Hot Apps pie: More than 11,625 downloads for a free app, or more than $513.81 in revenue for a paid app. Of course, that number is bound to rise over the remaining 78 days of the competition, but it seems that the barrier for entry is rather low for the time being.

A Hot Apps refresher: The most-downloaded free app between February 1 and June 30 will win $100,000, the #2-21 free apps will be awarded $10,000, and #22-221 will win $1,000. The highest-revenue paid app will net $100,000 at the end of the competition, while #2-21 will get $10,000, and #22-221 will win $1,000 apiece. That’s $1,000,000 total, split amongst 442 developers.

Oh, and if that June 30 date doesn’t seem right, that’s because Palm has extended the end of the Hot Apps competition from May 31 to June 30!

The shocker headline from late last night was that Palm was up putting itself up for sale. According to Bloomberg, Palm enlisted the help of Goldman Sachs and Qatalyst Partners in the quest to find a buyer. If you fear what could come of Palm should they be purchased, Reuters is here to assuage your fears. According to Reuters’ source, Palm’s retaining of the two banks (Qatalyst focuses on technology investments) is not just to arrange a sale. Palm is apparently exploring all options, as we would hope they would.

On the same table as “sell” are at least two other options: seeking additional capital investments (such as the hundreds of millions of dollars injected into Palm by Elevation Partners) and licensing the webOS operating system. Either would allow Palm to remain a standalone company, though if you had to ask us, extra money stands a better chance of success than licensing webOS. The smartphone marketplace is incredibly crowded and Google’s Android OS has snapped up licensees left and right. The smartphone marketplace is growing increasingly crowded, and as much trouble as Palm has had convincing customers to buy their phones, we can see even greater difficulties in getting manufacturers to pick up webOS.

Meanwhile, StreetInsider.com is reporting that Canaccord Adams‘ analysts expect that if Palm is purchased, it will be taken in at below market value (a proposition we find laughable). According to the analysts, four potential buyers have submitted bids between $1 billion and $2 billion (Palm’s market cap stands at a hair over $1 billion). Only three of the potential suitors have apparently made it to the second round of bidding: HTC, Lenovo, and Cisco (surprise!). Yeah, Cisco, the company known to laypersons as the guys that make routers and big video conference rigs only presidents and CEOs can afford.

Palm’s stock rallied hard on the NASDAQ today, ending trading up 17.05%, closing the day at $6.04. Shares of Palm have risen nearly 57% since last Wednesday when the first serious rumors of a buyout surfaced.

Thanks to Mikeh20 and Markus for the tips!

It was a hypothetical question we floated a few months back for a Round Table session, but recently it seems that our hypotheticals are moving more towards the realm of reality. Our friends over at Engadget beat us to the punch on this one, and put together a fantastic list and summary of the companies thought to be considering a bid for purchasing Palm, but we thought it’s something that we should ask to our more targeted webOS audience: who do you think should buy Palm? Poll after the break, as are those comments in which you so want to sound off.

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TripAdvisor (app on left, mobile site on right)

Normally the quick app is an app that we want to draw attention to for positive reasons. TripAdvisor is not one of those apps. To call it half-baked may very well be generous, as the webOS TripAdvisor app is merely a poorly-executed portal to their mobile website. In fact, the website is actually more functional, because you can do things like use the back gesture. In the app there is no way to go back at all, you’re limited to hitting the home button in the top left corner (same as the website) and losing all your progress. The only advantage that the app provides is the nearby button, serving to locate you via GPS. Is finding your location worth the hassle of using the app? Well, it is free, so we can’t ask too much. If you’re looking for a full-featured “what’s around” app, we’re going to recommend something like Zagat To Go or OpenTable, and hope that TripAdvisor gets an update to bring it more in line with what you can get on other platforms.

While we can’t say we’re completely surprised, we are still surprised. Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein has long advocated that Palm’s plan is to go it alone and that they had a path to return to profitability, but Bloomberg is now reporting Palm is putting itself up for sale. According to “three people familiar with the situation,” Palm is working with Goldman Sachs and Qatalyst Partners to find a proper suitor. Bids are expected to come in as early as this week. According to those sources, both HTC and Lenovo are keenly interested in acquiring Palm, and Dell had expressed interest, but has since decided against making an offer. As we would expect, all parties rumored to be involved have declined to comment, but if Bloomberg’s sources are to be believed, Palm’s days as an independent company might be over very soon.

Thanks to everybody that sent this in!

While pretty much every pair of bluetooth headphones offers at least basic functionality to go along with playing music, the Samsung WEP870 Convertible Bluetooth Headset is one of only a few headsets that manage to bring basic stereo music functionality to the traditional headset form factor. It doesn’t hurt that the modular design means you can get music in multiple ways. And it’s also good that this whole combo both looks and sounds pretty decent.

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Winding down the week, Friday’s app drop was a touch lighter than those in the preceding days. That’s okay, because there were still new apps and updated apps, both of which is always good things in our books. Sadly, though, those new apps only numbered to eight, while updates at least managed to top a few dozen. Sure, it’s not the kind of figures we got used to from days gone by, but by no means is this the lightest app drop we’ve ever seen. In fact, there were days where we would beg and plead for this kind of action. At least it’s still more than enough to be listed after the break, right?

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After running exceedingly hot for a few days here with new apps and updates, the pace slowed a bit yesterday. But not by a lot, as we still got a decent handful of new apps and at least one bucket full of updates. And there was some useful stuff in there, such as Torrent Remote for remotely controlling uTorrent, or MoBill for using Authorize.net to send bills to customers from your phone. And Richard Buckminster Fuller Quotes. Oh, wait. Sure, it’s one of four quotes apps from Brighthouse Labs that landed yesterday, but that we have these apps is a sign of the freedom that developers have been granted for the webOS App Catalog, unlike what our friends over at TiPb are witnessing. The great holy list of app freedom, listed after the break as usual.

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Think back one year from today. It was a heady time in the land of Palm. The Pre hadn’t even been released yet, the iPhone 3GS (well, the 3G S at the time) hadn’t been announced, in fact, Palm looked poised for incredible success. A year ago, April 7, was also the day that Palm announced the Mojo Messaging Service (confusing acronymed as MMS) for webOS. Mojo Messaging Service was portrayed as an advanced “push” notification system that not only would allow developers to push alerts out to webOS devices running their apps, it would leverage user data (e.g. GPS location) to managed targeted alerts to specific sets of users. The example given: traffic alerts to those that are actually in the area.

Mojo Messaging Service was to take Apple’s iPhone push notifications and put them on steroids. It would have given developers untold flexibility in managing alerts and allowed them to build much more powerful apps. Not to mention, push notifications would result in notable battery life improvements. Instead of an app like Tweed having to poll the server every 15 or 30 minutes at a set interval, the server could instead contact the phone when you get a direct message or a mention. If you’re the type that gets such notifications on an infrequent basis, you could be looking at significant battery life improvements simply by virtue of your phone not being as active.

So here we are a year later, enjoying the fruits of Palm’s push notifications labors, right? Wrong. A year has come and gone and we have heard nary a peep from Sunnyvale about the future of Mojo Messaging Service. While we fully admit that Palm has a lot on its plate right now, a measure of the webOS platform’s success in our day and age is going to be both the quantity and quality of apps available. While quantity is a direct, albeit circular, metric with the number of devices sold, quality could receive notable improvement with a push notification system.

So, Palm, could you (ahem) push out an update letting us know when we might see the Mojo Messaging Service? 

After the lighter app drops, at least in the new apps category, that we saw in previous days, yesterday brought us a much beefier new apps list. We’ve got two new 3D games, with Skater Nation from Gameloft and the hilarious Family Guy: Uncensored from Glu Mobile. And plenty of other new stuff from a slew of other developers, and the usual bucket or two full of fresh hot updates. Oh, and did we mention that there’s now a text editor app for webOS? Find out for yourself, after the break.

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There’s no getting around it, we love O2 Germany, and we don’t even live anywhere near Germany. Our love for O2 Germany comes mainly in form of their advertising, which has been worlds better than what we’ve seen on the North American continent, and tends to peak out early. Let’s not forget Palm fans in Germany, we love you too, especially when you take pictures of these peaking-out-early ads. In this case, it’s a rather large O2 Germany poster, with the Palm Pixi, QWERTZ keyboard and all, standing front-and-center before devices like the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10, the Motorola Milestone (known as the Droid stateside), and devices from Nokia and LG.

Looking at the ad, there’s no indication whether or not this is a Pixi Plus or the Wi-Fi-less Pixi as seen on Sprint (there’s no Wi-Fi icon in the top bar, but this is stock imagery here). The folks at German phone reseller 7mobile.de may have the answer and then some. They have a listing for a Palm Pixi, complete with UMTS data and Wi-Fi. Then again, they also say it will support video calls and T9 predictive texting. Either way, we would be stunned if the Pixi Plus was not the device that made it oversees, as that’s the device that AT&T is getting (albeit with different radio bands). 7mobile.de also claims an amusing "hours" of standby time and "minutes" of talk time.

At this point we have little doubt that the removal of Wi-Fi from the Pixi was Sprint’s idea, and not something that Palm wanted to do. While releasing the Plus on every other network is little consolation to Sprint Pixi owners, it’s still better than nothing. And it is worth noting that when and if the Pixi hits O2, it’ll be the first time it’s been available outside the United States, some six months after the Pre first hit European shores.

Thanks to gizmo21 and Jens for the tips!

When Palm and AT&T are touting the coolness of YPmobile on the new AT&T Palm Pre Plus and Pixi Plus, we’ve came to realize that it’s the exact same app you can already find in the App Catalog. In fact, we’re disappointed in ourselves for skipping over the app so many times, simply because of the name that conjured up images of super-thick books full of phone numbers and really bad ads on thin yellow paper. The free YPmobile app for webOS couldn’t be further from the yellow-paged days of yore, and that’s a good thing.

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Are you ready for some apps? I doubt it, but here it goes anyway. Yesterday brought us ninety eight (that’s, like, two away from, like, a hundred) new and updated apps. Of those ninety eight, ninety one were updates. If you’re doing your math correctly – there’ll be a test on this later – that leaves just seven new apps. Obviously, our desire would be for significantly more, but the folks at Palm have to work with what they’re given. That’s part of the reason for the upcoming Palm Developer Day: to get more apps into Palm’s submission bin, to approve them, and to get them out to the everyday webOS user. So about those apps foir which we are questioning your preparation? After the break, as you’ve likely already surmised. Click on.

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How do you like your porn stars? If you answered “fully clothed and on my phone,” have we got the apps for you! At least, that seems to be a bit of the theme from developer On The Go Girls, though with a name like that, what else are they going to do? Yesterday’s app drop brought seven new apps, four of adult film stars (and one of Hooters girls) wearing clothes of varying degrees of skimpy. Thankfully, that was offset by another enormous app drop (now I can’t help but read innuendo into everything I’m writing), hopefully designed to bring even more paid apps to our friends in countries that end with something other than “merica.” The list, in all it’s glory, is waiting for you after the jump.

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If we had to pick just one cause behind the failure of the Palm Pre to really catch on with the general public, it’d have to be that increasingly bad advertising from ad firm Modernista that tried and failed to introduce webOS to the world. We won’t link you to them to refresh your memory – you don’t want that. What we will link you to is a report from AdAge: the relationship between Palm and Modernista is over.

Palm is, quite obviously, now in the market for a new ad partner. The new partner will be working with a Palm that has lost a lot of momentum in recent months and has tons of excess inventory to move. Modernista’s ads for Palm have improved recently, so we can’t help but wonder if the parting of ways is more over money than anything else.

Several months ago Cadillac also dumped Modernista, a move that came as part of GM’s restructuring and an effort to cut costs. Modernista is a small independent firm with only a few major clients, and thus charges more than some of their larger Madison Avenue competitors. For their part, Palm has already shifted their focus to point-of-sale advertising (in-store ads and training for store staff) and cut back on expensive television advertising, leaving that to the carriers instead.

[via: PreCentral sister site TreoCentral]

Okay, so maybe it’s more like Palm Developer Weekend, but they’re calling it Palm Developer Day, so we’ll just go with that. Friday April 23rd and Saturday the 24th will see current and potential webOS developers descending on the Palm corporate campus in sunny Sunnyvale, California, to partake in a number of sessions and rub elbows with the Palm Developer Relations Team.

A $25 pre-registration fee will net an attendee access to all sessions, meals (they had some pretty kick-ass pizza last time they did something like this), and even a gift of the commemorative type.

Topical matter for the sessions will include:

• Intro to webOS
• Porting Apps to webOS
• Advanced webOS
• Marketing Your Apps: The Business of webOS Development
• Creating 3D Games for webOS
• Effective Debugging Techniques
• What’s Coming Next in webOS

Yes, it’s not just a Mojo SDK code-a-thon. There’ll be talk of app porting, 3D gaming with the PDK, and of high importance for any developer looking to make a buck or two: marketing. And is that a peak at the future we see there? We think it is.

Pre-registration is open now.

UPDATE: As Lisa from Palm has informed us in these here comments, the Palm Developer Day could almost be considered two separate events. Friday will be "more of a webOS bootcamp" for new developers, while Saturday will be the Developer Day with the keynote, programming sessions, and – this is cool – "office hours" where a developer can get one-on-one time with the Developer Relations Team.