Author: Dieter Bohn

We didn’t see any of the Mom-focused Verizon commercials for the Pre, unfortunately, but we did briefly see the Pre appear in a commercial for SMS Info company KGB.

It was bittersweet, though, as not only did the Pre take the fall as a stand-in for "finding information via the web," but it also had to suffer a "simulated screen image" that showed a featurephone interface instead of our beloved webOS. It also stood in incredibly stark contrast to another smartphone commercial. The Pre appears in the hand of a skinny guy who gets obliterated by a sumo wrestler, the Motorola Devour in the hand of Megan Fox in a bathtub.

Both videos after the break for your post-superbowl webOS schadenfreude viewing ‘pleasure.’

Thanks to everybody who sent this in!

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We’re proud to say that The iPhone Blog is now TiPb: your #1 iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad blog!

A little SPE network news before we get to our weekly list o’links. We’ve been calling TiPb ‘TiPb’ instead of ‘The iPhone Blog’ for so long now, we figured we may as well make it official. Add in that the iPhone platform now encompasses the iPhone, iPod Touch, and the newly announced iPad and renaming the site pretty much became a foregone conclusion. Same great content, new shorter URL to type in!

Score another point for fast and easy development for webOS. Mozilla Labs has announced they’re working on a Weave Sync client for webOS. Weave is Mozilla’s way of syncing bookmarks, passwords, history, and even open tabs from your desktop Firefox to your mobile device (and eventually to mobile Firefox on your mobile device).

On webOS, the client is "all just tests," which is to say you’re going to be doing some digging into .js files to get it working. Also, the client is just a viewer for your data, there’s no syncing or editing here. That last is perhaps not likely to change anytime soon, as webOS has the browser pretty well locked down.

What about mobile Firefox for webOS. We’re not Mozilla, so we don’t know – what we do know is that if you hit the menu inside the launcher and tap "Default Applications," a placeholder is there to someday set a different browser as the primary browser. So webOS is architected to allow for mobile Firefox (or mobile whatever), should somebody wish to get their tech onto the devices.

thanks to everybody who sent this in!

O2 Litmus is O2 UK’s portal for mobile apps and mobile app developers. Got that? Now get this: they have three Palm Pre phones to give away and they’re doing it in a clever contest:

Tweet a message of just what lengths you would go to win a Palm Pre to @o2_litmus and become our follower. Get creative to keep your story under 140 characters, though you can link to external sites through url shorteners such as bit.ly.  Entries must be tweeted by 8:00 p.m. GMT on Monday 8 February

Check out the blog post for more details or go on and see what sort of competition you’re up against on twitter, but beware, promises of oiled panda wrestling and giraffe robbery await you.

via @foxycar

Jay points us to this PreCentral Forum Thread where folks in New Jersey, New York, Detroit, and Philly seem to be having issues with data on Sprint. Our pals at CrackBerry.com’s forums also are posting sporadic reports of the same. Twitter isn’t exactly aflame with ire, but then again if data was out on Sprint, it might be hard for people to tweet it up, though @jakeroz did just tweet up that Sprint Support says there are outages. Anybody out there with Sprint data issues?

Update: looks like most folks have data now, move along. 🙂

We knew that the Palm Pre was coming to SFR in France, but details on the launch have been a little harder to track down. Looks like it’s coming quite soon, as SFR is having a launch party for developers (and a developer contest separate from Hot Apps) on February 9th, complete with Palm luminaries Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer.

You can sign up for a newsletter, try to score an invite, or just meditate on the meaning of a man being trapped in a giant lightbulb at the SFR Jeunes Talents Développeurs site. You can also follow @sfrjtd on twitter, if that’s how you roll.

Developers take note: Interpret is looking to find a bit more about you and they have a brief survey to do just that – finish that, enter your info at the end, and be entered into a drawing for a free Palm Pixi or Palm Pixi Plus. Non-developers, feel free to take part to be entered as well. Either way, go on and let ’em know how you’re feeling about mobile apps these days.

Click here to take the survey and enter for your chance to win!

(Keep in mind the survey is being run by the folks at Interpret, not everybody who takes the survey may be eligible to finish it. If you don’t qualify, fret not, we’re giving away a Palm Pre or Palm Pre Plus next week for the Smartphone Round Robin, here’s the latest forum thread for you chance to win)

Here’s a feel-good story for you: our pal TIWizard of WizardApps was spotlighted in his local news this week, talking up the apps that are going to put the 15-year-old webOS developer through college. Andrew Munsell (as humans refer to him) makes several apps now, including:

• Weatherman, which updates your wallpaper with the weather (also available in Lite and a Homebrew Graduate, to boot)
• Stickyman, which does the same for sticky notes (and just missed making my own personal top ten webOS apps)
• LOL, which aggregates various lolblogs (and was built with the Ares development platform, by the by)
• Don’t Taze Me, Man, for amusing taze action
• Fart Man, which does exactly what you think.
• QuickClip, a neat little text-clipping app

…This, folks, is one of the reasons webOS is so exciting: how easy it is for developers to quick learn and ramp up to creating apps, not to mention selling them via the App Catalog in fairly short order. Big up to you, TIWizard! Everybody else, feel free to say howdy in the WizardApps Developer Forums 

Dieter and Derek talk webOS, Verizon’s new advertising, and speak of the iPad despite a chatroom rebellion.

• Download it directly with this link
• Subscribe via iTunes
• Subscribe directly to the Podcast feed with your favorite Podcatcher here
• Listen to it here with the player above

Thanks to everybody for writing and calling in!

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It’s time we made the rounds again – this week we’re opening the kimono (metaphorically, thank god) and showing you which apps your PreCentral.net editors use every day. After the break, take a gander at what we’re using every day and be sure to tell us what you’re using in the comments.

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Over at jkOnTheRun, James Kendrick has posted up results comparing the Mobile Hotspot feature on his Palm Pre Plus to the MiFi Mobile Hotspot device. His results are pretty disheartening: speeds on the Palm Pre Plus and Palm Pixi Plus are noticeably slower than on the dedicated MiFi hotspot. I don’t have a Verizon MiFi to test against, but I have gotten faster download speeds than James did, however my upload speeds are lackluster to say the least. At right, the results of both of our tests, averaged over multiple attempts at Speakeasy (2 for James, 3 for me).

Update: I just realized that I had the "Unthrottle Download Manager" patch installed. I just removed that and ran another battery of tests and am getting slightly slower speeds, but not enough for me to think that this patch affects data speed – 3G is often wildly different from test to test, even from the exact same location.

After the break we’ve posted two polls that we’re asking only Verizon users to fill out: if you’re using Mobile Hotspot, what kind of data download and upload speeds are you getting? People using Mobile Hotspot on Sprint via ‘nefarious’ methods and people using other methods of tethering webOS, please sit this poll out and instead post your results in the comments.

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After representing Windows Mobile for two years running the Smartphone Round Robin, this year I’m taking at a look at it from a webOS user’s perspective. Windows Mobile (which can be found on Windows Phone) has had a rough year wherein the big launch was 6.5, which was a minor update to 6.1, which itself was a minor update to 6.0, which some have argued was more like Windows Mobile 5.5 than anything… you get the picture, Windows Mobile hasn’t seen much in the way of huge OS updates for a long time now.

So where’s the action at? It’s at HTC, who has churned out what is probably the coolest single piece of smartphone hardware of the past year and who has also developed this thing called ‘Sense’ that’s less a theme or skin and more a symbiotic app suite that replaces as much of the look and feel of Windows Mobile as humanly possible.

We’ll delve into all that and more, after the break!

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It’s Tuesday, and that means it’s time for PalmCast Live! We’ll chat up the week’s news like we always do, so come on over at 8pm Eastern for your webOS fix.

You can tweet your questions in with the  #palmcast hashtag for our lightning round. We’re also told that there’s some kind of show we’re competing against now. Sure, you want to see what happened on that island, but you have a DVR and we have a Touchstone that’s begging to be given away. Just saying.

8pm Eastern tonight. We’ll see you there.

We were pretty impressed with our when we saw the demo for Slacker on webOS at CES. Now you can be as impressed as we were, as Daniel just emailed to let us know it’s live in the Official App Catalog. Heck, it’s good enough to briefly appear in Verizon’s Palm Pre Plus commercials and also free, so you may as well give it a shot.

Slacker is yet another online radio station with liking and whatnot, but it manages to surface a bit more of the music content to you in-app than Pandora does as well as give you a set of 120 pre-programmed genre stations to help you discover music without all the pesky thinking of artists you like. 

If you upgrade to Slacker Plus (for a monthly fee), you can get bonus features like building lists out of specific songs, lyrics, and ad-free listening. Tell ’em PreCentral sent ya (because, you know, we just did).

Verizon is finally advertising the Palm Pre Plus. This time around Palm and Verizon decided that rather than give you the creeps directly, they’ll give you the creeps by scaring you with visions of the past.

We like the target market here, but, well, "The 3G smartphone smart enough for mom" is completely true, accurate, but perhaps a little too …direct? Swing of the pendulum, we guess: instead of a vague, hazy brand message we get "buy this for your mom." Roger that, will do, and she’ll like it. She may not like the stereotype, though, even if it is presented just to be shoved aside by the Pre Plus.

Women (and especially moms): What do you think?

One more commercial after the break, thanks to windzilla for the tip!

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The thing about putting a phone on a new carrier – even if the hardware is virtually identical – is that there are always a handful of bugs that pop up. We have two from our forums that are looking something like confirmed. They aren’t critical, deal-breaking bugs, but they are a hassle. 

First up, long-time member dutchtrumpet points us to this thread about Verizon MMS and the gist is this: when WiFi is on, MMS messages aren’t able to be sent. It looks as though the issue is that MMS message need to go through Verizon’s EVDO network, but the Pre Plus is attempting to send them over WiFi. This isn’t an issue for Sprint users thus far. The good news is that there is an easy workaround: just turn off WiFi before you attempt to send an MMS message.

The second bug is a little more worrying: it’s starting to look like there is a fairly serious issue with GPS on Verizon Palm Pre Plus devices. The concern is that full, tower-assisted AGPS is only working for VZ Navigator and not other apps. The Fear, with a capital F, is that Verizon is playing their lock-down shenanigans again, but from what we can tell in this thread that’s probably not the case, as Verizon Palm Pixi Plus apps are able to get quick GPS locks and also because Bell Pre phones are also having some hassles. A workaround that seems to help some comes from m0sim: open VZ Navigator (even if you haven’t purchased it on your plan) before using GPS on other apps. GPS is a finicky feature, so diagnosing exactly what’s happening here is going to take some time. The good news is that the massive and massively helpful PreCentral Forum community is on the case.

Either way, we’re looking forward to webOS 1.4 and hoping it’ll address these bugs.

Dieter, Derek, and Keith talk Palm Pre Plus and Palm Pixi Plus!

• Download it directly with this link
• Subscribe via iTunes
• Subscribe directly to the Podcast feed with your favorite Podcatcher here
• Listen to it here with the player above

Thanks to everybody for writing and calling in!

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Our pals over at TiPb are rocking all sorts of iPad coverage today, as you might expect. Our quick take from a webOS perspective: it looks like a pretty cool device, but not the revolution much of the pre-release hype made it out to be.

The one thought we can’t get out of our heads: the iPad combined with Mobile Hotspot on webOS sounds like a match made in heaven, doesn’t it?

Actually, the thought that’s really in our head mirrors some of the twitter responses we’re seeing, namely: the iPad doesn’t look like it handles multitasking, which means a door has been left open for a webOS tablet that can do multiple apps, have non-annoying notifications, and generally fit the "next generation of user interface" that we know some people have been hoping for in a device of this kind. Heck, a webOS Tablet would even be able to do Flash someday – just saying.

Any webOS owners out there thinking about snapping one up?

If you’re a Google Voice user and for some reason you aren’t feeling any of the several options available to you in the Official App Catalog or in Homebrew, then you’re in luck. Thanks to Apple’s boneheaded App Store policies, Google was forced to step up their game and improve the heck out of their mobile Google Voice interface. The good news is that this ‘designed for iPhone’ look and feel works just fine on the webOS browser.

The web app works in a fashion almost identical to how our current, native webOS clients work: you find the number you want to call, Google calls you, you answer, and voila: connection via Google Voice.

Sure, you lose things like local contact search, but what you gain is… the ability to tell iPhone users that they’re not so special. Either way, Google Voice users can hit it up at google.com/voice/m

Thanks to everybody who sent this in!