GADGET REVIEWS Just another GADGET NEWS

Palm has announced the Pre 2, along with a major update to its webOS. It will be available to buy in France this Friday on SFR and will be available in the US (Verizon) and in Canada “in the coming months.”

Hardware-wise, not much has changed. In fact, from the outside, the Pre 2 is almost identical to the Pre, and it still has the slide-out QWERTY of the original. There are a few differences: the camera is now 5-Megapixels, up from 3MP, memory has jumped from 8GB to 16GB (although the upgraded Pre Plus already got this boost) and, well, that’s about it. You probably won’t notice the difference in your hand.

Which leaves the interesting stuff to webOS 2.0. The headline feature is “True Multitasking”, which HP and Palm tout as allowing you to switch between apps and then go back to where you left off. This doesn’t actually look anything like “true” multitasking, which keeps the applications open and running, and even rendering unseen graphics as happens on a PC. In fact, it looks a lot like the Android and iOS versions of multitasking, which effectively pause apps when they’re not in actual use. The presentation is different, though, with an update to the “cards” metaphor that the original webOS used to organize app windows. Now these will be sorted into stacks, grouped by task.

More useful is “Just Type”. This lets you start typing to launch apps, search the phone, send email and other things (Just Type is open to third-party developers, too). If you have used a quick-launcher on your computer, like Quicksilver or Launchbar on the Mac, then you’ll be familiar with just how great this could be.

The Pre’s ability to tie into all your social networks and pull in accounts and contact details remains, only now it’s called HP Synergy, after Palm’s new owner.

“Exhibition” is another useful addition. Exhibition is triggered when you stick the Pre to its pebble-like magnetic charging-dock, the Touchstone, and can be configured to show a slideshow, your day’s appointments or anything else a developer might choose to do.

There are also a whole lot of smaller tweaks, but there’s one more thing that Palm has snuck in that is worth a mention: Adobe Flash. webOS “now supports a beta of Adobe Flash Player 10.1 in the browser.” This will only work on the Pre phones, not the Pixi or Pixi Plus, and it is unclear whether it actually comes pre-installed.

Finally, you’ll have to wait for the price. SFR, the French carrier that will launch the Pre 2 this Friday, has taken down its Pre 2 page already. Google’s cache tells us that the handset will have a 1GHz processor and 512MB RAM, but that’s about it.

This seems a very pedestrian upgrade in a world where Android handsets grow as powerful as small computers, and the iPhone 4 has leapt ahead of its predecessor in every way. It seems that Palm is still competing with last year’s models of everything. Lets just hope that the team are putting all their time into the upcoming webOS tablets, at least.

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Palm Pre 2 [Palm]

Why webOS 2.0 goes to 11 [Palm blog]

HP Introduces webOS 2.0, the Next Generation of Mobile Innovation [HP]

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Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

There are two ways you could take the news that Hewlett-Packard has confirmed WebOS phones for early next year. One is “At last! What took so long?” The other is “Thank God they didn’t rush this thing.”

Speaking at a Conference in Barcelona, Spain yesterday, HP senior VP Eric Cador said “You will see us coming early next year with new phones” and added that Palm’s WebOS is “extremely fundamental.”

HP bought Palm earlier this year, so releasing new phones early next year is still pretty fast. But if we have learned anything from the runaway success of the iPhone and iPad, it’s that these things can’t be rushed: Apple’s devices were in development for years before they launched.

What we’re really looking forward too, though, is a WebOS tablet. Could it be that HP, once known for innovation but now just another commodity gray box maker, is taking its time to come up with an amazing, killer product? Let’s hope so. Right now, there’s only one tablet worth buying, and that lack of competition is not good for the consumer.

HP to launch new webOS phones in early 2011 [Reuters]

Image: New Palm Pre WebOS screenshots

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Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Now that HP has sealed its acquisition of Palm, the PC maker is working hard to get Palm’s webOS mobile operating system onto HP products.

Palm’s webOS will power HP upcoming tablet, says HP CTO Phil McKinney. The tablet known as HP Slate had earlier been designed using Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system. HP also plans to put webOS on printers, says McKinney.

“There’s a gap for devices that are larger than a smartphone but smaller than a netbook,” he told attendees at the ongoing Mobile Beat conference in San Francisco. “Slates could fit in that category.”

Unlike rival Dell, which chose the Google-designed open source Android OS to create its cellphone and tablet, HP spent $1.2 billion to buy Palm. The transaction closed earlier this month.

HP wants to control all pieces of the mobile ecosystem, says McKinney.

“If you look at success in the market, they are those companies who can control the end user experience and the entire experience stack,” he says.

That sounds more like Apple and less like Google. But it is clearly the direction that HP wants to go. In March, HP seemed poised to launch its Slate tablet offering sneak peeks of the device through carefully edited videos. Leaks of the company’s plans for the Slate pegged the price of the device at $550.

But in a surprise move in April, HP announced its buying Palm and with that it sent the Slate back to the drawing board. McKinney says HP is not yet ready to announce a launch date for the Slate.

“I am not going to pre-announce products but I will say that we are investing money into research & development and marketing at Palm.”

Photo:HP

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Palm CEO John Rubinstein will continue to head up his webOS team under new boss HP, and will be working on smartphones, “future slate PCs and netbooks,” according to a statement from HP

The computer giant completed its acquisition of Palm yesterday, and announced that Palm will continue to develop both hardware and software, headed up by former Apple employee Rubinstein.

This will include new phones (the Pre and Pixi lines are now also owned by HP), but most exciting is the confirmation that there will be webOS tablets. After all, apart from iOS, name another operating system that is as suited to a tablet as the webOS (sure, Android is close, but still a little too clunky).

Better still, HP has the deep pockets to go up against Apple, and if Rubinstein and team are left to work on great machines their combined experience (many of them are also Apple alumni) should finally provide an iPad competitor. And even if you are a total, unashamed iPad fanboy, this should still excite you. Competition is good for us buyers. Take a look at the iPhone 4: Do you think it would be this good if Android and Palm weren’t chasing so close behind?

HP Completes Palm Acquisition [Yahoo]

Photo: Lisa Brewster/Flickr

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

The major new feature of Apple’s latest mobile operating system, iOS 4, is multitasking. What took the company so long? Apple claims it was waiting to get multitasking just right before unleashing the feature for twashe iPhone. Meanwhile, the Android OS and Palm Web OS have supported multitasking just fine for over a year.

However, each platform handles multitasking quite differently. Let’s take a closer look at how each mobile OS’s multitasking works.

Apple iOS 4

How you use it
When you press the Home button twice, Apple’s iOS 4 displays a “drawer” allowing you to switch between apps. The drawer shows your most recently used apps. This is similar to the “alt-tab” functionality we’re accustomed to on traditional PCs.

What’s going on
When you leave an app in iOS 4, it’s not actually closing (unlike previous versions of the OS). Instead, it’s going into frozen, suspended animation, sitting inertly in the background. So when you relaunch an app, it opens instantly to pick up from where it left off before you “closed” it. That behavior allows you to switch between apps very quickly a feature called Fast App Switching, which is the core functionality of Apple’s iOS multitasking. (TidBITS has an excellent in-depth explanation of Fast App Switching.)

Fast App Switching isn’t all iOS 4 multitasking does, as there are a few exceptions for specific types of apps. Apple allows apps that play audio, connect with voice-over-IP or use location detection to run quietly in the background while one thread is still active. So that’s why, for example, you can leave the Pandora app, and the music will still be playing in the background while you check your e-mail. Likewise, you can leave Skype while on a VoIP call, and you won’t hang up on your buddy while you’re browsing Safari, for example. Third, you can leave a mapping app or a fitness tracker like RunKepper and come back to it, and it’ll still have a lock on your location.

It’s up to third-party app developers, of course, to tell their apps to behave this way with the new iOS 4 software development kit.

Another sort of background activity iOS supports is push notifications, which keeps a specific internet port active while the iPhone is in hibernation, so you can receive e-mails, instant messages and alerts even when the screen is off. These alerts pop up on the screen in the same way as an SMS on the iPhone.

Wired: Fast App Switching is indeed fast and stylish, avoids draining battery. All apps are constantly running inertly, so you can quickly switch between them all.

Tired: Only allows a single application thread to continue running; only certain kinds of activities are allowed to run in the background. Push notifications scream for your attention at the center of the screen.

Android OS

How you use it
Hold down the Home button and a tray appears showing the apps running in the background. Switch to another app and it instantly opens.

What’s going on
Android’s multitasking behavior is by far the most complicated to explain.

In Android, when a user switches to another application, the app you switched from doesn’t shut down: Its process is kept around in the background, allowing it to continue working (e.g., for downloading web pages in the background while doing something else), and come immediately to the foreground if the user returns to it. If the smartphone is running low on memory, Android starts killing off unnecessary processes to free up resources.

If a user later returns to an application that’s been killed, Android re-launches it in the same state as it was last seen, by keeping track of the parts of the application the user is aware of, and restarting them in the last state they were seen in. This last state is generated each time the user rotates the screen or leaves the application.

There are two basic components to control what apps can do in the background. Apps with “broadcast receivers” go into the background and wait to go off in an event, such as an alarm going off at a certain time, or if you receive a notification from Google’s server for getting a new message in Gmail. The other background component is called a “service,” which instructs an app to perform a task such as music playback or turn-by-turn navigation for a certain amount of time in the background. It’s up to the third-party app developers to embed these components in their apps to behave these ways in the background.

Wired: Apps can stay fully functional while running in the background. Notification tray makes it easy for apps to give you information without interrupting what you’re doing. Users don’t have to manually quit apps when memory is running low: Android does that for you.

Tired: Getting multitasking to work just right is a lot of work for developers.

HP WebOS

How you use it
The HP (formerly Palm) WebOS displays apps as “cards.” Each card acts similar to a tab in a desktop web browser. You move between activities using gestures (swipe forward, swipe back, hold to readjust the positioning of the cards), and when you’re finished with an activity, you can throw the card off the screen to quit the application.

What’s going on
WebOS allocates resources (memory, processor cycles, network access) to each card based on requests from the cards. The System Manager prioritizes the card in the foreground when allocating resources. Apps in the background are placed in a semi-dormant state, and their access to services is restricted.

If an application that the user isn’t currently interacting with wants to get the user’s attention, the app can display information in the notification area at the bottom of the screen. The information sits in the dashboard until acted on or closed. (Therefore, you can do something in a foreground app while dealing with a notification, whereas on the iPhone a push notification shows up in the center of the screen interrupting your task until you close it or leave your current app.)

Activities in the background do not have access to certain battery-intensive services. For example, apps cannot access accelerometer data and their frequency of network access is reduced. Third-party games are paused in place when moved to the background, reducing both their CPU load and memory consumption.

Wired: The card interface is neat, and it feels very natural to switch between apps. Notifications appear at bottom of the screen, not interrupting your current task.

Tired: After launching a specific number of apps that reach your memory limit, you can’t launch anymore, and you have to manually quit an app before launching another.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews