Author: Tim Carroll

We may have discovered what that extra “.1” was in the recently-released webOS 1.3.5.2 for Europe: the GSM Palm Pre now fully supports Bluetooth sharing of your 3G connection. Although Palm have yet to post the full changelog (at least so far as your correspondent can find) (update: full changelogs have been posted, and its looks like tethering is a German-only affair. No other changes to report from the previous 1.3.5 update), setting up tethering is simplicity itself – at least on Windows.

All you need to do is go to your Bluetooth settings card on the Pre and turn on Bluetooth, making it discoverable. Then pair your PC with the Pre, and join the newly-created Personal Area Network. Voila! You’re now wirelessly connected to the cloud via your phone. Of course, it’s not quite as cool as turning your Pre into a Wi-Fi hotspot – but it’s certainly better than a slap in the face with a wet fish.

An unexciting screenshot is posted after the break.

Hooray for us, GSM Pre owners: webOS 1.3.5.2 has hit our myriad shores, packing its various tasty new bugfixes and sparkling SDL support – meaning we can finally join our CDMA-totin’ brethren in getting our Doom on.

You know the drill, folks: remove all homebrew patches before upgrading, lest you find yourself breaking something you shouldn’t have. (Exact upgrade instructions, via WebOS Internals, are after the break.) We’ll post the full changelog as soon as it goes up on Palm’s site. In the meantime, happy downloading – be prepared for a long wait. (Mine is taking forever.)

As inevitably as the setting sun, MotionApps have posted some screenshots on Facebook of the official PalmOS emulator for webOS, Classic, running on the Palm Pixi. Notably, the virtual hard button onscreen interface has been totally revamped in order to better fit on the Pixi’s smaller (320 x 400, vs 320 x 480 on the Pre) display. Rather than ape the vintage look of a PalmOS device, the Pixi version of Classic instead places the Home/Contacts/Calendar/Menu buttons into a webOS-style “capsule”, with an option to swap them out for the 5-way navigator buttons.

Hit the jump for the screenshots.

That’s right! Relive all the excitement of two hours ago: the video recording demo, the 3D gaming announcement, the Flash demo, the unexpected zombie attack that saw several gadget bloggers tragically join the growing horde of the undead…

It’s all after the break! (Well, except for the zombie attack, which appears to have been edited out.) You can also check it out on Palm’s Youtube page.

If you’ve been hanging out for video recording on your Pre or Pixi (without resorting to homebrew hackery), Palm have answered your prayers today: they’ve announced at CES that full video recording, editing and sharing capabilities will be available with the webOS 1.4 update on all models, due February.

Director of Product Marketing Paul Cousineu demo’d the new feature by taking a video live onstage, and uploading it to Youtube in the background as he played one of the newly-announced 3D games (The Sims, to be exact). Pics after the break!

Greetings, PICexicans! Today’s the day: Palm will once again front the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas, and Palm Infocenter will be covering it… kinda. We’re not there in person this year – pesky life stuff has conspired against all of us – but, Internet permitting, we’ll be watching a live stream and liveblogging the event as it unfolds. And if there’s no stream? Heck, we’ll just monitor the coverage that will no doubt be flooding in from other sites and have ourselves a good old chat about it. Pre and Pixi Plus? Native development? All will be revealed in a few hours…

Hit the jump to participate in the chat. The intention is to open the gates around 10.45am. Why not join us?

Ahead of their expected announcement at Palm’s CES event tomorrow, the specs for the Verizon-bound Palm Pre Plus and Pixi Plus have been leaked to Phone Arena, via a Verizon-branded spec sheet. No great surprises here: the Pre Plus ups the storage to 16GB, while the Pixi Plus gets the Wi-Fi that was so glaringly absent from its Sprint sibling. (No mention of voice dialing for either, contrary to earlier speculation.)

The leaked shot is after the break.

Oh sweet, sweet SDL. How did we ever live without you? The webOS ports are coming thick and fast now, with these last two days bringing us three tasty new gaming treats for the Palm Pre. From Eric Gaudet – creator of the Virtual Keyboard – comes SuperTux, a side-scrolling 2D platformer that bears more than a passing resemblance to Super Mario Bros. It features the epnonymous penguin on a quest to save his girlfriend. You get your choice of accelerometer or keyboard controls, and the gesture area serves as your jump button.

From wIRC co-creator Ryan Hope comes TetriCrisis, an open-source clone of the classic block-dropping puzzler that made millions of nine-year-old boys hurl their Gameboys out their bedroom windows when the Fates flat-out refused to give up the straight block they needed to beat their brother’s high score… but I digress. It uses keyboard controls and makes somewhat of a mockery of EA’s charging $6.99 for the same in the App Catalog. Both of the above can now be found in Preware.

And the big ‘un? It’s after the break, along with a video of SuperTux for the PC.

Got a Pre on Bell? Want webOS 1.3.5.1? It’s available now, so you can finally stop whining and git yer’ downloadin’ on.

As usual, do remember to remove all homebrew patches before installing, unless you’re particularly keen on a visit to the Doctor. The 1.3.5 changelog is here and the 1.3.5.1 changelog here, if you’re interested.

As opposed to their last report from September, which was somewhat ambiguous on Palm’s current fortunes, ChangeWave Research’s latest 90-day overview of the consumer smartphone space is decidedly more gloomy.

The survey of 4,068 consumers showed that in addition to Palm’s marketshare falling slightly by 1%, consumer preference for webOS has also dipped in the face of fierce competition from new Android handsets, dropping from 8% to 4% of planned future smartphone purchases. As the report’s authors note, Palm’s best chance to boost their slowing momentum is their upcoming launches on new carriers, finally freeing them of the Sprint exclusivity that many have blamed for webOS’s relatively unspectacular sales figures thus far.

Rumour:A brief two-sentence post over at The Boy Genius Report claims today that Palm’s two webOS handsets, the Pre and the Pixi, are “beginning to appear” in Verizon’s inventory system, with Big Red having ordered 200,000 units of each model. For the mathematically-challenged, that means they’ll have 400,000 in total ready to unload.

The question this raises, of course, is whether this is good news or bad? Given that Palm and webOS were both hyped (mainly by an excitable tech press) as giant-slayers after their initial introduction, an order of this relatively small size could indicate Verizon does not share those expectations and isn’t planning to promote Palm’s new babies on the same level as their New Sensation, the Android-powered Motorola Droid – despite apparently getting upgraded models. Of course, it could also just mean that they’re being cautious. We’ll have to see how it plays out once the expected CES announcement is made…

A teensy-tiny webOS update has been pushed out by Palm today. webOS 1.3.5.1 fixes a Calendar bug, introduced by the rollover to 2010:

Palm has discovered that the turn of the year 2010 has surfaced an issue that affects customers who use Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) to synchronize their calendars. Data remains intact on the device; however, this issue prevents the data from being displayed correctly in the Calendar application. It impacts all versions of webOS.

The full (small) changelog is after the jump.

Sure, that’s not a Pixi you see on the right there, but if you look at it from reeeeally far away then you might get an idea of what Palm has next in store for its Centro sequel: Pink. (The colour, not the singer.) In some of the least surprising news ever, an anonymous tipster has sent Engadget a photo of Sprint’s inventory, which clearly shows “BUY BACK PALM PIXI PINK“.

Why unsurprising? Well, Palm does have a history with this sort of thing, and with Valentine’s Day a month-and-a-bit away a pink Pixi might be just the thing for your ball-and-chain lady friend / effeminate man friend. Perhaps we’ll be hearing something at CES… Anyway, photo’s after the break.

For European Pre owners, the webOS App Catalog has been something of a cruel joke, as we’re forced to watch our American brethren get all the cool new stuff while we’re left with the dregs. Fortunately that’s about to change: Palm today announced that paid applications would be coming to the European App Catalog in March 2010. Developer Community Manager Chuq Von Rospach waxes lyrical on the Palm Developer Network Blog:

The general app catalog model is not new, but what we’re doing with it is. The Palm developer program extends the unique web orientation of the Palm webOS platform, providing developers innovative opportunities to leverage the web as a promotional channel for applications. We offer greater freedom and choice of how to get your applications to market and unparalleled control to promote and grow your business.

Developers interested in getting their apps into the catalog can find full instructions on the Developer Network Blog. Just remember there’s a global audience out there…

So much for “inching”. It was always obvious that OpenGL support for the Pre was en route, but what was unexpected was that it would be up-and-running (courtesy, as usual, of the ever-amazing WebOS Internals group) so quickly. “bpadalino” gets the cred here, having whipped up a simple demo of a flat triangle with concentric circles, hypnotically and infinitely contracting inwards… ever-inwards… so sleepy…

Wait, where was I? Oh right. This is, of course, more proof that Palm is gearing up to announce proper GPU support for webOS apps – and it’s about time, too. A video of the OpenGL demo is embedded after the break (with thanks to Max Kanter from The MxWeb). Alternatively, you can catch it on the WebOS Internals YouTube channel.

If you were a gambling man (or lady), and you were to bet against Palm preparing to announce native game development options for their Linux-based webOS, then your correspondent reckons you would soon be a very broke gambling man (or lady). The discovery of SDL’s inclusion in webOS 1.3.5 really should have been enough evidence for you that something big was brewing, but destinal and Rod Whitby’s (of WebOS Internals) latest discovery is proof positive: webOS 1.3.5 also includes a method for launching native Linux applications without any of the Upstart hackery we reported on yesterday.

How’s it done? Rather simply, actually. All a developer needs to do is install the application’s files and include a webOS-standard appinfo.json file, which tells webOS everything about a particular app. By setting the type to “game” and pointing to a binary executable (rather than the usual index.html a typical webOS app is based around) webOS 1.3.5 will happily throw your new native, SDL-based Linux program into a card, ready to do your bidding.

So there you have it. Fully-integrated native apps on webOS are a go – and within seven months of launch, we might add. (For the record, the iPhone took a year to get there and Android nearly two.) Need For Speed on the Pre doesn’t seem quite so far-fetched anymore, now does it?

Updated: Yep, the floodgates have well and truly opened: id’s second revolution in shooters, Quake, has now been ported to the Pre courtesy of the new SDL library cooked into webOS. The current release isn’t playable: it crashes once you try to load a new game, and there are no key bindings to let you control it anyway. But the developer, dtzWill, has already fixed the issue and plans to push out a playable release soon. A fully-functional version is now available in Preware!

In the meantime, you can feast your eyes on the demo video after the break…

Since its initial release less than two days ago, development has proceeded apace on the webOS port of classic FPS DOOM. The latest news, however, has implications beyond just this particular port itself. For starters, the game no longer requires any fooling around in the Terminal to get it started: you can now load it from an icon in your launcher, just like any other app. You can also fire up multiple instances of the game in multiple cards – possibly useless in of itself, but it’s great for that geek cool factor.

The technology being employed to make all this possible is the interesting part. WebOS Internals is now piggy-backing on Upstart (the Ubuntu startup manager, included with webOS) to allow webOS apps to punch in (via pre-defined scripts installed by signed, trusted apps) Linux commands on their own, which is how the Terminal has been bypassed. This new method will also enable dependencies in Upstart scripts, which will help homebrewers save precious memory on their webOS devices by not requiring all the back-end services to be running all the time. But the real kicker is that this now paves the way for all manner of SDL applications to be ported to webOS with very little effort at all – and there’s hundreds out there… not to mention it can also be used to control the 1600+ Optware command-line applications available for Linux.

Happy New Year! Taking a time out from fireworks and festivities, Palm has cleared an arbitrary numerical milestone: one thousand apps are now available in the (U.S.) webOS App Catalog. Not a bad number at all, especially considering that webOS devices have only been available to the public for six months. And, of course, that’s not counting the numerous homebrew applications out there in the unofficial distribution channels…

So what was that thousandth app? No less than Engadget’s new webOS app, a well-crafted little piece of software that lets you browse through the popular gadget blog with a flick and a swipe in a very mobile-friendly format.

Congratulations Palm – here’s to thousands more apps in 2010!

My oh my. There have been many hints and clues in these closing weeks of 2009 that GPU support for the Palm Pre is much, much closer than expected, but until now there’s been nothing in the way of concrete proof. That all changed with the recent release of webOS 1.3.5, which zsoc (of Precorder fame) and destinal (who made the webOS Terminal) from WebOS Internals have been poring over today. And what they’ve discovered is starting to give us a pretty good idea of what Palm has planned for their upcoming 2010 CES appearance: hardware-accelerated graphics for webOS, via SDL.

What’s SDL? It stands for Simple Directmedia Layer, and as the website will tell you, it’s a cross-platform software library that enables low-level hardware access – which as of version 1.3.5 appears to have been baked into webOS’s Luna framework. And what better way to test this new functionality than with a port of iD’s seminal shooter, the legendary DOOM? zsoc was able to throw together a webOS port of the game today, and although it currently requires a bit of Terminal trickery to get it running, the proof is in the pud: behold the screenshot after the break! DOOM, running within a webOS Mojo-ized card and fully controllable via the keyboard. Brings a tear to the eye, it does.

Updated with video after the break!