Showing posts with label Palm Pre. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Palm Pre. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 30, 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)

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

TELUS to launch Palm Pre and Pixi in January

The second coming of Palm is in full force as they have just launched the Pre in the U.K, Germany and Spain. Here in Canada, even though Bell just dropped the price of the Pre down another $50 we understand that sales are strong. Could there be reasoning behind the price drop though, other than their HSPA network? We think so…

Back in July we wrote a story about how the Palm Pre was only exclusively available to Bell for 6 months. We had a document called Bell Strategy that said: “The Palm Pre will expand and strengthen Bell’s smartphone category and will break new ground in the fiercely competitive smartphone market. Bell will be the second carrier worldwide (after Sprint) to sell the Palm Pre, with exclusivity for 6 months. Bell anticipates the Canadian market will strongly embrace this product with strong interest, which will boost overall smartphone sales.”

The Canadian market did embrace the Pre and the 6 months is coming to an end. Although we’ve said it before, we are now hearing that TELUS, the only carrier to have 3 networks (CDMA, MiKE, HSPA) will officially be bringing on both the Palm Pre (HSPA) and the new Palm Pixi in January. No word on pricing or exact January launch dates yet, we’ll find out more when we get closer to the date.

Source: mobilesyrup.com (Rob Avison | November 10, 2009)

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Palm Pixi News: Ares WebOS Development Tool Coming to the Pre and Pixi

On Thursday, November 5th 2009, at the Open Mobile Summit conference in San Francisco. Palm demonstrated “Ares”, a Web-based development environment for WebOS applications. It will be coming to the Palm Pre and Palm Pixi smartphones by the end of this year through the WebOS developer site.

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According to Palm, Ares will give developers a faster way write WebOS applications through a drag-and-drop interface. Senior Vice President of Application Software and Services at Palm; Michael Abbott said that Ares It’s designed to help Web developers make the leap to becoming mobile developers.

According to Abbott, Ares won’t require any downloads or configuration. And “the environment includes debugging and a mechanism for developers to share libraries and APIs (application programming interfaces).” A Palm engineer created a search application for the Flickr Web photo site in a live demonstration at the conference, just to show how easy this new tool will be.

Source: mypre.com (09 November 2009 by Juventino Quinones)