News Reporter
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We're not going to sugar coat this one - the camera on the Pre3 is the best camera to grace a webOS device, and it's okay. It's not great, but it's decent. But it's saddled with the same camera app that webOS has had since practically day one. You can toggle between video and stills, cycle beetween auto, on, and off flash, and hit the shutter/record button.
Missing, in comparison to competing smartphone platforms: using the front camera, multi-exposure HDR photos, a timer, white balance, automatic panoramas, and much much more. Truth is, the webOS camera app isn't built to handle these features - adding a camera switch button to the TouchPad Go's camera app crashes the tablet. The camera app needs an overhaul so users can at least do their best to make up for the shortcomings of the sensor.
Our suggestion is to utilize Enyo - put in a pull-out settings tray where users can access all of this more advanced stuff plus the everybody-does-it-because-it-looks-cool basic filters (sepia, black-and-white, pop colors, etc). And if the user doesn't want that stuff, they don't have to touch it. And while we're at it, something's frustrated us for a long time when taking pictures with webOS smartphones - the image fills the entire screen, going under the shutter button. This isn't in and of itself a problem, except that the camera takes 4:3 ratio photos and the Pre series smartphones have 3:2 and 5:3 screens, meaning the top and bottom of photos are always cut off when trying to frame things up. Everybody else has solved this by framing the entire image on the screen and putting primary controls off to the side - there's no reason webOS shouldn't either.
Have your own thoughts on this webOS Wish List entry? Of course you do - the comments are below. Surely you have your own ideas as to what ought be on the webOS wish list, and so we've created a forum thread just for what has proven to be an awesome discussion.
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Just a few days ago we were looking back at one year since HP had announced the Veer, Pre3, and TouchPad and marveling at all that had happened in just the preceding 365 days. But webOS Nation reader Tim O'Brien pointed out something pretty crazy that hadn't even occurred to us: this February also marks the ten-year anniversary of the Treo smartphone.
That's right, a full decade ago the world finally got its hands on the first Palm OS-powered smartphone from Handspring in the Treo 180. How state-of-the-art was this smartphone? The Treo 180 had a 2.8" 160x160 16-scale monochromatic resistive touchscreen and a full QWERTY keypad (the 180g had a Graffiti area in its place) over top of a blazingly fast 33MHz Motorola DragonBall VZ MC68VZ328 processor, 16MB of RAM and 4MB of ROM. It was 2.7 inches wide, 4.3 tall, and a slim 0.708 inches thick, and weighed in at a featherweight 5.18 ounces thanks to its steel blue plastic shell. The Treo 180 ran Palm OS 3.5 with deep phone integration thanks to Handspring's VisorPhone software.
While the Treo 180 wasn't the world's first smartphone - that honor technically goes to IBM all the way back in 1992 (Ericsson was the first to market a 'smartphone' with the Symbian-powered R380 in 2000, and Palm teamed up with Kyocera to release the Palm OS-powered 6035) - it and the BlackBerry 5810 released a month later were the devices that really kicked off the idea that a smartphone was more than just a niche product for high-flying CEOs.
So happy tenth birthday, Treo 180. We've come a long way since February 2002, and it's thanks in large part to your pioneering ways.
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While every webOS device comes with some kind of speaker, the TouchPad is the only one whose speaker is adequate to fill a (smallish) room. On the phones, even the rear speaker struggles to put out enough volume to allow sharing of music or other audio in a space with moderate or higher background noise. Given that webOS phones all support both standard 3.5mm headphone/speaker jacks (the Veer admittedly needing an adapter) and Bluetooth speakers, there are numerous options for boosting the sound so others can enjoy it too. Unfortunately, most of those external speakers are far less portable than the phone itself. There are, though, some speakers that offer both powered amplification and portability. One of these is the Naztech N15 3.55 Mini Boom Speaker, which additionally operates as a standalone MP3/WMA player (it accepts microSD cards as removable storage, and has minimal controls for music playback and track navigation). While the Naztech's design and standalone player capabilities are pluses, however, its minimal amplification power makes it a poor choice for webOS devices.
Naztech has done a nice job with the design of the N15. It folds to the size and shape of a flattened golf ball, with a recess for storing the non-removable (and very short at 2-3 inches) 3.5mm audio cable. Along the periphery of the speaker are the standalone music player controls, a miniUSB (not microUSB, unfortunately, meaning it cannot share charger cables with a webOS device) port, and the microSD slot. The play/pause button doubles as the power button for the speaker, and a blue LED lights up when the unit is powered on. Note that although the track forward and reverse buttons double as volume controls for standalone play, they do not affect volume when the N15 is connected to an external sound source. According to Naztech, the N15 provides 2 watts of speaker output, and its 3.7 volt lithium ion battery charges (via a powered USB port or charger) in 4 hours. Naztech does not provide any play time details, and our testing did not extend to battery life.
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The App Catalog on the HP TouchPad might not have the most expansive selection in the tablet space, but it's got some pretty decent apps in it. One of those is the free USA Today app, which provides a slick interface for accessing the news site's stories. And as it would turn out, it's a relatively popular app. From a leaked slide from an internal USA Today presentation, we've learned that the USA Today app for TouchPad has been downloaded 250,000 times, which isn't bad for a platform that might have over a million devices on market.
While that pales in comparison to the 2.9 million downloads for the iPad, the webOS tablet app handily trounces its Android tablet competition. All standard Android tablets (excluding the Amazon Kindle Fire, because while it's based on Android, it's not a "true" Android tablet) combined have netted a total of 130,000 downloads. That's on tablets from multiple manufacturers who are still standing behind the product. Heck, HP's defunct tablet has managed to clock more app downloads than Windows Phone as a platform.
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So it turns out that this week is App Catalog Access Week for the webOS Wish List. We already touched on the need to expand the App Catalog to more than the less-than-a-dozen countries currently covered and revamping the app promo code system with global and shorter codes. Now it's time to supplement the current app-based promo codes with promo codes based around the one thing that makes the world go round: money.
HP has already demonstrated the ability to create monetary App Catalog promo codes - TouchPad early adopters received a promo code for $50 in apps back in August. The infrastructure is there, and it's already been exercised on a mass scale. The only thing missing is the ability for average Joe users to create their own App Catalog gift cards.
We'd like to propose two types of gifting for the App Catalog. We know that the chance of there being physical App Catalog gift cards like there are for the iOS App Store is practically nil, so we're totally cool with this being all digital. The first type is the monetary type, where through the hpwebos.com website users can create an App Catalog gift card for whatever amount they want and send it to a desired user. The second is the ability to gift a specific app, which one would be able to do through the website or through the App Catalog app itself. both would quite simply generate the appropriate promo code and email it to the recipient with appropriate flavor text about what it is and who sent it to them.
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It hasn't been that long since we kicked off our name change, and as promised, 2012 is bringing more than just a new name to the site. Last night our extraordinary team pulled off a combination site redesign and back-end overhaul. The goal of the redesign is simple: give webOS Nation a clean and modern look that is both easy on the eyes and the browser. For the most part things haven't changed from the user perspective, though you should be able to access our much more functional mobile site with webOS devices now. Also, commenting now works across the full range of webOS devices - huzzah!
As always with a redesign like this there are bound to be some hiccups or tweaks to be made. If you notice anything off kilter, please sound off in the comments. Or just drop us a note about how awesome this all is, that's cool too.
Enjoy the new site!
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The quest to get thinner, stronger, faster, and healthier with iMore and Mobile Nations continues!
We’ve survived the first week of Mobile Nations Fitness Month. We’ve set our goals and whether we achieved them (yay!) or are still working on them (take that!), we’re feeling better and doing better because of it. And we’re getting tons of great feedback. This might just be the year where mobile and lifestyle fully come together, where eHealth and eFitness — or iHealth and iFitness — finally start making the impact we’ve all been waiting for. It’s gone from being a token arm band case to being an entire ecosystem of highly specialized companion apps and accessories.
We recorded a special edition of ZEN and TECH with CrackBerry.com’ Kevin Michaluk, where we answered a lot of questions, cleared up some big misconceptions, and went over a lot of dos and don’ts to get things going.
Also Kevin produced the single greatest (or most terrifying) fitness video in the history of YouTube. Watch his Sexy and you know it workout.
So let’s keep it going! Once again, we’re setting reasonable, attainable goals, and we’re going to take advantage of our awesome community to make sure we attain them. We have a special edition of our Superfunctional podcast coming your way this weekend to help keep you motivated. Since it's a new week, we've got a new Fitness Month thread in the forums to keep us focused, keep us accountable, and keep us keeping on!
Oh, and we’re still giving away a lot of great prizes!
- Weekly drawings for an TouchPad Touchstone. We’re giving away 4 total, one each week!
- Grand prize drawing for a 32GB TouchPad Bundle (includes Touchstone, Bluetooth Keyboard, and Folio Case)!
Our ZEN and TECH podcast has also added to the pot with an Xbox 360 Kinect giveaway, so be sure to enter that as well!
So hurry up and jump into the forums and pick your goal for week 2. Mobile Nations fitness month continues!
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Anyone who has used a webOS phone for any period of time knows that battery life is not one of the strongest features of those phones. While it has gotten significantly better from when the original Pre was first released in 2009, it's still a difficult task to make it through a full day with any type of moderate usage. For Pre, Pre Plus, or Pre 2 owners, the good news was that you could use spare batteries from any of those phones interchangeably or purchase spare stock or extended batteries from places such as the webOS Nation store.
With the official limited release of the HP Pre3 in Europe and the slew of AT&T (and a few Verizon) phones making their way to eBay, we found ourselves in a bit of a quandary: the only way to get a spare battery for those phones was to buy an extra Pre3. Not exactly an inexpensive (or efficient) proposition. And if you didn’t want to spend the hundreds of dollars on another Pre3 just for its battery, what would happen if/when the battery stopped working after extended usage, shorted out, or gets trashed?
Seeing a potential business opportunity, Mugen Power Batteries (who previously made extended batteries for both the Pre and Pixi) created their own a survey late last year to gague interested in extended batteries for the Pre3. Within just a few hours of opening the poll, Mugen announced that they received enough feedback to justify development of Pre3 batteries. Pre-orders were opened in December for a 1400 mAh "SL" extended battery for $46.95 and a 2800 mAh "XL" extended battery for $98.95, the latter of which comes with a larger back cover for the Pre3. As compared to the stock Pre3 battery that clocks in at 1230 mAh, these batteries should provide an extra 14% or 128% of battery life before your phone needs to be plugged back in.
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This time last year, Derek, Dieter, and Riz were running around San Francisco's Fort Mason Center covering what turned out to be the biggest planned event in the history of webOS. It was the coming out party for webOS under HP, and it came to be known as "Think Beyond." One year ago, HP SVP and Palm Global Business Unit manager Jon Rubinstein got up on the stage to introduce, in order, the tiny HP Veer smartphone, the HP Pre3 - larger, thinner, and more powerful webOS smartphone that the faithful had been waiting for - and the first webOS tablet, the HP TouchPad, all slated by the end of Summer 2011
That day brought more than hardware announcements. We got our first look at webOS 3.0 on the TouchPad, met the new VP of Developer Relations Richard Kerris, found out that HP was not going to update older handsets to webOS 2.0, and said goodbye to the Palm brand. Things were looking up - even if the TouchPad wasn't a mind-blowing piece of hardware, it was the first of what we hoped would be several products to take the market by storm.
The Veer shipped to middling reviews in May and the TouchPad followed in July. And then everything went downhill from there. After just a month on the market, HP cut the TouchPad's price by $100, and ten days after that pulled the rug out from under the webOS community by canceling all webOS hardware development. Since then we've gone through a hardware fire sale, a fired CEO, the loss of Kerris, Rubinstein, and many others, questions about the future of the platform, and emerged on the other side with plans for going open source with a new Open webOS.
My, what a year it has been.
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Ready to jump into the wide world of homebrew on your TouchPad, Pre, or Veer? Alright! Here's what you need:
- Your webOS tablet or smartphone
- A computer, Mac or PC, connected to the internet
- A Micro-USB cable to connect the webOS device to your computer (you can use the cable that came with the device, but any Micro-USB cable will do)
- A stiff drink (this isn't required, but you'll deserve one for being awesome enough to be doing homebrew)
Got that? Okay, time for some clarifications. webOS devices do not need to be "rooted" - they come from the factory open enough that special tools aren't needed to install apps outside of the App Catalog or gain access to the operating system. The process of getting a homebrew installer set-up is relatively straight-forward and doesn't involve anything scary or potentially warranty voiding (there are potentially warranty-voiding things you can do after that, but everything described in this how-to is perfectly acceptable).
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We'll be honest - this one is more for the developers and our own lazy purposes. Right now, webOS App Catalog developers are only able to generate promo codes for their apps on a per-country basis, i.e. a promo code can only be generated for a specific country, and doing so for other countries requires a different promo code. Here's a glimpse into the headache of country-specific promo codes.
When we do our weekly app giveaways here on webOS Nation, we have to get a multi-use USA code from the developer to send out to the winners, knowing that the majority will be on the American App Catalog. But should they be an international user on, say, the German App Catalog? Then that code won't work for them and they need a German promo code. Not a problem, we'll get one from the developer. Now do that for 15-20% of the winners in our giveaways. It can escalate a migraine to a headache real fast keeping track of which winners need a code for which country.
It's even worse if you're a developer who wants to just put a promo code out there but still cover all the international bases - you have to make one for each of the ten countries that support promo codes and hope that people pick them up. Amusingly/frustratingly, even though HP supports app sales to Singapore, they never got around to adding Singapore to the promo code selection list.
The time has come to overhaul the promo code system. The first step is to institute global promo codes - one code to cover every country. We can forgive not supporting promo codes in countries where app sales aren't happening, though that's something that needs to be worked on too. The second step is to eliminate the requirement for having a payment method on file with the App Catalog in order to use a promo code. Best Buy doesn't require that I have cash on me when I use a Best Buy gift card, why should the App Catalog need a credit card to use a promo code?
And step the third: make them shorter. The current 32-digit alpha-numeric promo code system is both ridiculously hard to manually enter and overkill - it allows for 1.9 quattuordecillion (that's 1.9 billion trillion trillion trillion) possibilities. Note only would it be near impossible to guess a promo code, even with a computer doing the inputting, but HP is never ever going to run out of combinations. Our humble suggestion: cut it down to eight alpha-numeric characters. That's still 2.8 trillion possibilities. Go for ten (3.6 quadrillion) or twelve (4.7 quintillion) if you're feeling antsy about hackability.
Have your own thoughts on this webOS Wish List entry? Of course you do - the comments are below. Surely you have your own ideas as to what ought be on the webOS wish list, and so we've created a forum thread just for what is sure to be an awesome discussion.
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It was early December. The whirlwind year that was 2011 was coming to a close and the future of webOS was still a great unknown. But one developer stood up and proclaimed, "My name is Zhephree, and I shall build an app to catalog my media!" And so it was done.
Fast-forward to today and Geoff Gauchet's Wooden Rows app is now available for TouchPad owners. The app leverage's Amazon's vast database of books, CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays, and video games to allow the user to build a searchable library of their own personal physical collection. With that library put together you can then even keep track of when you've loaned things out to friends. Wooden Rows is not a content portal - you can't watch your movies, read your books, or listen to your music through it, nor will you likely ever be able to - it's a personal inventory tracker. If you've got a large media library, we can think of much worse ways to spend $3.99.
If you're in the mood to spend that amount twice, Zhephree has also cut their price of their other flagship app by a dollar, bringing the social network aggregator incredible! (properly lowercase and exclaimed, for the record) down to $3.99 as well. The move is a permanent price cut, and should be an easier pill to swallow for users looking to unite their Facebook, Flickr, foursquare, and Twitter existences in one cohesive stream.
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A few months back, deep in the midst of the TouchPad fire sale, at least a few of HP's webOS tablets shipped out the door and to customers with an unexpected install: Android. While HP never figured out exactly how their internal build of Android got released into the public, they've gone ahead and released the kernel and GPL (General Public License - i.e. open source) components. It's worth noting that releasing this is not something HP had to do - while those that ship Android devices are required by the licensing terms to release the kernel to open source, HP's release was accidental and thus open sourcing was not required - this release can be chalked up to goodwill, even if resulting from being pressured into doing it.
As was noted on RootzWiki, the source code released appears to have been developer separately from webOS on the TouchPad, possibly as a precursor project to HP's acquisition of Palm. The last change in the code was in March 2011, three months before the TouchPad's July 2011 release, but well after HP announced the webOS tablet in February. The crew at RootzWiki is understandably encouraged by the release and intends to adopt various portions into the CyanogenMod 9 Android 4.0 port.
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PreCentral: App Giveaway: 50 copies of Chinese Checkers
in LG and webOS News
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Little known fact: Chinese checkers is neither checkers nor Chinese. The game originated from 1892 Germany, and was itself an evolution of a square American board game caled Halma. But that doesn't matter, because you can now play it on your TouchPad, thanks to the Chinese Checkers game by PJ Nation. As any Chinese Checkers ought to do, it supports up to six players, human or computer, and in our experience is quite skilled at kicking our butts to all six corners of the board. Feel like getting your butt kicked by the computer, or just want to kill time with a partner (or five)? Good, because we've got fifty copies to give away!
Contest: We have 50 copies of Chinese Checkers 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 3.0 or higher with the latest version of the App Catalog.
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