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If you'll recall, late last month we at long last saw the release of the first public betas for Open webOS. Surprisingly, the open source successor to webOS came in two forms: a version that ran as an app inside Ubuntu Linux, and a multi-processor-compatible version enabled by OpenEmbedded. The only problem with the latter, which is technically capable of running on a wide range of hardware, is that it lacks a user interface. And that presents a problem for an operating system in 2012 - people just aren't as comfortable tooling around in the command line today as they were in 1982 (Mac OS brought the first consumer graphical user interface in 1984). While we wait and hope that the complete 1.0 version of the OpenEmbedded Open webOS due out later this month comes with a complete user interface, the fact that it lacks one hasn't stopped enterprising developers from going full steam ahead with porting Open webOS to their hardware of choice. Case in point, today the Raspberry Pi blog called attention to the work of developer aaa801, who has successfully booted Open webOS on the Raspberry Pi single-board computer. If you're not familiar with Raspberry Pi, it's a fully-hackable credit card-sized ARM-powered computer that sells for just $25. The Raspberry Pi includes a 700MHz Broadcom ARM processor, SD card slot (it has no storage of its own), 256MB of RAM, two USB ports, an Ethernet port, HDMI, 3.5mm audio, and RCA video out, and a handful of other ports meant for developer types to build their own hardware. Spec-wise it's practically an original Palm Pre, though significantly more hackable (and though small for a computer, still notably larger than the motherboard found in said smartphone). At $25 a pop and small enough in size, the Raspberry Pi has proven to be highly popular with hardware hackers, allowing them to build all sorts of contraptions. It's not too surprising to see that somebody's already ported Open webOS to the Raspberry Pi, given the aforementioned popularity of the mini computer. We're still glad to have seen it happen, and expect that it's just the tip of the iceberg as far as what Open webOS can boot on. Though it'll really need a user interface if it's to be useful… video of the oh-so-exciting white block letters of a black background booting process of the Open webOS OpenEmbedded beta on the Raspberry Pi. read more View the full article

When HP bought Palm, the latter company was loaded with talent that the former needed for their grand webOS plans. When things didn't quite pan out, that talent started to flee to greener and less-likely-to-be-swallowed-up-by-the-Earth pastures. Among those that left Palm were Product Line Manager Rob Katcher and hardware engineer Manu Chatterjee. They've teamed up to create a new gadget to aid in the creation and updating of grocery shopping lists called 'hiku', and they’ve taken to Kickstarter to raise fund to get the project rolling. Katcher was with Palm for more than six years, where he, as noted by AllThingsD, was a product manager for products like the Palm OS-powered Treo 700p and Centro smartphones. Chatterjee, meanwhile, is credited as creator of the wildly popular (at least within webOS circles) Touchstone inductive charging dock. Combined, they've concocted Hiku, a rounded white hockey puck-size device that packs a barcode scanner, two-month battery, Wi-Fi radio, and a microphone. What Hiku is designed to do is relatively ingenious: if hooks into a customized cloud service and allows you to either scan the barcodes on things around the kitchen you need to restock (e.g. scan the barcode on the tortillas bag when you're running low) or simply speak into the microphone and have the cloud service transcribe your voice into text and intelligently sort it into categories. All of this ties into Hiku's cloud service, which syncs your scanned and spoken lists down to an iOS app or onto the service's own website. If you're thinking this is the kind of thing you'd buy and then forget to use, they thought of that too. Haiku has a magnet in its back so you can just slap it onto the refrigerator door. Anytime you need it, just grab and scan. Hiku's on Kickstarter right now, hoping to net $80,000 in funding over then next 28 days to drive towards production. For the single ones of us out there Hiku might not be that essential of a tool, but for those with families that tear through refrigerator contents like a grizzly bear in a dumpster, Hiku could prove to be an invaluable kitchen gadget. Plus we're digging that two former Palm guys decided to give their new gadget a name that's homophonic with our favorite kind of poetry. View the full article

Brace for the truth bucket of cold water, folks, for it's coming in hard and fast. It's been a long time since we've had to deal with Taiwanese electronics 'news' outlet Digitimes on our pages here at webOS Nation, but today we find them in our sights. What has brought on the truth bucket this morning? Digitimes published a 131-word piece today that claims Chinese telecom manufacturer ZTE plans to launch an Open webOS-based smartphone in the fourth quarter of this year. Problem is, that's not true in any way, form, or fashion. Well, there is a tiny nugget of truth in the report that snowballed into this wrongness, and it is that ZTE plans to launch a new smartphone on a new operating system in the coming months. Problem is, ZTE's smartphone is going to run Firefox OS, not Open webOS. This news has been widely reported today, and in case you're doubting the report from a reputable organization like Reuters, ZTE cross-posted it onto their own press center website. How did this news turn into a report that ZTE was going to produce a webOS smartphone? Poor machine translation. ZTE Executive Vice President He Shiyou was interviewed yesterday Sohu.com and C114, in which he discussed ZTE's smartphone plans. The problem is that the interview was conducted and published in Chinese, and automated machine translataions still aren't what they need to be to handle transcribed Chinese speech. What we ended up with was multiple mentions of "a web OS", which some - Digitimes included - have taken to literally mean HP's open source project-in-progress webOS. Except that He was talking about Firefox OS as a web-based operating system. Things were further muddled in the machine translation when Sohu's interviewer brought up Palm, HP, and webOS, though He never mentioned our even referred to favored operating system. He did do a lot of talking about how web-based operating systems like Firefox OS (and webOS) have great potential thanks to their open source base on web technologies. But webOS specifically? No, He did not. Firefox OS does look interesting, and it even seems to have brewed in some of the webOS user interface, lifting almost verbatim the card-based multitasking application management scheme introduced and apparently popularized by webOS back in 2009. webOS and Firefox do share commonalities in that they're both dependent upon web technologies like HTML5 and CSS, but the similarities don't extend all the way to the core. Where webOS is build off of WebKit, Firefox OS is based off of Mozilla's also open source Gecko rendering engine. The word of the day is prudence. With outlets like Digitimes it's always beneficial to set aside your excitement and check if there's anything to back up their claims before rushing to re-publish it yourself. Sometimes you just have to go with your gut. In this case, our gut check said "Wait a minute..." and in the end we were able to determine that they got it wrong, misinterpreting the stated facts and public knowledge, resulting in a headline that's just flat out wrong. And that's something we just don't need. </truth_bucket> View the full article

Hate is an incredibly intense emotion. Hate implies that you want to see the object of that emotion ended at all costs, be it the weather, your nemesis, or that untrained dog next door that barks through the night at nothing and everything. Hate is consuming, hate is destroying, hate is by and large wholly counterproductive. Hate is simply not good. It has been thirteen months since HP cancelled webOS hardware development in what we can best describe as a fit of shortsightedness. It was a fit that was utterly destructive to the future of webOS and the community as a whole, and those who work on and with the operating system for a living and those of us who for various reasons care about webOS have spent the last year slowly recovering from that most improvident decision. Heck, HP's been struggling to recover from the decision, having been forced to write down billions of dollars in losses and losing a massive amount of shareholder value in the process. Yet still, well over a year after the ax fell and the planned future of webOS was shunted to the side, I still find on a regular basis hate towards HP. The words still ring out in the comments and the forums, "I hate HP!" and "Damn you HP!" and so forth. HP as a company has changed in many ways since August 2011, not the least of which includes a new CEO in Meg Whitman to replace the failed and disastrous tenure of her predecessor, Leo Apotheker. read more View the full article

There's a lot of goodness happening with LunaCE, but the user-facing features are just scratching the surface. webOS developer ScienceApps has been around the block a few times, including popular apps like Multiple App Launcher and Starter. With LunaCE, ScienceApps is amping up Starter, fixing one of our biggest complaints with the app. The cool part about Starter is that it could launch multiple apps at once. The not-so-cool part was a limitation of webOS 3.x: those apps would all launch as separated cards, even if it would make sense to launch them in a stack. Starter users with LunaCE installed, however, can expect to now be able to launch multiple apps directly into a stack. The feature makes Starter, in our not so humble opinion, eminently more useful. Now you can set up a multiple app launching sequence of, for example, Facebook, Twitter, Messaging apps, all in one neat little 'communicate with your friends' stack instead of having them spread out and needing to manually regroup them on every launch. Video after the break. Starter isn't the only ScienceApps app getting the LunaCE treatment. The developer is currently working on an update to Lithium News HD that will take advantage of the dynamic dashboard height API in LunaCE, finally allowing the TouchPad to display larger-size dashboard notifications of your news stories. The LunaCE-enabled version of Lithium News is still a work in progress, but we're looking forward to its release. LunaCE is currently in beta, though interested users can install it as always via Preware, so long as you've enabled the beta feeds (check out testing.preware.org for info on how to do that). ScienceApps is one of the first developers to take advantage of what LunaCE has to offer, and we hope more webOS app developers will follow down their path. Not all TouchPad users are going to install LunaCE, in fact we'd wager a relatively small portion even know of its existence, but for those that are taking the extra step of pimping out their TouchPad with the help of WebOS Ports, there's more goodness to come. read more View the full article

It's time for a webOS Nation brainstorming session. Late last week we were all some combination of perturbed, disturbed, hopeful, wistful, enraged, or just play befuddled when HP CEO Meg Whitman proclaimed that yes, HP eventually will have to make a smartphone. "But you already did that!" was the cry in all capital letters across the internet, followed by the cacophony of a million techies sighing at once. But it got me thinking - is webOS as it stands right now really capable of standing up to the giants of the current smartphone industry? We all know the merits of webOS - multitasking, notifications, Synergy, Just Type, and so forth, but right now even the Open webOS that's coming up is looking to be seriously devoid of feature updates. So, if somebody - anybody - were to take webOS and make a smartphone out of it, what would it take for somebody to be willing to pick it up instead of the iPhone or Galaxy S or Droid or Lumia sitting elsewhere on the shelf in the carrier store? Let's delve into that, shall we? We'll start with the assumption of webOS 3.0 melded with webOS 2.2.4 as our basepoint. Everything that webOS 3.0 can do, dropped down into the form factor of a webOS smartphone, essentially. Now sit this phone next to the Apple iPhone 5, Motorola RAZR HD, Nokia Lumia 920, and Samsung Galaxy S III. What's missing? We could go on and on about hardware. A modern webOS device would need to have a higher resolution and larger screen (hell, even the iPhone 5 has a 4-inch screen now), an LTE radio, faster processor, more RAM, more storage, a bigger battery, a better camera, and maybe other extraneous bits like NFC, all crammed into an impossibly thin shell to be taken seriously at a glance. This thought exercise is more a matter of software. After all, Open webOS is open source - anybody can take it and put it onto whatever hypothetical hardware they want (with some work, clearly) - so let's focus on how the software can be improved to modern standards. I'll offer up two major points - application selection and camera software. read more View the full article

Are you the type that needs to do things on a schedule, a schedule that's too, shall we say 'odd', for a calendar. As in you need to know how many day's it's been since you last washed the dog? Or how many minutes it's been since you last hiccuped? Or just how many hours have past since you last lost The Game? [editor's note: son of a…] Then sinceWhen+ by penduinbits might be just the app you need. Simply create a note of what event's time-since has passed, log the time, and wait. Events can be given labels, and a complete history of your sinceWhen+ loggings is kept. It's a simple concept, but a rich app at a not-so-rich price of $0.99. But should you happen to want a copy for free, well are you ever in luck - we've got one hundred copies of sinceWhen+ for that very purpose! Contest: We have 100 copies of sinceWhen+ to give away. Just leave a comment on this post to enter. Contest ends next Sunday at midnight US Eastern Time, after which time we will select 100 random entrants to win. Please only leave one comment, multiple entries won’t count. Promo codes are only valid in countries serviced by the App Catalog, and users must be running webOS 2.0 or higher with the latest version of the App Catalog. View the full article

Just Type on webOS has always been a powerful tool. Between universal search of your apps, content, and the web, custom web searches, and quick action shortcuts, Just Type has always had the potential to be incredibly powerful. But it didn't always get there, thanks to the perennially-low marketshare penetration of webOS. But just because webOS has low user numbers doesn't mean there aren't developers out there looking to make there mark. Take Eugenio Paolantonio, an Italian webOS developer who decided he wanted truly custom web search capabilities. So he made his own app: webOS Quick Actions. The app lets you generate a custom Just Type search or launch, so long as you know your way around scripting. It's pretty barebones, but the app itself is just a point in which to enter your scripting and a launching intermediary. So what does this scripting allow you to do? Let's say you want to be able to search a site that doesn't have an OpenSearch plug-in. What do you do? You set up a custom Google search script that includes the site's url, and then all you have to do is plug into just type "sitename searchquery" and hit the Execute Quick Action button under Quick Actions - the app takes your cue (in this case sitename) and performs the appropriate search. webOS Quick Actions also supports opening apps on the device, and if the app supports the ability to open to a specific URL (for example, the web browser and App Catalog do), you can add in arguments to make that happen. Paolantonio's posted a good walkthrough on webOS Italiia, if you're willing to muddle through the auto-translation (or can read Italian) What webOS Quick Actions can do isn't necessarily limitless, but the options are many and only limited by your scripting know-how. Admittedly, our scripting know-how is on the rusty side of "never knew much to start", so while it'll take some studying before we can really make use of webOS Quick Actions, we saw the power user potential in it right away. View the full article

A month ago we broke the news that HP's webOS Global Business Unit would be spinning off as a new company called Gram. The company was said to focus on cloud and user experience, leveraging webOS and Enyo along the way. Nothing new has come out about how exactly they're going to do that or when that's going to start happening - that's what happens when you're in stealth mode (which one could easily argue is in effect an admission that there's nothing more than grand plans to announce right now anyway). We wondered for a short time what URL Gram might secure, as sites like gram.com and gram.net registered as available, but thanks to their actual-word nature would have commanded a high price. So HP turned to Armenia, securing gr.am and shortly thereafter having it merely redirect to the Open webOS project site. That recently changed, however, with gr.am now displaying the looping curvy three-quarters-of-a-butterfly Gram logo on a white background. Nothing else. No links to anywhere, nothing commented out in the code. Nothing. Stealth mode is serious business, it would seem. View the full article

I remember a time when Apple's product announcements were exciting. A time when Apple could announce a product that the entire world hadn't already seen every part of and thoroughly dissected and analyzed before the announcement. A time, apparently, before workers in China realized how valuable the raw parts they had in their hand could be and started sneaking them out of the factory and posting photos of them online. Much to the chagrin of Apple, and to the delight of bloggers starving for anything on the upcoming Apple devices. Except for when it gets announced and we already know practically everything about it, thus making for a relatively underwhelming announcement. Case in point: the iPhone 5 announcement today was unremarkable, as we knew practically everything about the new Apple smartphone, and so the exciting part of the whole event was that Apple unveiled a new widescreen touch iPod Nano to replace the little iPod Shuffle-sized version that came before (R.I.P. Nano Watch). The modern internet news cycle is entirely to blame for this level of disappointment. In the five years since the the original iPhone was announced the blog industry covering the iPhone, and even the traditional news outlets, has exploded and hungers for any scrap of news about the upcoming devices. Apple's covered more aggressively than any other tech company, with only Google even approaching the level of interest from the general public. When the new iPhone gets headline positioning on traditional wide-coverage media outlets like CNN, up there with much more important things like the senseless and galling death of the U.S. Ambassador to Libya amidst the civil unrest spurred on by a purposefully inflammatory amateur video posted online from halfway around the world; the striking teachers union in Chicago and the 350,000 students not in class because of it; and the rhetoric, ideas, and gaffes of the presidential election campaigns (themselves feeding into and thriving off of the high tempo news cycle), perhaps our global obsession with Apple in particular and the latest gadget in general has gone too far. Is the iPhone 5 impressive? Absolutely. It's thinner, lighter, faster, longer-lasting, stronger, bigger, and everything else you'd expect from the latest smartphone. Apple's yet again managed a strong technical accomplishment, making a phone that is better in practically every way than its predecessors. But Apple's competitors have caught up, and they're starting to differentiate in ways that Apple would not, making devices that are equally, if not more impressive. The Samsung Galaxy S III is still an impressive competitor to the iPhone 5, and the Nokia Lumia 920 too looks to be a worthy competitor. Apple's still at the head of the pack, but the competition isn't lagging far behind - if at all behind - these days. And that's a good thing. Personally, as an owner of an iPhone 4S on Sprint, I'm not all that enticed by the iPhone 5. Sprint LTE coverage won't be in my area for some time, and I honestly I've got all the inches I need. If I had an iPhone older than the 4S, or honestly any webOS phone older than the Pre3, I might be seriously eyeing the iPhone 5. As always, the latest iPhone will rarely be a justifiable upgrade for owners of the previous generation, but anything with something older would have a harder time justifying not upgrading - especially as their contracts are coming up for renewal right about now. As for how this compares to webOS? Well, webOS might be lagging on features, even as it makes the transition to open source, but in our opinion webOS still wins on user interface. iOS by its nature cannot match the fluid gesture-based interface of webOS. I've had an iPhone for some time now and I still find myself swiping across the bottom bezel to go back or switch apps. If I could get an iPhone 5 with webOS on it (plus a bunch of the modern software features of iOS 6, Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, and Windows Phone 8) then I'd be a happy, happy camper. View the full article

Earlier this month we saw the debut of new devices from Nokia, Motorola, and Amazon. Well, Sony was in there too, but they failed to impress enough to warrant a mention. Today brings the event they were all hoping to precede, lest they fall short by going afterwards: Apple's iPhone 5 announcement. Honestly, it really doesn't matter how impressive Apple's new iPhone is, it's sure to outsell by a wide margin all of the devices announced earlier this week. That said, this new iPhone does look to be a significant upgrade over the previous model, with a taller 4-inch screen, a thinner unibody metal shell, a new smaller dock connector, new earbuds (whoo), LTE, and the much-improved iOS 6. Plus whatever else the gang in Cupertino pulls out of their hats on stage in San Francisco. It all goes down starting at 1PM EDT (10AM PDT), so just go ahead and point your browser to our everything-i sister site iMore for live coverage of the event. You know you're at least slightly interested, just if so you can tell your friends how much it still sucks, right? View the full article

Sprint is just starting to roll out their LTE network, but if you're a webOS user that's really not of much concern to you. No LTE network really is. What concerns you is 3G, be it EVDO on Sprint and Verizon or HSPA+ on AT&T. If you're the owner of a Sprint Palm Pre or Sprint Palm Pixi, you're both a diehard for sticking with such aged hardware (even if you've Frankened to a Pre 2) and for dealing all these years with Sprint's last place 3G speeds. But we've got good news! Sprint's 3G speeds are going to improve over the next several months as part of their Network Vision rollout. The overhaul of Sprint's network includes putting down some big thick fiber pipes to handle all of the data that will be streaming over their LTE network (which is notably faster than their barely-4G WiMAX network). Those new light-speed pipes will have the added benefit of boosting the capabilities of Sprint's already-present 3G network. And that's not including the upgrades that Sprint plans to implement for their 3G network; they know full well that it will be years before they have comprehensive LTE coverage in the US, and they've got a long way to go to catch up with AT&T, let alone Verizon (sorry, T-Mobile). Sprint actually expects their Network Vision plan to be "largely completed by the end of 2013", so it could be a while before Sprint's upgrades have an impact on your 3G speeds. Here's hoping you don't have to hold out for another fifteen months before your Pre sees faster speeds, not that it'd be able to do much with them… View the full article

The land of webOS used to be a bountiful land full of ridiculously awesome Twitter apps. As time progressed interest in webOS amongst developers dwindled and these developers either pulled their app or abandoned them altogether. Then when former CEO extraordinaire </sarcasm> Leo Apotheker killed webOS hardware the Twitter apps started dropping like flies. We still have a couple great offerings from diehard webOS developers, but the overall selection is definitely "slim pickens" compared to what webOS users once had. Needless to say we are always happy to see any signs of a new Twitter client (or any new app, really) so when we stumbled upon Neo webOS we got excited. Since the app is currently in closed beta, we immediately got in touch with the developer and managed to snag a very early copy of the app to preview for you. Neo webOS is the brainchild of developer Bryan Leasot, otherwise known as @fxspec06 on the interwebs, and a student of Computer Information Systems Programming. Leasot planned this project all summer long and as soon as his summer classes ended in early August he got started on Neo with a little help from his friend Jake Morrison. Using Spazcore from the open source and famed open source webOS Twitter client Spaz HD as a foundation, Leasot gutted and rewrote code from Spaz HD with the new Enyo 2.0 framework. His current goals for this project are speed, customizability, and usability. read more View the full article

If there's one category of game that will hold an eternal place in our hearts, it's puzzles. Not specifically the piece-together-an-image type puzzle, but games that are brain teasers of some sort. Take, for example, Picross by penduinbits. This app, built for webOS devices running webOS 1.4.5 or higher (so, every webOS device), offers up a load of 8-bit style puzzles where you have to use the numerical clues around the edge of a grid to determine which blocks to fill in to create an image. It's a simple idea, but the numerical puzzle aspect of Picross will be sure to keep you, well, puzzled. At least, it will for one hundred of you, who will receive a free copy of Picross! Contest: We have 100 copies of Picross to give away. Just leave a comment on this post to enter. Contest ends next Sunday at midnight US Eastern Time, after which time we will select 100 random entrants to win. Please only leave one comment, multiple entries won’t count. Promo codes are only valid in countries serviced by the App Catalog, and users must be running webOS 2.0 or higher with the latest version of the App Catalog. View the full article

HP's been the number one manufacturer of personal computers since they acquired Compaq in 2002. Despite their numbers-based dominance, HP's recognized the threat to their business posed by Apple and the iPad. Having recognized that threat, HP's been working to update their business to respond to Apple - that threat posed by Apple's iPad and other mobile computing devices was exactly why HP spent $1.2 billion to purchase Palm and webOS in 2010 (even if that didn't go quite as planned). While Samsung's been duking it out int court with Apple over the former's copying of the latter's designs, specifically with respect to the iPhone and iOS, HP's been busy aping the design of Apple's laptops. Just look at HP's Envy laptops, with their machined aluminum bodies and glass-covered display panels. At a glance it can be difficult to differentiate between one of HP's Envy laptops and Apple's MacBook Pro line. One can argue that computers were 'headed in that direction' all they want, but it doesn't change the face that before Apple began achieving success in personal computing (success, in that Mac unit sales have continued to grow while the overall personal computer market experiences a decline - in part thanks to the iPad), this sort of design duplication didn't happen on this wide of a scale. This morning HP announced the new Spectre One, a new 24-inch all-in-one Windows 8 computer. The Spectre One makes the Envy line's copying of Apple design features seem like a warm-up exercise; the Spectre One is almost a spitting image of Apple's iMac desktop computers, even down to the included wireless keyboard and trackpad. The Spectre One does have a handful of differences from the iMac, such as ports located in the aluminum base, a removable panel on the back, and NFC compatibility, so long as you're using HP's apps on your Android phone. Plus, you know, Windows 8. HP's been eyeing Apple's products for some time, with the design of the TouchPad being heavily-influenced by the original iPad. HP's webOS tablet mimicked the dimensions, weight, battery life, screen size and resolution, and even the button layout of the iPad. Seemingly unable to predict the direction that Apple would take with future iPads (it always seemed like it'd be rather obvious to us: faster, thinner, longer-lasting, etc), HP chose to use the first generation iPad as the benchmark for the TouchPad. We've only heard bits and pieces about where HP planned to go with the TouchPad line, but word has it the TouchPad 2, well into development when HP pulled the plug on webOS, took further inspiration from Apple, including a higher resolution screen and a thinner and lighter metal body. HP may be drawing too much design inspiration from the likes of Apple, but are they going to face the same sort of legal action from Apple as Samsung has? It's hard to say, but as we said at the start, HP views Apple as a threat to their business - Apple doesn't seem to be all that fazed by HP. View the full article

In HP's seemingly unending quest to quell the bleeding, the company's employees have been in the firing line since May. Back then, CEO Meg Whitman announced that HP was looking to cut its 300,000-man workforce by 27,000. Today brought the news that another 2,000 positions are on the chopping block, as per a 10-K filing HP sent to the SEC. The new 29,000 total reduction count will reduce HP's workforce by over eight percent. HP hopes that a portion of those employees will leave HP as part of a "voluntary enhanced early retirement" program in the U.S. Given the current economic and jobs climate, getting enough workers to voluntarily depart HP (even in spite of HP's ongoing issues) and lose their benefits like healthcare coverage to make a dent in the expected layoff count has and will continue to be an ongoing hurdle. The restructuring plan and accompanying workforce reductions are expected to result in a total of $3.3 billion in accounting charges resulting from costs relating to the early retirement and severance packages from the layoffs. An additional $400 million in restructuring costs will come from consolidations in HP's real estate assets and data centers. View the full article

Touch-to-share was a grand concept introduced with the TouchPad, Pre3 and Veer to be able to share data between two devices by simply tapping them together. Unfortunately, the initial implementation of TTS only allowed you to share web page URLs, and it never even came to the Veer in the promised software update to webOS 2.2. So, unless you have a Pre3 and a TouchPad (or two TouchPads), you are seemingly just limited to sending website address to and from the browser app. It turns out, though, you are not just limited to the browser app to share these website addresses. We have already seen Zap Photoshare utilize touch-to-share to send the website address to view photos on a second device, and now forum member kmoll3ster noticed that the TouchPad's Facebook app also includes a Touch-to-share feature. If you are viewing a photo from within the Facebook Tablet app and then Touch-to-share with another TouchPad or Pre3, the browser will launch and load up the facebook.com website for that photo. Not exactly an extremely useful feature, but one that exists nonetheless and only for photos, as it does not work with other articles or posts. And be aware that this is a one-way feature as it's only built into the TouchPad's Facebook app and not the smartphone version, although you can use App Tuckerbox to install Facebook Tablet on your Pre3 to send it from a Pre3 to a TouchPad. Thanks to kmoll3ster in our forums for this tip! View the full article

Hot damn this community rocks. For everything the webOS community has been through, you can always count on the webOS Nation Forums to pull together to get things done. And get things done they have, in the course of three weeks the 2012 WebOS Internals web-a-thon raised a whopping $12,202.20 to support the ongoing operations of the homebrew organization. That's a good amount of dough that will help to sustain the operation of WebOS Internals and WebOS Ports for a good while, not that that's going to stop us from making more donations later on. Last year's web-a-thon may have raised a few thousand more dollars, but considering everything this community's been through in the past year (recap time!), it's staggering how much love this community can still show. And unlike last year, there were prizes beyond getting a badge of the webOS Nation Forums that screams "I'm awesome"; this year, WebOS Internals chief Rod Whitby tossed in am ultra-rare TouchPad Go for the highest donation, as well as four HP Pre3 smartphones for the next four donators. So what does will that twelve thousand dollars go to? It goes to paying for the servers and bandwidth that are needed for Preware, and it goes towards purchasing development devices so that the developers of WebOS Internals can work their homebrew magic. That latter point is going to be important going forward, as the future of official webOS hardware is questionable, those wanting to still run webOS are going to need modern hardware to do it, which means Internals is going to need to purchase modern hardware to build and test on. In a way, the donations made in this year's web-a-thon aren't going to just sustain WebOS Internals - they're going to help to sustain webOS as an operating system, and consequently sustain the webOS community. So for that, we at webOS Nation thank everybody for their donations - we don't really benefit directly from it, but anything to help further the webOS community is fine by us. Missed the web-a-thon? Don't feel bad, WebOS Internals accepts support donations all-year 'round. View the full article

Google's Android software is available on quite literally hundreds of devices. But on all but a select few it's been tinkered with at a bare minimum (or wholesale overhauled), moving it away from a 'true' Android experience. In fact, the number of 'Google' devices, i.e. those with unadulterated Android installed out of the box, can be counted on two hands. most of those are Google-directed Nexus devices. That's not to say that there's anything wrong with the modifications made by Samsung, HTC, Sony, Amazon, and everybody else toying with Android, but there's a contingent of people that want to be able to install stock Android on their device without the interference of others. Part of the code to make that possible has always been available as part of the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). Anybody can download that and do with it as they please, and installing it on a device should yield a 'pure' Android experience. So long as you're okay with probably not having access to a number of vital components with drivers that aren't open source and thus aren't part of AOSP. That hasn't stopped groups like CyanogenMod from repurposing the open source code of AOSP, including the project to install Android on the TouchPad. Google's head of the AOSP, Jean-Baptiste Queru, isn't content with that, and wants to bring the pure, unadulterated Android experience to more devices. His first experimental target: the Sony Xperia S. Despite Sony's history of siloing themselves off in proprietary technologies (MiniDisc and Memory Stick, anyone?), they've recently come to terms with being more open and have become more supportive of open source development. So it should come as no surprise that a few weeks after Queru started his quest to bring AOSP to the Xperia S, Sony's gone ahead and made available the binaries for the device. While such code won't be useful to the average homebrew ROM cooker, they should prove quite useful to the Xperia S AOSP project. We've said before that the biggest technical hurdle facing the adoption of Open webOS on the vast majority of devices is the lack of open source supporting software like the drivers and whatnot in the Xperia S binaries. With Google publicly pursuing getting stock Android onto at least one non-Nexus device, we have to wonder if this approach might be a useful one for HP and Open webOS. As of right now there are two forms of Open webOS, both in beta: one for Linux desktop installations, and another for embedded devices. The Linux version isn't exactly a cakewalk to install outside of the instructions provided by HP, so throwing it on that tablet you have sitting around isn't a simple task. And while the OpenEmbedded-enabled version of Open webOS is technically installable on any number of theoretical devices, it's missing a fairly major component: a user interface. But let's assume that HP's plans involve setting up Open webOS to run on more devices than just a 32-bit install of Linux Ubuntu, because that's simply not going to be useful to most people. In fact, we have to question whether it'd really be useful to any but a select handful. But thanks to a distinct lack of open source drivers for many things, there aren't a whole lot of options for Open webOS. That is, unless a company such a Sony is willing to step up as they have with the Android Open Source Project and pitch in useful code to make exciting things happen. While there's the obvious advantage to webOS enthusiasts such as ourselves who strongly desire to run webOS on new hardware, there's an advantage for the assisting device manufacturer as well. We're not talking about just goodwill here, of which there'd be plenty from a yearning-to-offer-goodwill webOS community. No, there's the advantage that said manufacturer would have an additional operating system in their quiver should they want to take the webOS route, and they'd have let the community do most of the work for them. View the full article

Way back in December of 2010 we were promised that Facebook Chat would come to the webOS Messaging app via Synergy in webOS 2.0. If you pick up your webOS 2.x device and fire up Messaging, you'll probably notice the distinct lack of Facebook in there. That's assuming you haven't gone all rogue and rouge added Facebook Chat support with a patch. But there is also a dedicated app to make it happen, from webOS developer pcworldSoftware (not related to the magazine and website) comes QuickChat for Facebook, an Enyo-based app for phones and tablets running webOS 2.1 or higher, that's dedicated to your Facebook instant messaging needs. Normally QuickChat would cost you $2.99 from the App Catalog, but it just so happens that we have 50 copies to give away to you, loyal reader. Contest: We have 50 copies of QuickChat for Facebook to give away. Just leave a comment on this post to enter. Contest ends next Sunday at midnight US Eastern Time, after which time we will select 50 random entrants to win. Please only leave one comment, multiple entries won’t count. Promo codes are only valid in countries serviced by the App Catalog, and users must be running webOS 2.1.0 or higher with the latest version of the App Catalog. View the full article

Mobile Nations Podcast Feed Mobile Nations on iTunes Mobile Nations YouTube Mobile Nations 18: Apple vs. Samsung special verdict edition Iterate 28: Marco Arment of Instapaper IFA 2012 - We were there and here is everything you need to know! Hands on with the Samsung Galaxy Camera Hands-on with HBO Go on Nexus 7 Many hands on BlackBerry 10 Phones: Ten things we're looking forward to so far What does the Samsung vs. Apple patent lawsuit mean to the Research In Motion? BlackBerry App World filling up with BlackBerry 10 apps Patch your Pre's carrier string to say whatever you want LunaCE graduates to beta status After two weeks of silence, App Catalog flooded with invalid listings No NFC bound for next generation iPhone iPhone photography: The ultimate guide How to set up two-step verification for Dropbox iMore show 308: Angry bits of mostly plastic Leaked photos of a new Nokia Lumia 820 with Windows Phone 8 finally appear HTC Windows Phone 8 devices will reportedly feature Beats Audio Microsoft unveils Samsung ATIV-S Windows Phone 8 device View the full article

Ask any webOS fan what device they were most looking forward to getting their hands on and chances are you will here them say the TouchPad Go. This seven inch little brother to the TouchPad was slated for release in "the coming months" after the original TouchPad's release. Despite the smaller size the TouchPad Go would have had many benefits to hold over its larger sibling's head like a soft touch back, a rear facing camera, and a better pixel density due to its smaller size. Add all that in together and combine it with the simple fact that a seven inch tablet makes for better portability and it's hard to imagine anyone who wouldn't want one. Unfortunately dear old Mr. Apotheker killed all hopes of anyone ever getting their hands on this awesome little tablet when he chose to pull the plug on webOS hardware development. This decision banished the TouchPad Go to the land of "misfit webOS devices" along with the Touchstone Audio Dock, the WindsorNot slab phone, and many other great devices most of us will never see. Despite the TouchPad Go's premature demise a few of these neat little tablets have managed to make their way into the hands of a few lucky webOS community members. One of these community members happens to be a dear friend of webOS Nation by the name of Rich Dunbar. Many of you you may be quite familiar with him from Twitter (@RichDunbar), the webOS Nation forums, or you may have even downloaded his app Tap for HELP. If you have had the pleasure of having a conversation with him you have probably gathered the fact that he is a very generous man that has helped many of people in the webOS community in many different ways. This time he's raffling off his beloved (and extremely rare) TouchPad Go (with a Touchstone charging dock) and donating all the proceeds to charity! read more View the full article