Best Twitter apps for Palm Pre and Pixi smartphones

Two Palm webOS users have recently posted their reviews of the current crop of Twitter apps, both free and paid, for the Palm Pre and Palm Pixi smartphones. Their summary: There's plenty available, from the barest of bare bones to powerful, full-function tweet machines.

Dan Ramirez is a "self-confessed iPhone-turned-Palm-Pre fan boy" according to his Twitter profile (@vara411). On his blog, Totally Palmed, he reviews a half dozen webOS Twitter applications for Palm's Pre and Pixi smartphones, all available on the Palm App Catalog.

Mobile developer, and recent webOS convert, Roy Sutton, founder of Pre101.com, offers his thoughts on the same apps, but dives in a bit deeper.

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Palm has been enduring a drumbeat of criticism because its online App Catalog has only a fraction of the applications found on Apple's App Store for the iPhone. Developers haven't flocked to the innovative webOS yet, though those that have rate it highly for its capabilities and ease of development.

That might be about to change. Palm just made generally available the Ares toolkit, which lets you build webOS applications with a Web browser. And, at January's Consumer Electronics Show, the company will unveil a key OS update, which will boost battery life, software performance, Wi-Fi speeds and handset responsiveness.

But today, you have a half dozen applications from which to choose for working with Twitter.

Ramirez's top choice seems to be Tweed, from Pivotal Labs, $1.99, followed closely by Twee, from Digital Morsel, $2.99. He likes the wide range of features and functions in the first, though he considers the UI itself pretty plain; the second has a richer UI, lacking some of the features in the first but adding some others (such as thumbnails of pictures).

Sutton echoes those judgments. Tweed's UI is minimalist, he says, but not its functionality. "In Tweed's design, all of the functionality is hidden behind a bright blue button on the top right. When you click on it you find everything you could want in Twitter app. More importantly, all the functionality works very well."

On Twee, Sutton confesses "I love the look of Twee." But he discovered an odd memory utilization issue: Twee spawns a second process that keeps running even when the app is shut down. It's not related to the notifications service, but it doesn't seem to take up much memory and Sutton didn't identify any specific problems resulting from this oddity.

There's also a free version, Twee Free, which drops notifications, nearby tweet search, Twitturly, and StockTwits.

The other four Twitter apps for webOS are:

* Spaz, from Funkatron Productions -- the only open-source webOS Twitter app that's also free. Sutton: "The look and feel of Spaz is solid, but there isn't anything that you haven't seen before." He says a paid version is rumored to be in the works.

* TinyTwitter from Tiny Byte Productions -- $1.99. Ramirez: Very fast, in part because it's stripped down to the most basic Twitter features (doesn't include "search", for example).Sutton: It doesn't match up to its paid rivals.

* Yak from JM Productions -- $2.99. Ramirez: Fast like TinyTwitter, with more features; Ramirez experienced some connection issues while using it. Sutton: "Does everything you need a twitter app to do?but it doesn't do anything else." (The only link for JM Productions has nothing more than a second link for "Palm webOS app support". When you click on that, it bring you to a third page with a single link, for "e-mail support."

* FleetTweet from 8bit development -- free. This app does one thing -- lets you post tweets. It's "free" but is supported by ads. Sutton: "I am all about simple apps with a laser focus, but this one strikes me as toooo simple."

Original story - www.networkworld.com/nwlookup.jsp?rid=195695

Source: John Cox, Network World (Tuesday, December 22, 2009)

Palm Smartphone Sales Slip as It Struggles to Turn Around

Palm’s reboot is under way, but it has yet to prove that it can turn around its fortunes.

Palm, which makes smartphones like the Pre and Pixi, said Thursday that its sales declined slightly from the previous quarter, although they were still up sharply from a year ago.

The company trimmed its net loss and said it had shipped a total of 783,000 smartphones to retailers in its fiscal second quarter, which ended Nov. 27. That was up 41 percent compared with the second quarter last year, but down 5 percent compared with the first quarter.

Over all, the company’s revenue and profit fell below Wall Street’s expectations. Furthermore, an important measure of customer interest in its phones, the sell-through rate, suggested that its new devices were not flying off retailers’ shelves. Palm said customers bought 573,000 units, down 29 percent from the first quarter and down 4 percent year over year.

“We’re still in the early stages of a long race,” Jonathan J. Rubinstein, chief executive of the company, said in a statement. For the second quarter, the company reported a net loss of $85.4 million, or 54 cents a share, compared with a loss of $508.6 million or $4.64 a share, in the same period a year earlier, which included a charge for a tax provision.

Because of a change in the way the company recorded revenue for its newest phones — during the fourth quarter, it began spreading revenue and expenses over a two-year period — it reported two sets of quarterly results Thursday. Adjusting for the deferrals, revenue was $302 million, compared with Wall Street expectations of $266.2 million, according to a poll by Thomson Reuters, and the loss was 37 cents a share, compared with a consensus forecast of a loss of 32 cents a share.

Using the same type of accounting adjustments, the company would have reported revenue of $191.6 million and a loss of 73 cents a share in the same quarter last year.

Investors appeared to react negatively to the news, with shares declining more than 8 percent in after-hours trading.

Shaw Wu, an analyst with Kaufman Brothers, said that Palm’s biggest challenge will be getting consumers and carriers to choose its product over many rival smartphones.

“The issue is not the product. The big concern for investors is Palm’s current lack of profitability,” Mr. Wu said. “Palm needs to focus on their operations and introduce more carriers to have broader distribution.”

Mr. Wu estimates that Palm could ship as many as 3.86 million smartphones in the fiscal year ending in May 2010.

The company has high hopes that a sleek stable of smartphones running on its speedy new operating system, WebOS, would help revive its finances and reputation. Mr. Rubinstein acknowledged that Palm had faced competition from rival handsets, including the Apple iPhone, the BlackBerry devices from Research In Motion, and the Motorola Droid.

“We are investing heavily in marketing to drive better awareness of our products,” he said during a call with investors.

In June, the company introduced the Pre as the cornerstone its new lineup, to largely positive reviews. Recently, it began selling a slimmed-down version of the Pre called the Pixi. In the United States, both phones are available only for Sprint Nextel’s network.

Michael Gartenberg, vice president for strategy and analysis at Interpret, a market research firm based in Los Angeles and New York said that Palm had done better than expected, considering that the new WebOS phones have been on the market only a short while and with a single carrier. “They can definitely still carve out a space in the mobile game,” he said.

But he cautioned that the company would have to do more to capture market share in a crowded landscape. “Palm is going to have to sustain the velocity they started in 2009,” he said.

Contributing to Palm’s sluggish sales, analysts say, has been a dearth of applications, the quirky bite-size programs that can perform various functions like mapping or social networking, for Palm’s smartphones.

To help establish a thriving system for software developers, the company announced the public release of a tool called Project Ares that allows developers to create and release applications for the Palm Pre and Pixi through a Web browser. Palm hopes Project Ares will significantly lower the barrier to entry for mobile developers looking to write programs for WebOS, Mr. Rubinstein said.

“There is a big opportunity in front of us as a company,” Mr. Rubinstein said. “Ultimately, our success is around our execution.”

Source: nytimes | JENNA WORTHAM (Published: December 17, 2009)

Palm Releases WebOS Update for Pre, Pixi

Palm releases updates for the Palm Pre and Palm Pixi OS. WebOS 1.3.5 offers fixes, conveniences and a smoother user experience for both Palm smartphones.

Palm has introduced an update to its WebOS, the platform run by the Palm Pre and the Palm Pixi, both of which, in the United States, are exclusive to the Sprint Nextel network.

With WebOS 1.3.5, available as of Dec. 28, Palm offers updates, improvements and a housecleaning of what were likely irritating, early snafus. For example, files with a .3g2 extension now correctly play as audio files, not video files; the Web browser now supports animated GIF files; and a user’s default e-mail signature now displays the Pre product name correctly.

Palm has also improved the application download experience for its App Catalog, and users can now download multiple applications at once, as well as pause, resume and cancel downloads. They can also enable downloads to continue in the background while other screens are navigated and use the full storage capacity of the phone for downloading apps.

A full erase of the device can be performed more easily with 1.3.5, and users can edit forwarded text for all e-mail account types and launch Sprint Navigation from an address in an open contact entry. Apps can now also be purchased from U.S. territories.

There are additionally small conveniences—when the screen is locked, the time is displayed in a different font—and bits of streamlining: When the user has “network time zone” enabled, the city and country are no longer displayed.

In September, Palm announced it would stop launching devices running Microsoft’s mobile operating system, in favor of focusing on WebOS, which is gradually gaining market share. According to AdMob, which measures ad requests, Palm garnered 4 percent of U.S. Web market share within two months of the Pre’s debut. In September, Palm smartphone traffic accounted for 13 percent U.S. smartphone traffic, which put it in fourth place, just behind RIM and HTC. The clear leader, with 48 percent of smartphone ad requests, was Apple.

On Dec. 17, Palm announced greater-than-expected quarterly losses, but said it had shipped 783,000 smartphones during the quarter, which was a 41 percent improvement over the last year and exceeded analysts’ expectations.

Source: Eweek | Michelle Maisto (2009-12-29)