Author: Ryan Kairer

Palm Inc. has released an updated version of their Facebook app for webOS. The application is being billed as new major version, as it was rewritten from scratch by Palm’s own developer team this time around.

The new v1.1 Facebook app brings an improved interface and much improved functionality allowing users to do all that Facebook stuff. Highlights include an enhanced inbox, improved news feeds (shake to refresh), profile views, better photo albums and photo video uploading, events and birthday support, people search and more Palm Synergy integration.

The application is free and is available from the Palm App Catalog and online.

Palm Inc. has released an updated version of their software development kit for the webOS platform. Release v1.4 coincides with the recent OS update and brings a number of changes and makes some new functionality available to developers.

Some of the highlights of the release include:

• webOS now incorporates WebKit 4, which features enhanced CSS support and numerous other improvements.
• The webOS implementation of the HTML 5 Media API has been updated, bringing closer conformance to the specification, and improvements to audio performance.
• The Camera API has been extended to let an application initiate video capture, in addition to image capture.
• The V8 JavaScript engine used in webOS has been updated.

Palm has release the long awaited webOS v1.4 update early Saturday morning. Users on the Sprint network in the US and on the O2 UK, O2 DE, O2 Ireland, and Movistar networks in Europe can now find the OTA update via the Updates app. Palm says on its blog that other networks (namely Bell, Telcel and SFR) will see this “soon.”

The full changelog is now posted on Palm’s support page. Major new features include: video capture and clip editing, performance and battery life changes, various new messaging, contacts & calendar changes and options and updates, LED based notifications, new ringtone/alert options, mail improvements and various other system tweaks and such.

webOS 1.4 also brings support for the Adobe Flash 10.1 Beta plugin. Adobe will presumably release their Flash beta for the Palm Pre sometime soon via the Palm App Catalog.

Update: Verizon users are reporting that the update is now available for the Pre & Pixi Pluses.

CNBC tech reporter Jim Goldman published a scathing piece on Palm Inc. late Friday. The article conveys the frustration among some investors and analysts have with Palm’s management over ill timed misleading statements and the recent financial warnings. Goldman points to a perceived increasing lack of credibility which has been accentuated by recent disclosures.

Palm’s got a credibility problem, and it’s the kind of thing that seems so insidious, and so systemic, that it might pose a deep threat to the company’s ability to keep going. […]

If the company knew three weeks ago that Verizon and Sprint were stopping orders, why not just announce it then? Why dribble the news out, and attribute a manufacturing stoppage to the Chinese New Year, which would ultimately not pass the smell test since the work holiday typically only lasts a week and Palm’s manufacturing has been suspended for the entire month?

The Wall Street Journal has published a memo sent out to all Palm employees today by CEO Jon Rubinstein. The letter goes into more detail behind they days financial readjustment press release and provides some background on Palm’s current initiatives to drive sales. The letter also discloses that Verizon felt the webOS launch was below expectations, but remains committed to working with Palm.

Sprint has quietly lowered the introductory price on the Palm Pixi. New customers can now purchase the Pixi direct from Sprint for $50 after the usual rebates and new contractual discounts.

Sprint was the first carrier to offer the Palm Pixi back in mid-Novemeber. It’s initial asking price was $99. Earlier this month Verizon began offering an updated Pixi Plus version which includes WiFi at the same price point. That too was initially offered at $99 and has already been reduced to $79.

Palm, Inc. issued a press release early this morning to warn investors of that its financial performance will not meet its previously stated expectations due to soft demand. The revision laid out below estimate a 30% reduction in quarterly revenue. The full release follows…

Palm, Inc. today indicated that it expects that revenues for the third quarter of fiscal year 2010 will be in the range of $285 million to $310 million on a GAAP basis and in the range of $300 million to $320 million on a non-GAAP basis. Revenues for the quarter and full year are being impacted by slower than expected consumer adoption of the company’s products that has resulted in lower than expected order volumes from carriers and the deferral of orders to future periods.

Accordingly, Palm expects fiscal year 2010 revenues to be well below its previously forecasted range of $1.6 billion to $1.8 billion. The company will provide more detail on its financial results during Palm’s third-quarter financial results conference call currently scheduled for Thursday, March 18.

Shares of Palm Inc. hit a 52-week low on a double dose of analyst downgrades early this week. Three Wall street analysts issued gloomy reports for the company sending shares down to close around $8.45 Tuesday on overall sales and market penetration concerns.

The biggest blow came from longtime BOA/Merrill Lynch analyst Vivek Arya who remarked in a note to clients that Palm’s newest webOS phones have seen “sluggish” sales since debuting on Verizon.

PocketGear, Inc. today announced the acquisition of Handango, the leading provider of smartphone applications globally, creating the world’s largest cross platform, open app store and content marketplace with a catalog of more than 140,000 paid and free titles. PocketGear and Handango are the two largest independent app stores and combined to date have generated over $400 million in mobile application revenues from customers living in more than 175 countries and using over 2,000 unique mobile devices.

With the acquisition, PocketGear’s mobile app marketplace has been expanded to connect more than 32,000 developers in the PocketGear Developer Program with over 40 PocketGear-powered storefront and distribution partners, including 4 of the world’s top 5 handset manufacturers, 4 of the top 5 mobile operators in the US, 3 of the top 10 mobile operators globally, and leading media and ecommerce companies including Samsung, LG, Sony Ericsson, Research in Motion, Microsoft, T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon Wireless.

Worldwide mobile phone sales to end users totalled 1.211 billion units in 2009, a 0.9 per cent decline from 2008, according to Gartner, Inc. In the fourth quarter of 2009, the market registered a single-digit growth as mobile phone sales to end users surpassed 340 million units, an 8.3 per cent increase from the fourth quarter of 2008.

“The mobile devices market finished on a very positive note, driven by growth in smartphones and low-end devices,” said Carolina Milanesi, research director at Gartner. “Smartphone sales to end users continued their strong growth in the fourth quarter of 2009, totaling 53.8 million units, up 41.1 per cent from the same period in 2008. In 2009, smartphone sales reached 172.4 million units, a 23.8 per cent increase from 2008. In 2009, smartphone-focused vendors like Apple and Research In Motion (RIM) successfully captured market share from other larger device producers, controlling 14.4 and 19.9 per cent of the worldwide smartphone market, respectively.”

With less than a month of market availability under its belt, Verizon has already seen it fit to slash the retail price on the Palm Pixi Plus. Verizon has lowered the intro price by $20, after new customer discounts, to $79. This deal can also be used with the carrier’s recently updated buy one get one free promo as well.

The Palm Pixi Plus smartphone is Palm’s svelte, lightweight model that packs in WiFi, 8GB of storage and an included Touchstone cover. The Pixi Plus also supports Palm’s new WiFi router functionality via the Palm mobile hotspot application.

Mark/Space has updated its Missing Sync desktop software for webOS devices. The Missing Sync for the Palm Pre (and Pixi) now offers two way calendar synchronization on Macs and Windows machines. Users can now sync their Outlook calendars from their PC with their Palm webOS device and vice versa. The software also offers the ability to exchange contacts, docs, files, photos, music, ringtones, videos and more from your desktop computer.

The Missing Sync for the Palm Pre works with Windows XP, Vista and 7 and Mac OS 10.5.6 and higher. The software retails for $39.95 USD.

A self claimed Sprint technician has posted a screen-grab of a upcoming Sprint update release sheet that shows Palm’s webOS 1.4 update due early next week. This Precentral post details the disclosure, which if correct, could indicate that webOS 1.4 could begin to arrive on Sprint models as early as Monday, February 15th.

webOS 1.4 was talked up by Palm at their CES keynote this year. The update is said to bring on device video recording and editing, improved phonebook transfer, calendar and messaging enhancements and this update will supposedly lay the groundwork for Adobe Flash support. The full screen-grab is mirror after the break.

comScore has released their latest data from the comScore MobiLens service, which reports on key trends in the U.S. mobile phone industry over the three month period between September and December 2009. The report ranked the leading mobile original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and smartphone operating system platforms in the U.S. according to their share of current mobile subscribers as well as the most popular forms of content and activity accessed via mobile device.

The report found Motorola to be the top handset manufacturer with 23.5 percent market share, while RIM led among smartphone platforms with 41.6 percent market share. Although down slightly from the last period, Palm’s webOS broke into the top 5 platforms for the period as well.

Canuck Software has released a new version of its popular webOS Quick Install utility. webOS Quick Install is a desktop app which allows webOS users to install many third party applications, webOS patches and other useful device tweaks.

Some of the major new features include support for AUPT (aka auto update patch technology) for easier system updates, an update checker and many other new options and bug-fixes.

webOS Quick Install v3.01 is freeware and currently available here. It is a Java based application which runs on both Mac, Linux and Windows machines.

MobileInfocenter has launched a new mobile and desktop eco news service. EcoTopical showcases the latest stories and headlines from the environmental news ecosystem on the web or your mobile device.

EcoTopical melds more than 50 of the web’s most popular eco news sources in a real time, news stream style layout. Categories include green news, climate, design, ecology, lifestyle, polices, tech and transportation. The site offers ecology enthusiasts an easy to follow, scannable format for staying on top of all the days eco topics.

A day after posting about a gameboy emulator, today brings word of a new Nintendo NES emulator for webOS. Kalemsoft, has ported over its NesEm emulator, first developed for Palm OS.

NesEm is said to currently run over 300 original NES games. It supports four channel sound, game saving, automatic speed adjustment, key config control and anti-aliased image smoothing.

NesEm is currently available in demo form via PreWare or the developers site. It is closed source and costs $9.99 for a license. The demo is restricted to roms under 40k and has a time limit.

A webOS developer by the name of Will Doetz has released one of the first classic console emulators for webOS. Will’s new VisualBoyAdvance brings Nintendo Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance handheld game emulation to the Palm Pre and Pixi.

The VisualBoyAdvance project is a work in progress and currently features close to parity with GameBoy and Gameboy color games. Gameboy Advance games are mostly playable but are said to still have some speed and compatibility issues. The emu features support for touchscreen and keyboard custom controls, landscape orientation, sound, a rom browser, saved states and even skin support.

The app (currently at v1.1.1) is available now via Preware. It is released under the GPL v2 with the full source code available as well. Scope a video of VBA in action after the break.

With Verizon’s new webOS handsets now out the door, Palm has updated its online store with some new details on where to purchase the new devices. A surprising new option has materialized which gives shoppers the opportunity to buy a new Palm Pre or Pixi (plusses included) directly from Palm.com without a contract commitment or carrier credit check.

The standard Sprint Palm Pre and Pixi sell for $549 and $399, while the Pre Plus sells for $599. While this is a nice option for developers and customers, prospective purchasers must still pay the full unsubsidized price, and the CDMA devices seem to still be locked to their respective carriers. As of today, there is still no domestic unlocked option or a US GSM model offered at this time.

Google has launched an updated version of its mobile web app for utilizing its Google Voice service. The new mobile optimized site allows webOS and iPhone users to use and access most Google Voice services and features through the web browser.

Built using HTML5, the site lets users make calls (with the GV number as the outbound callerID), send and receive SMS messages for free, manage your voice mailbox and place international calls using Google’s discounted rates.

The site works in the standard Palm webOS browser and can be accessed at voice.google.com.