The Bad Touch(stone)

Palm's Touchstone is undoubtedly one of the coolest accessories to hit the smartphone market in a long time. It looks great, serves as an excellent replacement for the old-school sync cradle and is a genuinely unique idea (so long as you don't count electric toothbrushes...). All of that said, it's no good at all if you wind up with a faulty unit, as some unfortunate online commenters seem to have discovered... as well as your correspondent.

Yes, I now have the dubious honour of owning being one of the lucky handful to suffer from the "DingDong" bug (as it's affectionately known). It seems that with some Touchstones, the magnetic coil which charges the Pre is not properly aligned, due to shoddy manufacturing. I say "shoddy" because as an investigator at Nexave.de has uncovered (German translation), the inner coils (one for charging, one for communicating with the phone) are held in place with nothing but glue - a recipe for manufacturing errors.

Palm Pixi Unboxed

Unboxing videos: the Internet's great tease to technology lovers. WireFly are our tormentors today, and they've got a brand-spankin' new Sprint Palm Pixi to undress. At 8:16 long, it seems like a bit of overkill for an unboxing video, but hey! Why not go all-out, says us.

No new footage of the Facebook app or Yahoo messenger integration (yet) unfortunately, but we'll be watching WireFly closely. In the meantime... feast your eyes! We've embedded the video after the break.

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Poking Around webOS 1.3

webOS 1.3. You want it. I want it. We all want it running its point-updatey goodness on our Pre phones, because there's nothing like an OS update to reassure one that the mother company does indeed still love you. It's on its way very, very soon - in fact, some developers are already running it on their Pres - but in the meantime, PalmInfocenter will settle for the next-best thing: playing around with the 1.3 SDK, which just happens to have found its way into our grimy mitts, courtesy of our elite Bothan spy network.

What secrets does this mysterious bundle of code contain within its gaping electronic maw? In short: Pixi compatibility, and a lot of foundations for the future. Read on for the Forbidden Knowledge...

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Palm Hoses Down webOS Speed Expectations

If you were one of those getting your hopes up over Tuesday's report on the possibility of webOS GPU support in the "immediate future", prepare to have those hopes dashed against the rocks of reality: Ajaxian have appended an update from Palm to their note on the webOS developer talk from whence the supposed quote came, and it goes a little bit like this:

Some of the notes have been taken out of context, so we wanted to clarify: We started with a talk on the the future of the mobile Web. This talked about the potential of the Web as the platform for devices, and why we were excited to join Palm... We don't comment on our specific SDK plans, and while we are personally excited about the Web gaining GPU acceleration via technologies like WebGL and CSS Transforms, and we would like to see webOS gain these capabilities to allow web developers to better leverage our fantastic hardware, we were answering a question about our personal opinion on what we'd like to see happen to the platform. We don't believe the term "immediate" was even mentioned by us, and we are sorry that people have read too much into this particular topic.

Too bad. But hey, don't despair! webOS 1.3 will be bringing other goodies to the table. We're going to report on them shortly...

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Palm Unveils Ares Graphical webOS Development Tool

Presenting at the Open Mobile Summit today, Palm has unveiled their latest weapon aimed at bringing more developers to webOS: Ares, a drag-and-drop web-based tool aimed at speeding up webOS development even further, said to be released by the end of the year. PC World has the scoop:

In a demonstration at the conference, a Palm engineer created a search application for the Flickr Web photo site. Using a simulation of the WebOS phone interface, he dragged logos, a search field and button, a list widget and other components onto successive screens of the application. To link the new application to Flickr, he used an Ajax request that called a Flickr API.

Palm has been strongly pushing the ease of webOS development as one of its biggest selling points for developers. The release of a GUI tool should help strengthen this claim to fame.

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Bell Canada Lowers Pre Price Again

Bell Mobility in Canada has lowered the introductory price on the Palm Pre for the second time in as many weeks. The device can now be had for $99.95 CAD with a three year contract and data plan. The Canadian Palm Pre originally debuted for around $199, and has now seen two $50 price drops in rapid succession.

As PreCentral.net notes, there are some other regional factors which may be influencing the aggressive price moves. Chief among them is Bell's switchover and transition from a CDMA based network to a GSM format. In addition, the carrier is also set to offer the iPhone 3G this week with similar pricing deals.

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Homebrew App Preview: wIRC

Before Twitter, before Live Messenger, before Yahoo!, before Skype and before ICQ, there was one instant-messaging service to rule them all: Internet Relay Chat. The now-ancient technology was first created in 1988, and to this day remains the favoured chat service of 'net nerds globally. IRC has been especially useful in bringing together the webOS developer community - even Palm are now officially hanging out on the webOS channels - and thus, it was inevitable that a native webOS client would eventually be released.

Enter wIRC, the brain love child of WebOS Internals developers Ryan Hope, Brandon VanBelle and Eric Gaudet. Powered by a native C background service and sporting a delectable Mojo front-end, wIRC is already mightily impressive even in its' current 0.0.0.0...... .0.1 alpha iteration. Read on for some sexy screenies and fabulous features!

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Latest Preware Service Is Fair Dinkum, Mate

Look, if you own a Pre and you don't have Preware installed by now, you are positively insane. Aside from allowing direct OTA access from your device to hundreds of free homebrew applications, patches and themes, the underlying Package Manager technology has just added two sexy new features to its repertoire: complete integration of the Fair Dinkum app limit breaker, and automatic loading of the correct patches feed for whichever version of webOS you have installed.

This means that owners of the slightly-backward webOS 1.1.3-toting GSM Pre - such as your correspondent - can now safely install patches from Preware, knowing they're going to work seamlessly. And everyone will be able to enjoy the benefits of a slightly-less-ridiculous 100MB free space (in the /var partition) limit, rather than the palty 64mb-total Palm saw fit to grant us. Download the stand-alone installer now!

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Next webOS Update To Focus On Speed?

Ajaxian, the web development blog founded by Palm's heads of Developer Relations, Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith, has caused quite a flutter in the online Palm community today, with a fresh post covering a recent webOS talk in London that the dynamic duo hosted in conjuction with O2 Litmus.

A number of interesting bits and pieces are contained within, but the one that has really set hearts racing is a quote from Dion that acknowledges webOS' current issues with "UI latency" - i.e. the dreaded tapping and dragging lag that afflicts many apps. Quoth the raven:

On ease of use, multitasking has been great; UI latency is still an issue even though the hardware is comparable to [iPhone] 3GS. The problem is the path to the GPU didn't exist, but now with CSS transforms, that will be solved in the immediate future

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Takeaways From Twitter: Palm's Pixi Answers

Earlier today, Palm held an hour-long Q&A on their Centro sequel, the Palm Pixi. The company's Phil McClendon fielded a varied range questions, from international availability to processing power.

Many of the responses were as expected, but there were a few interesting tidbits scattered throughout - for instance, the Pixi will have slightly better battery life than the Palm Pre, you won't be able to use the same Palm Profile simulatenously on both Pre and Pixi, and you probably shouldn't talk on it the rain. We've reposted most of the Tweets after the break.

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