While HP may not have killed webOS when it cancelled webOS hardware, it certainly stuck the knife in it and twister really, really hard -- and every webOS user, Palm loyalist, and PreCentral.net reader felt it. Some might choose to stick with it, to see if HP's incompetence can somehow be turned around by a forward thinking, hardware genius licensor, but others might have finally had enough. If you're one of those, the dedicated, the abused, we think Apple's iOS and iPhone and iPad hardware might be the perfect thing to salve your wounds and restore your sense of gadget wonder.

We've got 960x640 retina displays, easy-peasy FaceTime video calling, high quality 5 megapixel, back-illuminated camera that shoots 720p 30fps video, the massive update that's iOS 5 just down the road. And hey, if you're worried about moving over your personal data like contacts, finding apps, getting used to the differences, and wondering where to get help -- Relax. You're in the the right place. Here's everything you need to know (more properly, everything the TiPb iPhone Forums have taught us) about switching to iPhone and iPad.

webOS to iPhone - home coming

When half of Apple's original iPhone team left for Palm to make the webOS, maybe you went with them? Or maybe you're a loyalist who stuck with Palm from Treo to Pre or Centro to Pixi or Veer and never even considered an iPhone until now? No worries. You'll feel right at home. Mostly.

The biggest similarity between iOS and webOS is that they both share a sense of design -- of taste and elegance, of great user interface and experience. webOS certainly handles many things better, including the brilliant Card and Stack metaphors, but overall iOS is clean, consistent, and arguably has the best fit and finish in the business.

But taste only matters if you can get your stuff done.

Moving over contacts, calendars, and email

Hopefully if you're using something called webOS your personal info is all store up in the cloud. If so, you should have no trouble getting it onto your iPhone. Just like the pioneering Pre, iOS 4 can handle multiple ActiveSync accounts, including Exchange proper as well as Google Sync's implementation for Gmail. Just tap the Settings icon on the Home Screen, tap Mail, Contacts, and Calendars, choose Exchange, and enter your credentials.

If ActiveSync isn't to your fancy, you can tap Other and set up pretty much any POP3 or IMAP account you have in your collection, and MobileMe, Yahoo!, AOL, Hotmail, and anything else you can think of.

You can also load up any webmail account you like in the Safari web browser, including gmail.com, if that's how you want to roll.

And you can access all of it in iOS 4's unified inbox and threaded email client.

What about Synergy and Cards?

There's nothing as stupendous as Synergy built into iOS -- yet. Though the previously mentioned Exchange, Google, and MobileMe contacts, calendars, and email can live together in quasi-synergistic fashion, they're still all masters of their own separate domains. If you install the Facebook app [iTunes link] you can get some contact sync going on there as well (as can LinkedIn and other social apps). Other apps, like Orbit [iTunes link] can pull together your Facebook, Twitter, SMS, email, etc. contacts and let you assign different "volumes" to them so you can manage the level of interruption.

iOS has a highly abstracted version of multitasking that, for mainstream users, would be indistinguishable from the real thing were it not for the great battery life and overall snappiness. Rather than Cards, you double click the Home button and the fast app switcher UI appears so you can quickly get to other apps (which can now save state so you go back to where you left them). But hey, if you find yourself missing Cards, just launch the Safari browser and hit the icon for Page view. It's visually almost identical, though it lacks the ability to flick a page away to remove it.

And yes, since iOS 4, navigation, VoIP, and streaming music Pandora or Slacker-style can all multitask away blissfully in the background.

Finding other apps (and games)

HP webOS is the most developer friendly platform in the business bar none. They make Google seem closed and stodgy by comparison. But what Apple lacks in free-as-in-speech open App Store gates, they make up for in sheer tonnage of free-as-in-beer App Store goodness. And often at dollar store prices. Sure, there's a lot of CrApps in with those apps, but with hundreds of thousands and growing there's also a huge amount of incredibly good, incredibly native, apps and games.

As Steve Jobs himself will tell you, Apple also supports HTML5 as a second, completely open platform. And they support it better than any other platform -- you can even add them as icons to the iOS Home Screen so they're full on first class citizens, complete with no browser chrome and offline cashing. If you can't find something in the App Store, chances are you can find it as a web app for the iPhone.

When it comes to apps of all kinds, TiPb looks at several a week and we've got a whole iPhone Apps and Games Forum ready to help you out as well.

Root meet Jailbreak

There's no manufacturer supported rooting on iPhone, and no ultra-cool Konami code to enter developer mode, and no encouraged patching of any kind. (Apple says "stop it" and would give the EFF noogies if they could.)

If you want to get into the root jail of your iPhone, you need to break it -- hence, Jailbreak. If you want to side load apps outside the App Store, you need to use the Jailbreak app store, Cydia. Now, if you don't understand what any of this means, just skip along to the next section, we'll be there waiting. If you're a diehard themer and patcher, you'll want to keep your eyes peeled to our Jailbreak section, and more importantly -- our Jailbreak Help Forum, and Jailbreak Apps, Games, and Themes Forum.

No. More. Keyboard.

You won't be able to shave or cut cheese with the iPhone keyboard -- because it's virtual. If you believe the urban legend, former Palm CEO, Jon Rubenstein, back when he was still a VP at Apple, vigorously disagreed with Steve Jobs about the iPhone not having a physical keyboard. Hence, the Pre and Veer both have physical keyboards.

And that's okay. Just not on the iPhone. Apple likes their keys virtual so they go away when you don't need them (without creaking, oreo'ing, popping batteries, or coming to the rescue when virtual keyboards just won't do). On the plus side, if you're multilingual or international, the iPhone keyboard can easily be switched to any alphabet, script, stroke, or pictographic symbol you want to use. It can also become optimized for numbers, games, or pretty much anything you (technically, a developer) can think of.

Best of all, if you really miss your physical keyboard,you can tether up a Bluetooth one and knock email -- and yourself -- out.

Welcome back, iTunes

Remember back when Palm was trying and ultimately failing to hack the Pre into iTunes? Us neither. Anyway, with iPhone, you're a first (and only) class citizen with full keys to Apple's media kingdom. Enjoy.

Oh, hi iCloud

You may have dismissed iOS before because of the iTunes tether. Come October, Apple's cutting the cord to iTunes.

Now you'll still be able to tether up for re-charging, or syncing giant movie files, but you don't have to. Everything, from activation to backup, storing files to push them out, will happen transparently with [http://www.imore.com/tag/icloud/].

If that's not enough, you can find apps that let you access your Google Docs, DropBox, Box.net, and other online storage. You can even convert and stream content on the fly with apps like Air Video [iTunes].

Combine that with the built in AirPlay and an Apple TV and you won't believe what you can do...

Notification Center

webOS rules the roost with their elegant, non-interuptive, notification system. Compared to that utopia, iOS 4 notifications are some bizarre UI hell we'll likely be immolating in until the next major OS update.

But iOS 5 is on it's way, and its bringing with it Notification Center which should ease your transition a lot. (Hey, Apple stole the guy who invented webOS notifications to work on it!) If you're switching today, you'll have a few weeks of pain, but then things will get better.

More webOS to iPhone help and information

If you haven't already, check out our complete iOS 4 feature walkthrough. There's an incredible amount of stuff in iOS 4 and you can save yourself some serious time cribbing off of us.

If you need help, or have a story to share, check out TiPb's iPhone forum -- we've got a special switching from webOS to iPhone 4 thread going just for you!

And if we forgot anything or just plain got something wrong, let us know and we'll add it or fix it.

HP has just announced that they're killing off webOS devices, namely the Pre, Veer, and TouchPad -- or everything that competes with iPhone and iPad.

In addition, HP reported that it plans to announce that it will discontinue operations for webOS devices, specifically the TouchPad and webOS phones. HP will continue to explore options to optimize the value of webOS software going forward.

Derek Kessler, editor of our sibling site PreCentral.net pulls no punches:

So what does this mean? The statement was carefully worded to state that they're "discontinuing operations for webOs devices," not webOS as an operating system. If anything, this should add fuel to the second option we discussed earlier today when the shocking word of an HP breakup first surfaced: HP is more interested in webOS than devices. They tried to give it a go with hardware, but quickly realized that they weren't going to be able to make it work without massive long-term investment and commitment. So less than a year after acquiring all of Palm for $1.2 billion, we're looking at a hazy future for webOS.

My wish: Google buying Motorola to prevent against manufacturers turning away from Android leads at least one manufacturer with more savvy and stomach than HP to turn away from Android and towards webOS. An HTC ThunderBolt II or Samsung Galaxy S III with Cards and Synergy would be very, very interesting.

Keep your browsers locked to PreCentral.net for continuing coverage.

[PreCentral.net]

The MOTO Development Group is back with another round of capacitive touchscreen tests. This time they have stepped up their game by using robots to ensure the accuracy of the results. MOTO even tossed in a few extra handsets such as the Palm Pre and Blackberry Storm 2 for good measure.

You may remember that the original test that saw the iPhone take top honors. However some of you out there cried foul because of the fact a human finger was used in the tests. Hopefully this particular test helps put that all to rest as once again.

Now TiPb won't spoil all of the results for you (as if we could!) but wait until you see what happened to the Moto Droid, ouch...

Full video after the break!

[MOTO via Engadget]

YouTube link

Our good friend, Dieter, over at PreCentral.net has just got his hands on a leaked internal AT&T document that puts our beloved iPhone 3G into the ring up against the yet to be released Palm Pre. We are beginning to wonder what will happen first, Palm going out of business or the Pre actually being released... (Yes, we kid because we love...)

While some of the things that made the list are cold hard facts that every Palm fan will have to swallow, AT&T seems to be reaching on a few as well. Here are a some of the better ones:

• The iPhone has a "thinner, lighter, bigger screen; metal and glass design" compared to the Pre's "plastic casing".
• The iPhones App Store has over "25,000 Apps" while the Pre has an "Unproven App Catalog app store".
• The iPhone sports "Global GPS; aGPS for maximum speed, accuracy and reliability even in built-up areas" while the lonely Pre "Can't receive map updates or location assist information in most of the world due to lack of GSM capability".

What also caught our eye was:

• The Palm Pre "Touchscreen control gestures not intuitive" whereas the iPhone features "Patented Multi-Touch screen" and "Fast and responsive navigation."

If the Palm Pre cloned some of the iPhone's UI interactions, didn't AT&T just dash our chances for some lawsuit action?

What do you think? AT&T simply stating the facts or could they possibly view the Palm Pre as a legitimate threat? Now head on over to Precentral.net to check out the full leaked AT&T memo!

It's been some time since the 2.2 firmware dropped, yet we have not heard of any developers getting their hands on the next version. So Dizzy wants to know, when is iPhone 2.3 firmware coming? That is a very good question, so check out that thread and let him know what you think...

Next up is a thread regarding the sharing of a single SIM card between your iPhone and another phone on the AT&T network. I've done it previously with no issues, now it seems like AT&T is tightening the screws just a bit. Have you tried sharing your iPhone SIM with another phone? Let us know how it's worked out for you.

Forum member, EnterpriseGlobe, has started a fun thread - where did you get your iPhone? I stood in line for 2 hours or so on July 11th at my local Apple store. To kill time I emailed pictures and updates to Dieter while he was in line at the Providence, RI Mall. Oh the memories.

I know what you are thinking, this is an iPhone site, so why feature a thread about the upcoming Palm Pre? We all love competition, it just makes products better. Or at least that is the idea. To cut to the chase, what are your feelings regarding the recently announced Palm Pre? Is this real competition for the iPhone or is it simply one last ditch effort by Palm to try to stay afloat?

Finally, spidermanroach wants to know, Yahoo or Gmail? Which one do you think is better and why? Get in the forums and let him know!

Remember, before you can get in on any of the TiPb forum action be sure to register! It's free and will only take a minute of your time.

See you on the forums!

As I've said many times before on TiPb, I'm a Palm guy going back to the Palm V, and Treo guy going back to the Treo 600. When Palm essentially abandoned that user-base (see my Palm Treo Pro Round Robin video and review) a few years back, I abandoned them and dove headlong into the iPhone (and now the iPhone 3G).

I still have a very warm spot in my heart for Palm, however, their innovation in the smartphone space, and their focus on zen-like user experience. So, when Palm announced their new WebOS platform and premiered their new Pre handset at CES (see our new baby sibling site PreCentral.net for all the details and a massive hands-on video), I was more than just a little ecstatic. I won't lie, it's the first post-iPhone device that's caught my attention.

Don't get me wrong, I still fear for Palm -- the market is much more crowded than it was when they helped create it, and for all the problems WebOS and the Pre solve, they bring their own set to the table. However, watching the Palm Keynote fro CES I, presented by former Apple iPod father Jon Rubinstein and Palm founder Ed Colligan, two things stood really stood out for me:

• What Palm outright stole from the iPhone and put in the Pre
• And what Apple should immediate steal from Palm and put into the next iPhone OS.

We'll get into both, after the break.

What the Palm Pre Stole From the iPhone

First, stole is exactly the right word. No, I'm not talking about Rubinstein's verbiage (you can copy a Jobs script, but not the delivery, b'okay?) Feature for feature -- gesture for gesture -- the former Apple team headed now by Rubenstein as Palm straight up jacked whole swathes of iPhone functionality to a degree that I'm pretty much certain Apple's lawyers are drafting up whole heaps of infringement claims against them for all those patents Steve Jobs mentioned during his first iPhone introduction back at Macworld. Let's take a look...

Form Factor

Okay, an iClone is an iClone, and many would argue Apple didn't invent the singular black slab that is the iPhone's now iconic shape. Many would also argue there are only so many ways to make a full-screen, touch-screen device. Fair enough. But from that full, touch screen to the singular center button at the bottom, degree of rounded-ness not withstanding, we'll call an iClone an iClone when we see it.

Specs

Not only does the Pre look like the iPhone, it's built like the iPhone. It's almost like the iPhone feature set was lined up and checked off one by one: 320x480 capacitive touch screen -- check. Accelerometer, ambient light, and proximity sensors -- check. While the package is smaller in its closed state, and has been amped up (hello A2DP stereo Blue Tooth!), the mold from which it was cast is still patently obvious.

The Dock

The original Palm PDA platform had a static, lower tier application launcher space, if anyone remembers that platform anymore, but it was interrupted by the stylus input bad, and later hard-buttons took its place. With the Pre, however, Palm has taken a step sideways into the iPhone launcher paradigm. You get five buttons instead of four, and they focus on Palm's nouveau Pillars of PIM -- Phone, Contacts, Email, Calendar, and... up arrow (I'm guess a way to launch more options).

Real-World UI Interactions

It was amazing, back at Macworld 2007, to watch Steve Jobs effortlessly flick through a list of contacts and see them bounce with virtual elasticity when they reached their end. This kind of intuitive visual cuing is invaluable to the user experience. No wonder Palm copied it almost exactly. Flick through the Pre contacts, same capacitive acceleration, same elastic bounce back.

Likewise panels zoom in and zoom out, and slide over each other, just like with the iPhone, to give a sense of stacking and information depth.

Turn the Palm Pre and not only does the accelerometer rotate the screen, it does so with the same animation as the iPhone. No smash cuts like other handsets here.

Multi-touch

This is the big one, and the one I think have Cupertino's lawyers revving up their engines. Rumor has it that other post-iPhone capacitive handsets were supposed to ship with multi-touch, but fear of Apple's patents ultimately made them reconsider that functionality. The Palm Pre looks to have done no such reconsideration. Witness: pinch to zoom, double tap to focus, flick to scroll.

It's not just that they used multi-touch, they used the exact same gestures the iPhone already used to do it.

WebKit

Apple's open source web rendering engine, WebKit (based on the Linux Konquerer technology) doesn't have a huge desktop browser share outside of the Mac, but it's positively pwning the mobile space. Nokia uses it, Google's Android uses it, (some think Microsoft should dump Internet Explorer 6(!) for Mobile and use it!), and now the Palm Pre uses it as well.

What the iPhone Should Immediately Steal from the Palm Pre

What's more important than dwelling on what the Palm Pre stole from the iPhone is what Palm did to extend, and yes, improve upon it. Several of these improvements are so compelling, Apple immediately needs to take a little vengeance on Palm and steal them right back! Which ones?

Multitasking "Cards"

One of the most impressive features shown off in the Palm Pre demo was the concept of stacked cards, where the center button could "zoom out" and give a real-time, updated view of what was happening on other open applications. The iPhone needs this badly. Not multitasking third party apps will increasingly be seen as a limitation on the iPhone, but RIM or Windows Mobile style Task management is likewise a non-starter.

Luckily, the iPhone already has 2 existing metaphors for this. First and most closely resembling the Palm Pre cards are the Mobile Safari "tabs". Tap the tab button and the current web page zooms out and you see all open tabs. Pick the tab you want, it zooms in full screen. This could easily be adapted to multi-tasking applications.

Frankly, however, I'm not sure its good enough for the iPhone. The second metaphor, CoverFlow, might just be. We don't know what's driving the Palm Pre under the hood, but we know the iPhone has awesome OpenGL and PowerVR graphics that just beg for a drool-inducing task-switching implementation. Flick to change between your apps as easily as you do your albums in iTunes.

To close an app, as the Pre does with an upward throw-away flick, Mobile Safari Tab "X" buttons could be a solution, as could the flick-away, but I'm not sure how necessary that is. In an ideal world, iPhone OS X would transparently handle memory in the background, "sleeping" (saving state) what hasn't been used or isn't prioritized as needed.

As to the reorganization ability of the Pre task manager, I'm not convinced you need it in a switching system as fast as capacitive flicking.

Short of a Mac-inspired Expose for the iPhone, CoverFlow app switching would be killer.

And what better, easier, and more elegant way to implement it than just hitting the Home button in Landscape mode?

Merging the Cloud

Palm made a big deal about the Pre being built from the web up, and it sort of (and it no doubt increasingly is) a big deal. Since we're not sure what kind of media capabilities the Pre will have, the need to cloud-manage 1GB+ movie files may not be a worry to them the way it certainly is to the iPhone, but for PIM data did what they've always done -- nailed it.

Pre hooks into popular cloud data stores, Exchange, Gmail, and Facebook (and perhaps others) and merges all your data behind the scenes to present you with a single handheld gateway -- a unified view. Exchange contacts seamlessly integrated with the matching picture from your Facebook friend was the example given, and it's a game-changing one. Likewise, Pre combines together IM and SMS into a single, person-centric threaded conversation.

Tying in IM, Twitter, and people's own email address cards create something close to what I've always been asking for -- an application that unifies and HIDES all the various pipes away from the user.

Chad has mentioned several times that Apple has all sorts of Mobile iChat patents floating around. Can we get those put to use?

This is the type of flawless user experience both Palm and Apple are famous for. Palm is giving it to us first on the mobile platform. Fine. Apple, give it to us next.

(And we won't even get into what might happen if Apple leverages their new iPhoto '09 Faces (facial recognition) and Places (geotagging) technology into this paradigm!)

Status

On the Mac, if you have iChat open and you receive an email from someone who's also an iChat buddy, their availability status is shown to you. Palm's Pre works in a similar manner, showing you IM status in the email app. Sadly, the iPhone currently doesn't do this. It should. Dieter has asked for it repeatedly and he's right. Even though iPhone apps like Pinger do a great job aggregating status, there's no reason it shouldn't become ubiquitous throughout a mobile experience. And there's every reason it should.

As mentioned before, the user interface lines between SMS, Twitter, IM, etc., and even email are and should be blurring, and a way to not only manage all those communication pipes, but seamlessly leverage them as well, is increasingly becoming a necessity for connected users.

Auto-Save

Palm has always "just worked" when it came to saving state of data. Add a contact and no matter how complete or incomplete, Palm has just saved that state of the data on the device and for sync. With the Pre they've taken it a step further and saved state right back to the cloud as well.

The iPhone, by contrast, wants you to confirm the save with a button tap. This is okay to prevent fragmentary entries from polluting your pristine data store, but in the real world it's just annoying. If you start entering a calendar event, and you suddenly and urgently need to go into a different app (something that happens in the real world), you shouldn't have to worry about losing whatever data you've entered, or having to start over.

Just like Palm, and like Apple already does in Apps like iMovie, data should just be saved on exit as-is, and synced back to the cloud or local machine, also as is. It's simply a better, more robust user experience.

Keyboard Launcher

Familiar not only to everyone who's ever used a Treo, Vista Search, or Mac Spotlight, but truly understood by anyone who's become a QuickSilver (or similar application launcher) user, sometimes typing is just the fastest way to reach the data you want. The Pre does a great, Spotlight-esque job of quickly parsing keystrokes into local and cloud search results, and the iPhone should be able to leverage Apple's Spotlight just as powerfully.

Sure, the Pre has a hard keyboard, which is the last thing I want on an iPhone (remember -- at least for me -- the era of hard keyboards is over!). So what to do?

Stick a Spotlight icon on the Home Screen, what else? Okay, sure, make up something fun... Let me shake on the Home Screen to bring up a Spotlight optimized keyboard. Shake is used in other apps to do neat things, leverage it to let me do killer search as well. Shake, type, boom! (I kid, a little, see quickie mock-up pick).

Either way give me rapid search access into contacts, events, files (yes, give me a single, multi-app accessible file storage bin so I can get some Office action going -- but more on that in a future article), and the option to shoot off into CalDAV, CardDAV, WebDAV (iDisk), or general Web searches.

Conclusion

We didn't touch on everything, including the swiped App Store come App Catalog, or the innovative non-modal notification system, but hopefully this gives some idea of our ideas on where the iPhone brought the smartphone space, where the Pre has taken killer features from that, and what Apple could do to take some killer features of the Pre right back.

But what are your ideas? Anything from the Pre (or other post-iPhone smartphones) YOU think Apples needs to immediately integrate into iPhone OS 3.0?

Confession: I'm just leaving Macworld and haven't had a chance to form much of an opinion about the Palm Pre yet (see pics). TreoCentral (and our new baby sibling site, PreCentral.net) absolutely KILLED it on the first impressions, and make sure you check out the live blog (and congrats to Dieter on the trifecta of Schiller, Balmer, and Colligan all in one week! Superstar!).

The Treo 600 was my first smartphone, the 680 my last before the iPhone, so I have great fondness for Palm despite them leaving me "out in the desert" (TM, TreoCentral TreoCast) for years and years. I want them to succeed, I want them to force the entire industry to keep up the innovation and revolution the iPhone started. I want Steve Jobs and Apple to run back to the drawing board and feel compelled to make the iPhone HD 3.0 even better than they intended.

First blush: I love the organics of the device (the egg-shape does throw me, but that's the only exception and the overall look brings it home) and think cloud-focus and their WebOS platform (which I think is based on Apple's open-source WebKit, same as Safari on iPhone and Chrome on Android) are gutsy moves. Apple uses a hybrid of rich clients and web connectivity and smashes it out the park with Google Maps-style iPhone apps. Palm is running WebOS apps like native WebApps (which should avoid the outcry Apple faced with the original, pre-App Store and SDK iPhone dev solution). If it works Palm could have brilliantly out-maneuvered the whole "they'll never get developers". However, one look at Apple's focus on gaming shows the power of the rich local client -- is AJAX enough to run iPhone caliber gaming and other really hard hitting applications? I guess we'll see. We'll also see how they nail multitasking better than any previous OS, according to Dieter, when part 2 of TreoCentral's first impressions go online later.

On the negative side, for me (the anti-Dieter in some ways), I still think the era of hard keyboards is over, and dislike the moving parts of a slider all the more after the round robin (even portrait ones). That's just personal taste. The capacitive touch screen with gesture area looks solid, though I have to wonder if Apple's lawyers will rev up the multitouch patent files?

Apple's rivalry with the new Palm will be telling for political reasons as well. Those who remember the history know that the new guru behind Palm's new hotness is the old Guru behind Apple's old hotness, the iPod. He reportedly really wanted a hard keyboard on the iPhone, and Jobs skidoosh'ed it. (Which is why I jokingly called it the "iPhone Slider". I guess we'll see, however, over the next few months if Rubinstein remains but the learner, or if he is now the master.

Enough of my thoughts, iPhone lovers -- especially former Palm faithful -- what do you think?