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Mobile Nations 15: BlackBerry 10, HTC One, Lumia 900, new iPad

Rene Ritchie — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 15:35:46 +0000

Kevin, Phil, Derek, Simon, Jay, and Rene talk BlackBerry 10, HTC One, Nokia Lumia 900, the new iPad, something something webOS, and Google Drive. This is Mobile Nations!

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Agenda

Hosts

Phil Nickinson (@philnickinson) of Android Central

Kevin Michaluk (@crackberrykevin) of CrackBerry.com

Derek Kessler (@dkdsgn) of webOS Nation

Simon Sage (@simonsage of Mobile Nations

Jay Bennett (@JayTBennett) of WPCentral

Rene Ritchie (@reneritchie) of TiPb.com

Feedback

Got something to say? Agree or disagree with something we said? Have something you want us to discuss on a future show? Don't just sit there yelling at the screen, dammit, let us know!

Credits

Our music is pROgraM vs. Us3R by by morgantj. Introduction by Joseph Holder.

Thanks to the Mobile Nations network of store for sponsoring this podcast, and to our fantastic live chat members for keeping us honest and making us smart!

Oracle decided not to buy BlackBerry or Palm, denies the world Ellison helmed webOracleBerry

Rene Ritchie — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 01:27:59 +0000

Oracle, the 2 ton mutant gorilla of enterprise data software, once considered buying BlackBerry or Palm in order to take on Apple's iPhone and Google's Android in the smartphone space. No. Seriously. Unfortunately, Oracle CEO -- and former Apple board member and long-time Steve Jobs friend -- Larry Ellison decided against it. I say unfortunately because, while I can't imagine Oracle achieving anything inspired with either BlackBerry or Palm, it would have been incredibly interesting to watch them try. Gary Busey on Celebrity Apprentice interesting.

If the future really is mobile, right now only Apple and Google are positioned to own that future (though Android's open source nature means there could end up being hundreds of Android forks from the likes of Amazon, carriers, even Oracle itself).

BlackBerry was even later to the modern mobile party than Microsoft, and Microsoft was plenty late. HP and their brutally incompetent board of directors squandered what could have been a brilliant future for webOS.

But oh, what could have been...

Source: Reuters via CrackBerry

HP open sources Enyo framework, makes webOS-style apps possible for iPhone, iPad

Derek Kessler — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 02:01:25 +0000

HP has made good on releasing a roadmap for their webOS open source initiative and, as part of it, have fully open sourced the Enyo 2.0 application framework. But what does all this mean for the iMore crowd? In the short term it means you'll be seeing at least a few webOS apps made available in the App Store and in your browser. In the longer term it means you're likely to see a day where webOS is compiled to run on other hardware, though if that's possible with Apple's locked-down designs is another question entirely.

We'll tackle the apps thing first. At its core Enyo is based on web tech like everything webOS (whereas the iOS framework is based around Objective-C). Going open source means that developers who have written in Enyo can compile their apps to be loaded in a browser or on webapp-supporting operating systems like iOS and Android with little issue. In fact, it's already happening - multiple webOS Enyo apps are available through WebKit-based web browsers -- like Safari -- and at least one, an Instapaper client called Paper Mache, is available now in the Android Market. Of course, there's some tweaking that'll have to be done to make things nice and smooth, but apps like Paper Mache look and behave (minus the lag and jitter) exactly as they do on webOS.

The second major announcement was that HP is dumping their custom kernel and coopting the standard Linux kernel for use in Open webOS. This is the basic principle behind Android's kernel by making the switch webOS will gain support for a wide breadth of hardware. Where there's Cyanogen for the Android Open Source Project we certainly expect the same to happen with webOS. The question is… will anybody want to install it?

TouchPad Go gets reviewed; or the 7-inch war that never was

Rene Ritchie — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 16:14:43 +0000

Full review of HP's never announced, never released, 7-inch TouchPad Go, the webOS-powered iPad competitor that could have been

Derek Kessler of our newly renamed sibling site, webOS Nation, has got his snarky, geeky hands on the krayt dragon of the gadget world, and done up a complete and proper TouchPad Go review.

For those joining our webOS tragedy already in progress, while HP allowed the 9.7-inch TouchPad to stay on the market for dozens of days before canceling it, they didn't even allow the 7-inch TouchPad Go to enter the market. Could it have done better than RIM's 7-inch BlackBerry PlayBook? Could it have made Amazon's 7-inch Kindle Fire and Barnes and Noble's 7-inch Nook Tablet seem inelegant by contrast?

Sadly, because of HP's stupefying lack of testicular fortitude and mobile tenacity, we'll never know. But, bittersweetly, Derek can offer us a glimpse:

The TouchPad Go is not a bad tablet. But it’s also not a great tablet. Like the standard TouchPad, it’s a good tablet. Better than okay, but also not mind-blowingly awesome. By virtue of its size it changes how you use it, but not in any fundamental manner. It sought to fill a void in the webOS tablet market, seeking the customer that wants something smaller than the ten-inch tablet but doesn’t want to compromise in the process. While any tablet comes with compromises, the TouchPad Go’s compromises (at least over the original TouchPad) are only directly related to its size.

Check out the full review: webOS Nation

Stock Talk 02: Apple value, RIM results, Android uptake

Rene Ritchie — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 17:08:54 +0000

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Chris, Ed, and Rene talk Apple value, RIM's latest results, the uptake of Android, webOS going open source, Microsoft's mobile chances, HTML5 platforms, the future of LTE, and the year ahead. This is Mobile Nations Stock Talk.

Hosts

Feedback

Got something to say? Agree or disagree with something we said? Have something you want us to discuss on a future show? Don't just sit there yelling at the screen, dammit, let us know!

Credits

Thanks to the Mobile Nations network of store for sponsoring this podcast, and to our fantastic live chat members for keeping us honest and making us smart!

Mobile Nations 12: 2011 Year in Review

Rene Ritchie — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 16:48:43 +0000

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Kevin, Phil, Derek, Daniel, Georgia, and Rene take at look at the year in mobile, from BlackBerry to Android, webOS to Windows Phone, iPad to iPhone. Highs, lows, great new devices, frustrating delays, devastating losses, and a look ahead to 2012. This is Mobile Nations!

Hosts

Phil Nickinson (@philnickinson) of Android Central

Kevin Michaluk (@crackberrykevin) of CrackBerry.com

Derek Kessler (@dkdsgn) of PreCentral.net

Daniel Rubino (@malatesta77 of WPCentral

Georgia (@GeorgiaTiPb) of Girls Gone Gadgets

Rene Ritchie (@reneritchie) of TiPb.com

Feedback

Got something to say? Agree or disagree with something we said? Have something you want us to discuss on a future show? Don't just sit there yelling at the screen, dammit, let us know!

Credits

Our music is pROgraM vs. Us3R by by morgantj. Introduction by Joseph Holder.

Thanks to the Mobile Nations network of store for sponsoring this podcast, and to our fantastic live chat members for keeping us honest and making us smart!

HP open sources webOS

Rene Ritchie — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 18:55:35 +0000

HP announced today that they're going to open source the webOS operating system that once upon a time ran Palm Pre and HP Touchpad software, and showed the world how elegant multitasking metaphors and synergistic data handling was meant to be done. Derek Kessler from PreCentral pegs it thusly:

Notably absent from the press release is any mention of hardware, either from HP or possible partners. The open sourcing of webOS brings to a close months of speculation and hand-wringing about what HP would do with the operating system after former CEO Leo Apotheker cancelled hardware development. It’s clear that HP’s conclusion was that it would cost too much for them to try hardware on their own again, while simultaneously they were unable to find a suitor willing to meet HP’s price and conditions for a sale of webOS.

Sad. Bordering on the pathetic. Ultimately HP lacked the innovative spirit of their better days and the testicular fortitude of their peers necessary to blaze a mobile future. So ever tepidly, timidly, they've opted for the least of the worst -- offering a less developed if better looking open source alternative to Android to... whom exactly?

Will Samsung or HTC leave Android for webOS? Would Facebook or Amazon fork webOS instead of Android? Could Verizon or AT&T try to reclaim ownership of the stack with webOS as their starting point?

Say what you want about Google's "openy" plays -- and I've said plenty -- but they've shown the will and tenacity and cunning to make Android a dominant OS platform. HP has shown none of this, even when they had the control and the reach to attempt it best.

Now what do they have? And more importantly, what does everyone in the webOS community, from Palm faithful to HP employees to developers to end users have?

Aside from PreCentral.net to give them voice, that is.

webOS may yet achieve something but if it does it will be because of the open source community, in spite of HP.

And it deserved better.

Mobile Nations 11: Cheap tablets and cloud music

Rene Ritchie — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 15:31:26 +0000

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Phil, Adam, Derek, Jay, and Rene talk Amazon Kindle Fire pros and cons, Porsche's BlackBerry and phones as fashion, webOS indecisions, and Google Music vs. iTunes Match vs. Amazon Cloud vs. Zune Pass and more! This is Mobile Nations!

Agenda

Hosts

Phil Nickinson (@philnickinson) of Android Central

Adam Zeis (@azeis) of CrackBerry.com

Derek Kessler (@dkdsgn) of PreCentral.net

Jay Bennett (@JayTBennet of WPCentral

Rene Ritchie (@reneritchie) of TiPb.com

Feedback

Got something to say? Agree or disagree with something we said? Have something you want us to discuss on a future show? Don't just sit there yelling at the screen, dammit, let us know!

Credits

Our music is pROgraM vs. Us3R by by morgantj. Introduction by Joseph Holder.

Thanks to the Mobile Nations network of store for sponsoring this podcast, and to our fantastic live chat members for keeping us honest and making us smart!

Girls Gone Gadgets 01: Premiere [NSFW-L]

Rene Ritchie — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 01:51:00 +0000

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Georgia and Ashley Esqueda talk Android Xoom 2, geek dating dos and don'ts, how to rock (and not rock) your BlackBerry, advice for celebrity sexters, iHelicopters and Whale Trail for iPhone and iPad, and the next creepy step towards robot apocalypse. This is Girls Gone Gadgets! [NSFW-L]

Spotlight

Motorola Xoom II

Girl eyes for the gadget guys

Smartphone dating dos and don'ts

We've got mail!

"What are some killer tips for how to wear your BlackBerry? Hip holster hot or not? Playbook on a gold chain? Come on girls, we guys need all the help we can get!" - Kevin from Winnipeg

Techs and Apps

Grab bag

Feedback

Got something to say? Agree or disagree with something we said? Have something you want us to discuss on a future show? Don't just sit there yelling at the screen, dammit, let us know!

Hosts

Georgia (@GeorgiaTiPb) of ZENandTECH
Ashley Esqueda (@ashleyesqueda) of Techfoolery

Credits

Our music is pROgraM vs. Us3R by by morgantj. Introduction by Joseph Holder.

Thanks to the Smartphone Experts network of store for sponsoring this podcast, and to our fantastic live chat members for keeping us honest and making us smart!

Iterate 9: Zhephree

Rene Ritchie — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 01:29:46 +0000

Marc, Seth, and Rene iterate through Adobe Un-blur and CSS Shaders, Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, TAT's Cascade, interrogate webOS developer Zhephree with the help of PreCentral's Derek, and answer questions on backups. This is Iterate!

Roboto vs. Helvetica

Geoff Gauchet of Zhephree

Hosts

Marc Edwards (@marcedwards) of Bjango
Seth Clifford (@sethclifford) of Nickelfish
Rene Ritchie (@reneritchie) of TiPb.com
Derek Kessler (@dkdsgn) of PreCentral.net

Feedback

Email: podcast@iterate.tv
Twitter: @iteratetv
Facebook: Iterate page

If you're one of the best-of-the-best-of-the-best in mobile design for Android, BlackBerry, iOS, webOS, or Windows Phone, we'd love to get you on the show, or if you've found a drop-dead gorgeous app on any platform and really want us to talk about it, contact us and let us know.

Mobile Nations 9: Grand Theft Mobile

Rene Ritchie — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 05:27:18 +0000

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Kevin, Phil, Derek, Dan, and Rene talk Windows Phone from Mango to Tango (and Nokia!), BlackBerry DevCon and BBX superphones, Android's Ice Cream Sandwich and Galaxy Nexus, webOS and the road ahead, and iPhone 4S and Siri. This is Mobile Nations!

Agenda

Feedback

Got something to say? Agree or disagree with something we said? Have something you want us to discuss on a future show? Don't just sit there yelling at the screen, dammit, let us know!

Hosts

Phil Nickinson (@philnickinson) of Android Central

Kevin Michaluk (@crackberrykevin) of CrackBerry.com

Derek Kessler (@dkdsgn) of PreCentral.net

Rene Ritchie (@reneritchie) of TiPb.com

Credits

Our music is pROgraM vs. Us3R by by morgantj. Introduction by Joseph Holder.

Thanks to the Smartphone Experts network of store for sponsoring this podcast, and to our fantastic live chat members for keeping us honest and making us smart!

Mobile Nations 8: The Four Cs

Rene Ritchie — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 16:56:40 +0000

Phil, Kevin, Derek, and Rene discuss Apple's iPhone 4S event, the Nexus Prime, BlackBerry BBX and superphones, the Amazon Kindle Fire, and Amazon webOS rumors, and the hierarchy of tablet needs. This is MobileNations!

Agenda

Feedback

Got something to say? Agree or disagree with something we said? Have something you want us to discuss on a future show? Don't just sit there yelling at the screen, dammit, let us know!

Hosts

Phil Nickinson (@philnickinson) of Android Central

Kevin Michaluk (@crackberrykevin) of CrackBerry.com

Derek Kessler (@dkdsgn) of PreCentral.net

Rene Ritchie (@reneritchie) of TiPb.com

Credits

Our music is pROgraM vs. Us3R by by morgantj. Introduction by Joseph Holder.

Thanks to the Smartphone Experts network of store for sponsoring this podcast, and to our fantastic live chat members for keeping us honest and making us smart!

webOS Pre3 gets reviewed

Rene Ritchie — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 13:38:44 +0000

Derek Kessler over at PreCentral.net has reviewed the hell out of the webOS Pre3, the no-longer-going-to-be-released iPhone competitor that HP bought from Palm only to leave broken and strewn across a mountain of mismanagement and corporate incompetence.

This could have been the great hurrah for webOS smartphones. The Pre3 could actually have stood a chance against the might of the iPhone and Android behemoths. Instead, it’s not even made it into the arena, let alone the ring. It demonstrates what the Palm team was truly capableof building a great smartphone with the right resources at their backs. Too bad the support wasn’t there too.

Shame on HP.

Source: PreCentral.net

HP could be pilot for new "Jobs' Business Nightmare" show on FOX

Rene Ritchie — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 03:18:18 +0000

After reading the news Precentral.net broke about Palm once again being split into separate software (likely to wither) and hardware (likely to die) units, it made me wish we could get a new show on FOX this fall called "Jobs' Business Nightmare". Just like the Gordon Ramsay cooking show, Steve Jobs could tackle another bumbling, downward spiraling tech company each week, shake them up, reorganize their product matrixes, and turn them back towards the path to success. Just like he did with Apple. And he could miraculously do it all in 44 min. Just like Ramsway.

HP could be the pilot.

"Apotheker, come here. 2 seconds. Listen to me. You're in denial. You're ruining webOS. You're ruining it. Donkey."

I'd watch.

iPad Live 70: Bond villain

Rene Ritchie — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 03:39:35 +0000

Georgia, Seth, Keith, and Rene talk iPod touch 5, iOS 5 beta 6, UDID don'ts, iPad 3 this spring, iPad killing HP consumer hardware, Google's Moto insurance policy, and the glorious JooJoo2. This is iPad Live!

Hosts

Credits

Thanks to the TiPb iPad Accessory Store for sponsoring the podcast, and to everyone who showed up for the live chat!

Music Hear me Roar by iPad Live theme song contest winner, DieselJesus!

How to switch from webOS to iPhone and iPad

Rene Ritchie — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 16:05:39 +0000

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.

webOS to iOS, Next generation iPhone name, iOS beta battery, Anticipated iPad features - From the Forums

Jeremy Sikora — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 15:48:41 +0000

From the Forums is a great way to see what all of the current hot topics are on the TiPb forums. In order to create any new threads of your own or reply to any of the existing threads, you must be a registered member. Becoming a member is a simple process that will only take a few minutes out of your day, so if you have not already already done so, head on over and register now!

See you in the forums!

Mobile Nations 5: A wedding and a funeral

Rene Ritchie — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 04:28:47 +0000

Mobile Nations 5: A wedding and a funeral Phil, Kevin, Derek, Dan, Georgia, and Rene talk HP dumping webOS hardware, Google picking up Motorola Mobility, RIM's new BlackBerrys reviewed, and what it means for Microsoft and Apple. This is MobileNations!

Agenda

Feedback

Got something to say? Agree or disagree with something we said? Have something you want us to discuss on a future show? Don't just sit there yelling at the screen, dammit, let us know!

Hosts

Phil Nickinson (@philnickinson)of Android Central

Kevin Michaluk (@crackberrykevin) of CrackBerry.com

Derek Kessler (@dkdsgn) of PreCentral.net

Daniel Rubino (@Malatesta77) of WPCentral.com

Georgia (@GeorgiaTiPb) of ZENandTECH.tv

Rene Ritchie (@reneritchie) of TiPb.com

Credits

Our music is pROgraM vs. Us3R by by morgantj. Introduction by Joseph Holder.

Thanks to the Smartphone Experts network of store for sponsoring this podcast, and to our fantastic live chat members for keeping us honest and making us smart!

Did iPad kill HP's hardware business?

Georgia — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 23:23:14 +0000

After Apple introduced the iPad I wondered out loud on iPad Live whether it would leave any air in the room for eventual tablet rivals. It turns out I might have been right, but also might not have been right enough. The iPad, and now iPad 2, might not have left any air in the room for any hardware rivals, tablet or PC.

HP is not only killing off their webOS hardware and looking to license the software, HP is spinning or selling off their laptop and desktop computer business as well. Why?

The tablet effect is real and the TouchPad is not gaining momentum in the marketplace.

And since we know there's no tablet market, just an iPad market, the real meaning there is pretty clear.

I was a PalmOS user since the Visor and while I never owned a webOS device, I have tried them and liked them and it's disappointing to see HP cut and run like this. Sure it's easier to say "make better hardware" or "get better carrier deals" or "ship more mature products faster" and really difficult to do, but that was the job HP signed up for.

Maybe Amazon or Facebook, or a jilted Android manufacturer will pick up webOS and show HP what a company of will can really do?

Keep reading PreCentral.net for ongoing coverage and let us know -- did Apple and the iPad kill HP's hardware business, and who would you like to see run with webOS?

HP to discontinue webOS devices -- Pre, Veer, and TouchPad bite the dust

Rene Ritchie — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 20:37:17 +0000

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]

Mobile Nations 4: From boardroom to bedroom

Rene Ritchie — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 17:27:13 +0000

Phil, Kevin, Tim, Dan, and Rene talk Google vs. Microsoft patent slap-fight, new BlackBerrys (new BlackBerrys!!), waiting on Pre 3 and the TouchPad 3.0.2 update, and Apple eating all the mobile profits. This is Mobile Nations!

Agenda

Feedback

Got something to say? Agree or disagree with something we said? Have something you want us to discuss on a future show? Don't just sit there yelling at the screen, dammit, let us know!

Hosts

Phil Nickinson (@philnickinson)

Kevin Michaluk (@crackberrykevin)

Tim Stiffler Dean (@anotherguy)

Daniel Rubino (@Malatesta77)

Rene Ritchie (@reneritchie)

Credits

Our music is pROgraM vs. Us3R by by morgantj. Introduction by Joseph Holder.

Thanks to the Smartphone Experts network of store for sponsoring this podcast, and to our fantastic live chat members for keeping us honest and making us smart!

Mobile Nations 3: Full house

Rene Ritchie — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 19:21:57 +0000

Phil, Kevin, Derek, Dan, and Rene talk Netflix on Android, media on Mobile, the RIM-pire striking back, news execs at webOS, Nokia Windows Phones, 20 million iPhones, and hitting the budget buyer sweet spot. Bringing together the heads of state of Android, BlackBerry, iOS, webOS, and Windows Mobile for full on round-table action. This is Mobile Nations!

Agenda

Feedback

Got something to say? Agree or disagree with something we said? Have something you want us to discuss on a future show? Don't just sit there yelling at the screen, dammit, let us know!

Hosts

Phil Nickinson (@philnickinson)

Kevin Michaluk (@crackberrykevin)

Derek Kessler (@dkdsgn)

Daniel Rubino (@Malatesta77)

Rene Ritchie (@reneritchie)

Credits

Our music is pROgraM vs. Us3R by by morgantj. Introduction by Joseph Holder.

Thanks to the Smartphone Experts network of store for sponsoring this podcast, and to our fantastic live chat members for keeping us honest and making us smart!

Mobile Nations 2: Not yet begun to fight!

Rene Ritchie — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 18:16:01 +0000

Kevin, Phil, and Rene discuss whether or not Google should buy RIM, how BlackBerry can fight back, is Google MIA in the patent wars, Google+ is here, the TouchPad has landed, and will there be a second new iPad this year? Bringing together the heads of state of Android, BlackBerry, iOS, webOS, and Windows Mobile for full on round-table action. This is Mobile Nations!

Show notes after the break!

Agenda

Feedback

Got something to say? Agree or disagree with something we said? Have something you want us to discuss on a future show? Don't just sit there yelling at the screen, dammit, let us know!

Hosts

Phil Nickinson (@philnickinson)

Kevin Michaluk (@crackberrykevin)

Rene Ritchie (@reneritchie)

Credits

Our music is pROgraM vs. Us3R by by morgantj. Introduction by Joseph Holder.

Thanks to the Smartphone Experts network of store for sponsoring this podcast, and to our fantastic live chat members for keeping us honest and making us smart!

Iterate

Rene Ritchie — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 12:29:59 +0000

Iterate is a new, mobile design focused podcast coming soon from Marc Edwards of Bjango, Seth Clifford of Nickelfish, and yours truly.

For more information and updates, follow @iteratetv on Twitter.

Loop until done.

Dear Android and BlackBerry users, what would iOS 5 need to win you over?

Georgia — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 16:25:15 +0000

Apple will be announcing iOS 5 on Monday and if the rumors are to be believed it will do pretty much everything from notifications to make you a tasty vanilla latte (okay, not really.) But it does beg the question -- if you're an Android or BlackBerry user, or a Windows Phone, webOS, or fan of any other platform, what would Apple have to do to win you over to iPhone and iPad?

Rene's posted his want list. What's yours? What would you need to see from Steve Jobs and Apple to make you switch (or switch back?)

HP/Palm finally making an iPhone-style webOS slab phone?

Rene Ritchie — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 23:40:38 +0000

Our editor-in-chief, Dieter Bohn, writing for sibling site PreCentral.net lands an exclusive first look at an HP/Palm webOS slab device, potentially code-named Stingray.

While we are quite confident that the image is legit, unfortunately we don't have a lot of confidence in any further information. Is the device coming or is it simply a prototype that has been canned? Our tipster described it as "an EVO with webOS" and suggests it simply has yet to be announced.

If real and if HP goes ahead and releases it, it will be their first phone without a keyboard, leaving webOS itself as their key differentiators. With more an more emerging about the tablet-specific webOS 3.0 (similar to how iOS 3.2 was iPad specific), it'll be interesting to see what ultimately launches on the phone.

[PreCentral.net]

iPad competitors: Will the true multitasking please stand up?

Rene Ritchie — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 18:41:56 +0000

One of the most persistent complaints levied against the iPhone and iPad were/are the lack of multitasking. This, of course, has always been silly. However, now that BlackBerry QNX PlayBook>, Android 3.0 Honeycomb tablets like Xoom, and HP webOS 3.0's TouchPad are set to launch, "true multitasking" is again finding its way into the bullet points of competitively positioned slide decks and ad campaigns. It's still silly but it's also more complicated now.

Does iOS offer "true multitasking", does its competitors? Let's take a look, after the break.

The no iOS multitasking myth

Going back to the original iPhone's introduction in 2007, Steve Jobs' demonstration clearly showed music fading out as a call came in, staying on a call while browsing the web or sending email, and music fading back in as a call ended. Those of us who had Treo's at the time were astounded at how smooth iPhone multitasking was, and how it didn't crash or reboot the phone once.

From launch, the iPhone had great multitasking. It just didn't have 3rd party apps. Fast forward to 2008 and iOS 2, the App Store launched and while Apple's own apps continued to enjoy great multitasking, 3rd party App Store apps weren't allowed any background processes at all. This kept things nice and simple and stable for a certain group of consumers but frustrated power users to no end.

Fast forward again to 2010 and iOS 4 (specifically 4.2 for iPad) and Apple set up a system to allow App Store apps limited multitasking. Not fake multitasking. Not untrue multitasking. But limited multitasking. Apps that were transferring data could keep the connection alive in the background for a short length of time after exit to finish the transfer (like a photo upload or status stream download). Music apps like Pandora could be streamed in the background. VoIP (Voice over IP) apps like Skype to keep a process in the background to receive or continue calls. Turn-by-turn navigation apps like TomTom could keep giving voice directions in the background. True multitasking all, it addressed a huge percentage of mainstream needs. (Not all needs mind you, persistent internet connections for SSH, etc. would have been nice for power users...)

In addition Apple added a few others things to enhance the "appearance" of multitasking from a user perspective. Instead of just leaving apps running forever in the background, using battery power and system resources and requiring user intervention to manage, Apple created a way to "save state" on exit. So, the next time an app launches it's in the same place it was when last it was used. They also (re-)set double click on Home to launch a fast app switcher dock. Hidden behind the regular dock, invisible to users who don't need or want it, it can be called up to quickly jump between recently used apps (or to expose controls for audio, brightness, etc). Not at all "true" multitasking but important when it comes to the perception of multitasking.

It's a compromise solution, one that tries to address the aforementioned battery life and resource issues with ease of use and convenience and while it's not perfect and could use some improvement, it's pretty good. (Especially when you see how fast some competing devices chew through battery life.)

It's also something that might be addressed further when iPad 2 -- with more RAM and processing power -- and iOS 5 are shown off sometime this spring.

Competitive multitasking

RIM's QNX-powered BlackBerry Playbook, HP's webOS 3.0-powered TouchPad, and the slew of Google's upcoming Android 3.0-powered tablets, spearheaded by the Motorola Xoom, are all more or less touting "true multitasking" as a competitive advantage over the iPad. These are the same companies and campaigns touting Flash as the "whole internet/web" and both statements are, ironically, untrue. (We won't touch on Flash here but suffice it to say that while Flash is the most popular plugin on the web, it's far from the only plugin on the web.)

Lest you think this partisan or apologist, Kevin from CrackBerry.com was quick to point this out back during CES when RIM first spoke about true multitasking -- what functionality does it provide to the end user?

Having a movie or video game continue to animate while in card view (webOS or Playbook variety) is great eye candy but isn't functionally any better or truer multitasking than having it save state or pause and then resume when brought back to the foreground. You can't interact with it when in background and more importantly -- you can't interact with multiple cards the way you can with multiple windows on a PC which really does offer true pre-emptive multitasking. To the best of my knowledge you can't watch a movie and play a game at the same time, or drag and drop content between browsers and document editors, for example.

Cards (again webOS or Playbook) are a brilliant and elegant way to visualize multitasking for end users but until you can start dragging and dropping data between them the way you can on a Mac or Windows they're functionally no better than the fast app switcher on iOS.

iOS, in fact, used card view before either webOS or PlayBook -- Pages in Mobile Safari date way back to the original iPhone -- Apple simply lacked the vision to (or chose not to) exploit them throughout the OS. (Even in Safari on iPad I'd argue a tabbing system would be more functional than the grid of pages we now enjoy.)

So while I'd dearly love for Apple repatriate cards/page to the iPad multitasking OS, I'd really only love it if it came with that multiple usage functionality. And when/if that comes, I hope Apple can figure out a way that isn't at the expense of mainstream usability. (If part of the success of iOS is attributable to Apple ruthlessly cutting away everything and anything that wasn't simple and easy for consumers to use, is complexity creep -- while desirable to power users -- the best thing for the platform as a whole?)

Android 3.0 Honeycomb seems to be bringing more of the desktop metaphor to the tablet space, including more multitasking. Their user interface and user experience, however, still seem to be on the back-burner. (Apple's priorities are almost directly inverse to Google's in that regard.)

The truth about true

The iPad multitasks fine. webOS and the strikingly similar BlackBerry tablet OS multitask with better visualization but it's arguable about whether or not that's "truer" and I'd argue it isn't. Further, I'd argue that at this point it really doesn't matter in terms of end user functionality. Android 3.0 Honeycomb may multitask more like a desktop but that's neither more true nor proven better for a wide swath of users. Buried in all that, however, are a few important truths. The pad/tablet industry is still in its infancy and Apple, Google, HP, and RIM aren't anywhere near done exploring interactions and interfaces on their devices. They're all getting better. And since there are a few really strong players (and perhaps Microsoft one day as well), consumers get choice and the competition drives all of them to get better so we consumers choose them.

iPhone Live 137 - We can hear you now!

Rene Ritchie — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 04:57:54 +0000

Rene and Georgia talk Verizon iPhone launch, battling TV commercials, iPhone 5 rumors, HPs new phones and Nokia's burning platform, the greenpois0n Jailbreak, Angrier Birds, and we give away an iPhone! The is iPhone Live!

Show notes and the week in iPhone after the break!

Verizon iPhone

iPhone 5

WWDC 2011, iPhone 5, iOS 5 GM to be announced June 5-9?

The competition

Jailbreak

Tips and How to

Daily tips

Apps

Hosts

Credits

Thanks to the TiPb iPhone accessory store for sponsoring the podcast, and to everyone who showed up for the live chat!

Our music comes from the following sources:

I Called You -- iPhone Remix by Pete Leidy

Sneakmove iPhone Ringtone Challenge

HP (not Palm!) announces Veer, Pre3, webOS 3.0 TouchPad

Rene Ritchie — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 23:10:46 +0000

HP held their Something Beyond event today where they announced the new, tiny Veer, the beefed up Pre 3, and their iPad competitors, the TouchPad. (And I'll note with sadness it was HP, and no longer Palm that announced them.)

The Veer replaces the Pixi as the mainstream fashion phone, only now it packs the Pre slider form factor shrunk down to credit-card size (don't call it MiniPre!). I'll miss the iconic front-facing QWERTY that made the Treo famous but for slider fans there's a lot -- read: a little -- to like here. Check out PreCentral.net's Veer hands on for more.

The Pre 3 is the Pre on Hulk serum. Bigger screen and far more powerful internals. If HP can nail the build-quality they could realize every dream original Pre-users have had. I'd have liked a slab form factor here, but I have an iPhone so HP is at least sticking to Palm's guns on hardware keyboards. Check out PreCentral.net's Pre3 hands on for more.

The TouchPad is HP's answer to the iPad, with identical display size but quadruple the RAM, a front-facing camera, and webOS 3.0 which really shines on the big screen. The UI doesn't scale automagically (it was unrealistic to think it would) but HP has moved some controls to the top, made notifications into a hybrid drop down, and cards and stacks just look gorgeous on a tablet. Check out PreCentral.net's HP TouchPad hands on for more.

HP also promised webOS as an ecosystem on everything from printers to webOS PCs to devices, all tied into the cloud. (They even showed TouchShare, where they "bumped" a web page from Pre3 to TouchPad by touching the devices together.)

It wasn't a home run -- Palm-now-HP has to start delivering more, faster if they want to keep up. But it was a solid at-bat in a game that's nowhere near the end yet. (2 hours was also long for an event, half the time would have made the highlights twice as dense.)

The lack of firm release dates or pricing info was disappointing, as is the nebulous state of webOS updates for previous generation Palm devices. And while the Pre3 and TouchPad specs look solid we're weeks away from iPad 2 and months away from iPhone 5, so HP has a heck of a pace to keep up with. HP has money, however, and that buys time (see Microsoft, Nokia) and at the very least they've shown webOS isn't dropping out of the race.

Check out all the videos linked above and then come on back and tell us what you thought of HP's Think Beyond event, does it raise the bar for Apple's 2011 iOS lineup? What's the threat level?

Multifl0w update brings Cards/Pages-style multitasking to iPhone [Jailbreak]

Andrew Wray — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 22:19:52 +0000

Multifl0w was recently updated in Cydia and brings a WebOS-like "Cards" (or Mobile Safari "Pages" if you're Apple-centric) interface to iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad multitasking system.

Multifl0w has been available in Cydia for some time now, but previously only allowed for an exposé display of apps (up to 9 at a time) running in the background. The mod features smooth animations and is low on system resources, and also packs full Activator integration for gesture support. If you've ever used ProSwitcher in the past then you'll be familiar with the way Multifl0w handles app switching.

I prefer Multifl0w over the stock iOS app-switcher dock and have been using it on both my iPhone and iPad for the past day or so with no crashes or hiccups. Multifl0w is available in the Cydia Store now for $4.99. Check out the pics after the jump, and let us know if you've seen any bugs or issues with the update in the comments!

[Multifl0w]

Podcast: CES 2011 round table

Rene Ritchie — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 09:52:25 +0000

The Cell Phone Junkies, Joey Koppes and Mickey Papillon host a special edition round table podcast rounding up all the news from CES 2011 with yours truly for TiPb.com, out EiC Dieter Bohn serving duty for PreCentral.net and WPCentral, Kevin Michaluk of CrackBerry.com, Phil Nickinson of Android Central. We talk all things Android, BlackBerry PlayBook, iPhone and iPad, webOS, and Windows Phone, along with Sprint, AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile. Listen in!

On the ground for CES 2011

Rene Ritchie — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 23:28:22 +0000

We're on the ground for CES 2011, looking for iPhone and iPad apps, games, accessories, and general awesomeness. Tonight is CES unveiled, and we're going to keep running from there. So if you want to see all the new stuff that's coming your way in 2011.

The Smartphone Expert Network is here in full force, so make sure you keep up with Android Central, CrackBerry.com, PreCentral.net, and WPCentral for the latest in Android, BlackBerry, weOS, and Windows Phone news. (And if you want the gory, behind-the-scenes details, give a Twitter follow to @reneritchie @philnickinson @crackberrykevin @backlon -- if you dare!)

Again, if you're a developer or manufacturer and you want to amaze us, let us know: news@tipb.com!

[Note: Pic above is CES 2010, we'll make new memories soon enough!]

On the eve of iOS 4.1 comes news about webOS 2.0

Rene Ritchie — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 18:12:38 +0000

Palm webOS news often seems to land right before Apple iPhone news and while we're waiting for tomorrow's Apple special music event and iOS 4.1 announcement, PreCentral.net's gotten the scoop on what's coming later this year for webOS 2.0:

Palm's multitasking 'card' metaphor is getting a refresh with Stacks
Universal Search is getting majorly beefed up with 'Quick Actions,' will be opened to developers, and rebranded as Just Type
Apps can have custom Touchstone at-a-glance views with Exhibition
Synergy is opening up to developers
HTML5 and Javascript support is much improved
Hybrid PDK/SDK apps will be fully supported

What, no interruptive, modal dialog notifications? Sigh. Seriously though, the multitasking looks interesting and once again while webOS isn't open source, it leads the game in being a far more open platform for developers and users than just about anybody else in the industry. Check it out and let us know what, if anything, Apple needs to do to keep up in 6 months for the iOS 5 preview...?

[PreCentral.net]

Palm to go Retina Display with webOS 2.0, next generation handsets?

Rene Ritchie — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 12:19:38 +0000

Derek Kessler over at sibling site PreCentral.net let us know that developer logs are showing traces of webOS 2.0 supporting the same 960x640 resolution as Apple's iPhone 4 Retina Display:

This time the developer was Killin’ It, and the app was the relatively popular game Cloud Hopper, As before, it’s entirely possible that somebody has performed some malevolent trickery to make this happen, but unlike theRoadrunner spotting in Foursquare’s Metrix logs, this one wouldn’t be quite so easy. Cloud Hopper’s source code has not been made publicly available like Foursquare’s, which means any charlatan attempting to pull the digital wool over our eyes would likely have to perform some pretty tricky modifications to the webOS emulator to get it to spit out Roadrunner HD as the device, webOS 2.0 as the OS, and the heretofore unseen 640x960 as the display resolution.

Given that the original Palm Pre matched iPhone 3GS in resolution and processors, and the easy iPhone games to PDK porting benefits that's given them, it's not hard to imagine a Pre 2 (or whatever the next generation device is called) will match iPhone 4 in the same way.

[@KillingItLLC via PreCentral.net]

Switching from webOS to iPhone 4? Here's what you need to know!

Rene Ritchie — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 01:00:57 +0000

How to make the switch from Palm webOS to Apple iPhone 4

iPhone 4 with its 960x640 retina display, easy-peasy FaceTime video calling, high quality 5 megapixel, back-illuminated camera that shoots 720p 30fps video, and the silky smoothness of iOS 4 convincing you to switch from Palm's Pre or Pixi to Apple's newest handset? Worried about moving over your personal data like contacts, finding apps, getting used to the differences? Wondering where to get help?

Relax. You're in the the right place. Follow along after the break for everything you need to know (more properly, everything the TiPb iPhone Forums have taught us) about switching from Android to iPhone 4 and iOS 4.

(And yes, we've done Android, Windows PhoneBlackBerry switcher guides as well).

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 went from Treo to Centro to Pixi and never even considered an iPhone until now? No worries. That was then and this is now -- iPhone 4 and iOs 4 now. Getting you up to speed and ready to go now.

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 the pioneering Pre, iOS 4 can handle multiple ActiveSync accounts, including Exchange proper and Google Sync's implementation. Just tap the Settings icon on the Home Screen, tap Mail, Contacts, and Calendars, choose Exchange, and enter your credentials.

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 the new iOS 4 unified inbox and threaded email client. It's not full on Synergy, but...

What about Synergy and Cards

There's nothing as stupendous as Synergy built into iOS 4, though the previously mention Exchange, Google, and MobileMe contacts, calendars, and email can live together in quasi-synergistic fashion. If you install the Facebook app [iTunes link] you can get some contact mojo going on there as well. 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 4 introduces 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, in iOS 4, navigation, VoIP, and streaming music Pandora or Slacker-style can all multitask away blissfully in the background.

Finding other apps (and games)

Palm 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 $0.99 goodness. And pretty much goodness at every level. Sure, there's a lot of CrApps in with those apps, but at 200,000 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. With local caching now available, HTML5 web apps can look and act far more like native apps. 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 reviews several a week and we've got a whole iPhone Apps and Games Forum ready to help you out as well.

Root meet Jailbreak

Again, Palm is so open and community friendly they make the Symbian foundation blush. 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 iTunes app store, you need to use the Jailbreak app store, Cydia (or Rock). 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 coverage, 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, current 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 Pixi both have physical keyboards.

Best of all, if you really miss your physical keyboard, with iOS 4, you can tether up a Bluetooth one and knock email -- and yourself -- out.

Welcome back, iTunes

Remember Palm trying and ultimately failing to hack the Pre into iTunes? With iPhone, you're a first (and only) class citizen with full keys to Apple's media kingdom. Enjoy.

So long, OTA updates

And you'll need that iTunes because while you can do a lot of things OTA (over the air), including syncing all your personal data via ActiveSync (including Google Sync) or MobileMe, download apps, and buy or rent iTunes music, TV shows, movies, podcasts, etc. (20MB or under over 3G, any size over Wi-Fi), updating the OS ain't on. (Backing up ain't two.)

Likewise, 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 AirSharing [iTunes]. But at some point, be it to install a software update like iOS 4.1 (probably due this fall) or backup your data, you're going to need to plug in to iTunes. So 2007, we know. If it's any consolation, Apple should release iTunes.com at some point...

Say WTH to interruptive notifications

Palm 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.

Here's the condemnation - you get one notification popup at a time that you have to view or close before you can resume what you were doing (or about to do) and once you close it -- or another notification pops up on top of it -- it's gone forever.

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.

Father of webOS notifications leaves Palm for Apple

Rene Ritchie — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 13:53:55 +0000

Palm has a stellar, non-interuptive, non-"choose it or lose it" notification system, and according to our sibling site PreCentral.net, the man who designed webOS notifications has left for Apple:

The man who "Invented the non-intrusive banner notification system used in webOS" and also did all sorts of other work for the OS, Rich Dellinger, is leaving Palm to return to his earlier employer, Apple, as a Senior User Interface Designer.

Does this mean iOS 4.x or iOS 5 will be getting better notifications? They've likely been working on that long before now, and who knows what Dellinger will be assigned to, but since notifications remain one of the few sore sports in iOS, we're very much hoping it does and the sooner the better.

And let's top that off by asking what kind of notification system you want to see in iOS? Palm and Android both do it well, how could Apple do it better? Simpler?

Why the iPhone didn't support Flash in 2007

Rene Ritchie — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 15:11:06 +0000

Why didn't Apple support Adobe's popular Flash plugin way back in 2007 when it first launched the original iPhone 2G? Because Adobe still can't get it to run on the most powerful, most modern 2010 devices Android, Palm and others have to offer. That's why.

"We have a number of excited partners who are working aggressively with us to bring Flash to their devices, whether they be smartphones as well as handsets, and so companies like Google or RIM or Palm are going to be releasing versions of Flash on smartphones and tablets in the second half of the year."

Maybe Adobe will finally get it working in Q2 2010, but we've heard that "it's coming!" line once too often now, so forgive us if "partners working aggressively" gives us a something diametrically opposed to confidence.

The facts remain, however, that the iPad will run HTML5 video inline today (and iPhone OS 4 this summer) without even getting warm to the touch while our laptops and multicore desktops turn into noisy miniature blast furnaces when the plugin spins up on their far more powerful hardware.

Flash, like Internet Explorer 6 and ActiveX filled a need and became a popular if proprietary and problematic solution. Years without competition finally caught up with Microsoft by way of Firefox and WebKit, as it's now catching up with Adobe by way of HTML5. Many years and incredible loss of mindshare later, Microsoft is scheduled to finally ship a standards-compliant browser with IE9. Maybe Adobe can work a faster miracle with Flash. But even if they do, HTML5 will have had months of mobile video delivery under its belt on a platform Apple predicted in their iAds (which also uses HTML5) introduction will soon be 100,000,000 strong. That's a heck of a head start and Apple is not a company known to look back.

You didn't have Flash on the iPhone in 2007 for the same reason you don't have Flash on any mobile device outside a Nokia netbookphone today. For the same reason you can't jump on a Corellian star-freighter and hit hyperspace for Endor. The technology doesn't exist yet, and when and if it ever does, for Apple and the iPhone it will likely be too little, too late.

[Business Insider via PreCentral.net]

iPhone Games Can be Ported to Palm webOS PDK in "Days"? -- The Competition

Rene Ritchie — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 12:37:15 +0000

It seems like Palm's new webOS PDK (plug-in development kit) can be used to port over iPhone games in a matter of days -- or even hours. Given how fast some iPhone games have turned up on the Palm Pre we've kind of suspect there was a little something something going on behind the screen, and our sibling site PreCentral.net confirmed it by way of Digital Daily's pre-GDC coverage.

As just mentioned, I'll be at GDC to have a look at what they're doing. If it's really just that easy to get your iPhone games onto webOS, then Palm has once again made their platform as frictionless as possible for developers (on top of the web technology SDK and Classic PalmOS emulation). Smart.

Windows Phone 7 Series looks to be packing Xbox Live gaming muscle, so they likely won't go the same route as Palm... but could Android and BlackBerry? And if developers can keep making great iPhone games and get webOS (and maybe others) as a bonus, is that ultimately better for iPhone gamers, or does it weaken the uniqueness of the platform? If it does, will there eventually be "exclusives" like there are on Xbox and Playstation, or will Apple do more first-party games like the console makers -- especially Nintendo -- do?

Palm Pre, Palm Pixi, webOS Review from an iPhone Perspective -- Smartphone Round Robin

Rene Ritchie — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 20:10:06 +0000

My first smartphone was a Palm Treo 600 and so my last 2009 Smartphone Round Robin "away" review focusing on Palm's new webOS platform as embodied by the Palm Pre and Palm Pix does not lack for symmetry. Between the two, last year I reviewed the Palm Treo Pro which I quipped was more HTC than Palm, ran Windows Mobile and not a Palm-made OS, and had a keyboard that was hard to consider "pro" level. 3 years of round robin, three totally different platforms from Palm, and only this review for me to try and make my own sense out of it.

Luckily I had the mobile accomplisher himself, our editor-in-chief Dieter Bohn to show me Palm's new platform and their new devices, and the truly exceptional community over at PreCentral.net Forums to help understand where it's at and where it's going.

(And just a reminder, every day you post on that PreCentral.net thread, or any of the official Round Robin threads, is another day you're entered to win one of six (6!) new smartphones!)

Now let's get this on...

Previously on Palm

First, this is where Palm stood last year, without a PalmOS device in the competition, represented instead by the HTC-built, Windows Mobile running, Treo Pro:

And now, just one year later Dieter was kind enough to show me the Palm Pre and Palm Pixi running the all new, all different, all Palm webOS:

CrackBerry Kevin and I also stopped by Palm at CES 2010 to check out the new Palm Pre Plus and Palm Pixi Plus for Verizon:

And here are the rest of the contextual links:

Hardware Design

I'm starting with hardware only because every other review started with hardware, and I'm telling you that because I really wish for this one review I didn't have to start with hardware. But I'm a sucker for consistency.

And the Palm Pre Hardware Just...

Well, it isn't great. The concept is killer, don't get me wrong. The river-stone ergonomics are beautiful. The execution, however, especially on the early units, was really unfortunate given how much else Palm got right.

After using the iPhone's glass screen for years, using the plastic screen on the Pre just feels... not good. The first Pre I tried at a local Best Buy had a screen protector over the plastic, and I found it almost unusable. If I was Kevin I could figure out some witty, spot-on analogy about layers of prophylactics between me and my multitouch but I'm not and I can't and so I won't. I'll just say Palm needs to switch to glass and now.

The Pre is also a vertical slider. It looks like an iPhone slab but pull down and a full physical keyboard is revealed. While this could be a best-of-both-worlds compromise, the lack of an official, built-in virtual keyboard means (unlike the Motorola Android Droid) you have to use the physical keyboard and... it's not great. A couple of Pre devices I've tried didn't have very solid feeling sliders and all of them had cramped quarters that made the physical keyboard not that enjoyable for me. I had to use the tips of my fingers/nails and still watch out on the top ridge of the display and the sharp edges of the sides.

I'm not sure what they could do to fix it, though Dieter says the new Palm Pre Plus is an improvement in the feel of the keys itself. That, combined with the better build quality control could be part of the answer. I look forward to spending more time with it in the future to find out.

Palm Pixi By Contrast...

Eschewing the slider for their second webOS device, Palm returned to their roots with the front-facing QWERTY. They also returned to the form factor of the Palm Centro, which saw high sales if low margins during the final year of PalmOS.

The device is tiny. It's deceptively tiny. It's so tiny that, like in the Dark Knight movie, you half-expect that if Dieter's Pre ever broke at the mechanism, he'd pull a release, a full Pixi would eject, and he'd just keep on typing. Actually, he'd likely type better because, counter-intutively, the Palm Pixi keyboard feels better than the Pre's. I don't know if it's crazy Pixi magic, or just the better Feng Shui of not having to type inside the Pre's cavity, but the tiny keys worked well.

The huge problem here, however, is that Palm reduced the screen size to fit in that keyboard. This isn't the Treo 240x240 or 320x320 of yesteryear. In 2009, never mind 2010, screen size matters. Aspect ratio matters. In a post-iPhone, capacitive era how we interact with our device is more screen-dependant than anything else. There are times you won't need a physical keyboard (watching video, playing games, reading e-books). There's almost no time when you won't want the full screen. Sure, it's only a few pixels shorter, but on a screen that small, the difference is noticeable. It's like having a 16:9 HDTV for a year or so, then suddenly getting a 4:3 SDTV again. You know what you're missing.

There's no easy fix for that easy, unless they jettison the physical keyboard and go with a fullscreen Pixi with a virtual keyboard. Many would hate that, but it's something I've been increasingly considering as of late...

Is the Era of Physical Keyboards Over?

Originally this section was going to be called "the era of physical keyboards is over" but a funny thing happened on the way to writing this review -- I kind of changed my mind.

Physical keyboards on smartphones are a strange beast. That a QWERTY button layout originally intended to prevent jamming on ancient IBM typewriters still exists on some of the most modern gadgets today is... either stupefying or a testament to the intractability of consumer typists.

Interestingly, Palm didn't start off with physical keyboards. The Palm Pilot had no keyboard and used a proprietary form of handwriting recognition. The iPhone doesn't have a physical keyboard either, and does offer recognition for Chinese character input, but uses virtual keys for most other languages, and sticks to QWERTY for English.

Rumor has it, physical vs. virtual keyboard was a huge area of contention between Apple CEO, Steve Jobs and then-Apple VP and head of iPod, Jon Rubinstein. Jobs didn't want a physical keyboard, Rubinstein did. And we all know how that turned out -- we have the iPhone sans-physical keyboard and Rubinstein has a new job as CEO of Palm.

It should come as no surprise, then, that when the Palm Pre debuted and looked a lot like an iPhone with a physical keyboard, many (and yours truly included) figured it was the iPhone Rubinstein always wanted to build.

He wanted the keyboard so much, as mentioned, he sacrificed screen real-estate on the Palm Pixi for it. I find that absurd. I would have removed the keys and made it an iPhone-nano-esque slab. As I said, until this review, I would have whole-heartedly exclaimed "the era of physical keyboards is over".

But then I started thinking about the BlackBerry and how the Storm2 is no replacement for the 9700 for their user-base. Just like it took a long time to transition from CLI (command line interface, the text-only days of DOS prompts and UNIX terminals) to GUI (graphical user interface, the windows, mouse, pointer paradigm we see today), it will take a while to transition from physical keyboards to virtual ones. And just like some people (not gonna say neckbeards!) still turn off the GUI on Linux, go pure Terminal on Mac OS X, and ignore WIndows completely, some people have been so raised on physical keyboards, even on tiny little devices, that they wouldn't transition to virtual even if, from an overall usability standpoint, they could or should.

BlackBerry is the easy example because they're essentially messaging devices. The iPhone is essentially a big screen you fill with media and apps, so that's an easy example of where the virtual keyboard fits best (especially Apple's still unequalled implementation thereof).

And that brought me to the crux of this long, rambling, tangent -- what's the Palm Pre (and webOS in general)? I had the same question about Android and pretty much determined it was Google's mobile insurance policy. But Palm is a mobile company. It's not an "also have" like Microsoft. It's their sole reason for being, and they're one of the original innovators in the space.

So I wondered again, what's the Palm Pre? And then I realized Palm told us from the beginning -- it's the fat middle. Where the Treo converged three devices into one, the Palm Pre bridges the traditional, keyboard-centric mobile messaging device with the new, screen-centric mobile platform device.

It's likely not keyboard enough for a BlackBerry addict, and it's not screen enough for an iPhone user, but it's a compromise form factor for those who want the okay-of-both-worlds.

I'm so happy with the iPhone keyboard that I'll never go back to a physical one. I use my iPhone keyboard far more than I ever used the physical keyboards on my Treo 600 or 680 because it works better for me. Not having to engage forearm muscles to depress tiny keys and hold the rest of the phone stable while I do so is a huge advantage in my book. It's just effortless and it just works. I won't be writing novel-length compositions on a BlackBerry anyway, so no argument about volume of typing impresses me. Likewise, I see enough physical keyboarders glancing constantly at their screens that muscle-memory no longer resonates with me as a deal-breaker either. New devices are about consuming information as much as creating it, and even glance-ability requires -- you guessed it -- glances.

One day haptics may be sufficiently advanced enough that mighty-morphin', there-and-gone-again virtual-that-feel-like-physical keyboards are enough for everybody. But right now, today, you have legacy keyboarders who'll never abandon their keys, and devices on Android that still haven't gotten their software right, and there needs to be a middle ground.

Or to be more succinct -- Smartphones are evolving beyond priority messaging devices to priority (data/media/etc.) consumption devices and hardware keyboards are legacy, bolted-on technology comforting for the former but waiting to be obsoleted when technology allows virtual keyboards to better serve the latter (and we're part of the way there with the iPhone).

(hat Palm didn't have hardware keyboards when the Pilot was priority PIM device is interesting as an aside. And no, Dieter, I won't take that back )

Inductive Charging

Palm debuted it with their Touchstone accessory. Cool. Future. Let's me leave this section on a positive note.

Software Experience

Okay, here's where webOS is interesting enough that any complaints about the hardware take a back seat. First let's get something out of the way. We've teased Palm about having the former head of Apple's iPod division as their CEO, and about bringing over a bunch of iPhone engineers to help create webOS. We've listed what webOS adopted from the iPhone (and we're far from the only ones), but it's important to remember the iPhone wasn't made in a vacuum. The icon grid as launcher, the tabbed phone app, and other paradigms existed in earlier Palm Pilots and Treos and Apple took them and put them together with a bunch of other stuff for iPhone OS. Likewise, some of the multitouch gestures in webOS are the same as the iPhone (and thank goodness), the way Cards works is greatly expanded from, but visually identical to how iPhone Safari Pages work, etc. In the end, they'll figure out the legal issues and we'll say the user benefits from a certain amount of consistency when it comes to these platforms. With that behind us...

HTML, CSS, JavaScript

Palm faced a huge problem when launching webOS. They couldn't really bring PalmOS developers forward because the platform was different and, unfortunately, the time it took between the decline of PalmOS and the rise of webOS meant a significant amount of developers had moved on. iPhone 2.0, meanwhile, had re-framed the mobile discussion for the second time, going from killer UI in 2007 to being all about apps in 2008, and Palm didn't have the money or mindshare of Google who was already offering the Android alternative. So what to do?

In a move I called brilliant at the time, they decided to make their UI layer, and hence development environment, out of web-standards -- HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. While they would -- and did -- take a performance hit by essentially running localized web pages as apps, it meant anyone who knew how to make webApps could fairly easily develop for webOS. (That Palm named it webOS shows how seriously they take that concept).

Apple tried a non-localized version of this with iPhone 1.0 and it's "sweet" (TM, Steve Jobs, WWDC 2007) WebApp SDK. It failed. But 2009 brought far more robust web technologies, including HTML 5 with SQLite for local storage, CSS3 with animations, and a whole lot more maturity in WebApp development. While Palm hasn't succeeded with this to App Store levels, no one else has with interpreted SDK (Java) or native apps either. Palm has succeeded to some degree, however, and iPhone 3.0 is now supporting localized HTML 5 apps on the iPhone home screen, while RIM, Android, and others are embracing WebApps and widgets.

It was a gutsy gamble. I still think Google saw webOS, smacked themselves in the Android and raced to make Chrome OS in response. It's also clearly a first step for Palm. Just like Apple released a full, native SDK for iPhone 2.0, Palm is now offering native plug-ins for games like Need for Speed (something that WebApps can't do, and even WebGL might struggle to get them to do as well).

It's not perfect. webOS' lack of contrast in the UI still flabbergasts me. More practically, it's sluggish at times, especially on the anemic Palm Pix processor, and it can take far too long for built-in apps like the calendar to launch. It also presents problems for developers who want to hide their source code, although Palm now has a solution that doesn't involve limiting apps to onboard RAM (something Android and BlackBerry still suffer from). Full GPU support might (though I think likely not) improve that, but hardware is always getting faster and bandwidth is (hopefully) getting bigger. Palm will benefit from both. In a year or two, it will be buttery smooth and still enjoy the flexibility and future-proofing that is webOS' promise.

Synergy Contacts, Multitasking Cards, and Non-Modal Notifications

Three areas where webOS absolutely kills are their Synergy contact system, their Cards visualization for multitasking, and their non-modal notification system.

Synergy, as far as I can figure out, takes all of your online data points, sucks them in while maintaining them as separate silos, then aggregates them, filters out duplications, and presents you a unified view of the data. So, for example, you have Facebook friends, Gmail contacts, a couple of Exchange accounts, and an old Yahoo! setup. Synergy will take all that, figure out that 700 of them are the same, create a unified contact that has all the information for each of those 700 (while leaving each untouched on their own service), and present you a single contact list containing those 700 as well as all the other (unique to Yahoo! or Gmail, etc.) contacts. I can't explain it as elegantly as it works most of the time (on occasion it won't match and you'll have to do some work to help it), but it's the future of contact management as far as I'm concerned -- with a few caveats.

If I don't want Google's terrible, promiscuous email retention polluting my phone contacts (or Facebook messing up my Exchange) that needs to be easily managed (it might be on webOS, I didn't get into it but hope it is). Also, an easy way to export the final, Synergy-zed contact list for backup -- or replacement of other online contact data bases! -- would be nifty. That webOS' approach allows them to elegantly handle multiple Exchange accounts is testament enough.

Cards for multitasking is likewise the future. If you've used Pages on the iPhone Safari -- where you can keep several web sites available at the same time and easily zoom out, see all the pages, swipe across to change them, and then zoom back in -- then imagine that but taken to the ultimate, logical, extreme. That's webOS Cards. Instead of just web pages, every app including web pages gets its own Card and you can zoom out to see them all, swipe to change between them, and tap to zoom back in. Yes, that means webOS supports multitasking for 3rd party apps, something only Apple apps are allowed to do on the iPhone.

It works well on the Palm Pre. It works mind-bogglingly well on the Palm Pre Plus (Dieter had 50 apps up all at once). It works so well, in fact, it kind of makes me sad I can't drag and drop elements from one Card to another. Why give me that fantastic visualization, why make a windowed multitasking interface for a small screen, if the biggest advantage of doing it -- drag and drop -- isn't implemented. Unless, of course, that's the "next step". I'll keep my eyes peeled for webOS 2.0...

Notifications, in terms of webOS, means once again I have to complain about the iPhone's current, modal implementation. Modal, if you're not familiar with the term, means that once the notification pops up, you have to either "dismiss" (and lose it forever) or "view" (and interrupt whatever you're doing) immediately. There is no later. And if another notification comes in, it obliterates the previous one entirely. With webOS, like Android, you're told about a new notification but you're free to ignore it and the system will just keep track of them for you until you choose to take a look at them. That difference means everything, especially when you start getting a ton of notifications coming in.

Conclusion

It's not all rosy for Palm, webOS, the Palm Pre, Palm Pixi, and their mobile strategy going forward. Sprint exclusivity might have guaranteed Palm some money but it doesn't seem to have given them the sales they needed. They're hitting Verizon now, and AT&T soon, but if they'd gone on Verizon sooner (before the Droid) they could have had a much bigger impact. Unlike Apple, Google, or Microsoft, they don't have billions in the bank or other businesses to prop them up. Unlike RIM or Nokia, they don't have entrenched business or international market share to ride. It's going to be an uphill battle for Palm. That they've accomplished and innovated so much in just a year is an outstanding accomplishment, however, and means I'll be cheering as they battle up that hill.

For iPhone users, switching to webOS means you gain a physical keyboard and those nifty Synergy, Cards, and notifications. You'll also gain a more "open" system as Palm has treated hacking webOS in a way Apple almost certainly won't for the foreseeable future. We didn't really get into the whole homebrew (think jailbreak apps) and patching culture of webOS, or Palm's efforts to reach out and embrace developers, but kudos to them for doing it. If that's something that's important to you, and Android/Google is a non-starter, it's certainly another plus in Palm's column.

As I write this, however, Apple might just be on the verge of announcing iPhone 4.0, and that just might "invent" multitasking for iPhone users. Better contact and notifications might be on tap as well. Hey, maybe even an iPhone on Verizon. The soonest we'll know is this Wednesday's "Come see our latest creation" event, otherwise Apple usually shows off new software in March and new hardware at WWDC in June.

I'm not saying wait and see before you leap to webOS or another platform. I'm just saying... wait and see.

The biggest thing about this year's Round Robin is that every device-maker brought the competition. Apple is still ahead in some areas, but they've been overtaken in some others. Apple having to catch up... that's good for iPhone users, and it's good for everyone.

Things are exciting again!

Palm at CES 2010: 3D Games, Video webOS 1.4, Recording, Verizon, and PreCentral -- The Competition

Rene Ritchie — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 20:15:36 +0000

While I look for iPhone stuff at CES, Dieter and the PreCentral.net crew went over to Palm's presentation, and got the goods on 3D gaming, video recording, Verizon, and more -- PreCentral.net's Here are the highlights:

Palm CES live blog coverage
webOS 1.4 coming in February
Palm Pre Plus, Palm Pixi Plus exclusive to Verizon with tethering
Flash 10.1 for webOS
Video recording for webOS
3D gaming with native APIs(plug-in development kit).
Open distribution for webOS apps
AND... PreCentral webOS App Gallery goes LIVE! (Congrats guys!)

Check it out and let us know what you think. Big news for Palm? Too incremental? Competitive enough for 2010?

2009 TiPb Editors' Choice Awards

iMore Staff — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 03:17:37 +0000

Happy New Year and welcome to the iPhone blog's 2009 TiPb Editor's Choice Awards for the very best (in our opinion!) iPhone and iPod touch apps and accessories released in the last year!

Smartphone of the Year: iPhone 3GS (by default)

We're not really doing Smartphone of the Year since, unlike our sibling sites, Apple has so far seen fit to only release one new iPhone each year. However, that doesn't mean we don't think the iPhone 3GS isn't terrific. It is. Even if we consider the smartphone space as a whole, even if we put it up against the best Android, BlackBerry, Nokia, Palm, and Windows have to offer, while it might get bested -- even eclipsed -- in certain specs or feature sets, there's still nothing that brings it all together in so appealing a mainstream package as the iPhone 3GS.

From its butter-smooth interface now with "s as in speed" to its singular build quality to its incredible ecosystem to its 120,000 apps for anything and everything, even if we did do this category -- which we're not -- the iPhone 3GS would still be our pick for Smartphone of the Year. So there.

Competition of the Year: Palm Pre and webOS

Make no mistake, the Droid, the BlackBerry Bolds and Tour and Storms, the Nokia N900, the Windows Phone HTC HD2 -- each brought it in their own way (hey, it's why we do the Smartphone Round Robin), but each mostly brought it with hardware specs like 480p displays, or services like free navigation. They made good things better.

Palm brought it with a whole new OS, one that combined amazing visualization for multitasking with brilliant notification handling, and sidestepped the developer divide by using web technology as their SDK. If the iPhone woke up a complacent smartphone industry, Palm made sure they stayed awake another year. Sure the hardware could have been harder core and there was that whole iTunes sync brouhaha, but that combined with the "years in the desert" to go from PalmOS to webOS, made Palm even more of a comeback story, and who doesn't root for Rocky? That's why the Palm Pre is our competitor of the year!

Apple Innovation of the Year: $99 iPhone 3G

Last year Innovation of the Year was easy: the App Store. Now, two-billion downloads, well over 100,000 apps, and almost universal imitation not just from the Android Market, but now from BlackBerry App World, Microsoft Windows Marketplace for Mobile, Nokia Ovi Store, Palm webOS App Catalog, and who knows what else, it's still far and away the market leader, if the idea itself has long passed being led. Not that Apple didn't try in 2009, with the iPhone 3.0 Sneak Preview Event the undoubtedly innovative in-app purchases (including free apps no longer needing to stay free) and accessory access via the dock and Bluetooth. Push notification tops the candidates list as well. It isn't he full-on multitasking some still demand, but it covers 90% of the functionality at 20% of the battery drain (ahem) and hey, even some multitasking smartphones don't handle push notification yet.

But no, we're going with something more important even if less interesting. The $99 iPhone 3G. Sure, it's last year's model, but it's got the latest iPhone OS 3.x on it and most importantly it redefined -- and disrupted -- what was considered a budget smartphone and forced every other platform and player to lower prices and reconsider the -- frankly crappy -- handsets they offered for cheap. Up front cost shouldn't mean much to people on contract for $2000+ over two years but it does. Getting under $100 was huge for Apple. And for consumers, who's previous budget choices were the likes of Palm Centro, BlackBerry Pearl, or WinMo... whatever, it was huger still. That makes the $99 iPhone 3G our Apple Innovation of the Year.

App Store App Innovation of the Year: Augmented Reality

Last year Google Mobile snuck in some private-API wizardry (later made all nice and legal by iPhone 3.0) to make voice search so good we thought we were in Star Trek. This year Apple announced accessory access and all sorts of new API's and developers certainly didn't disappoint. Some of the most amazing new iPhone Apps weren't new to mobile, however. RedLaser reads barcodes and finds competitive prices amazingly well, but Android had that first. Likewise Qik is finally streaming live, but geeks were doing that from the N95 a couple years ago. Still, with everything from the latest Apple Remote to Zipcar, it's harder then ever to single one app out.

So we're singling out a category -- Augmented Reality. Take a live camera view, add location services and -- one day, visual recognition -- and layer data on top of it. Hold your iPhone camera up to a restaurant and the menu pops up for you to read. Point it west and see the tweets of the physically closest people you follow. Point it at your friend and get a reminder you owe him $5. We're not sure if it's just trendy concept or will really, truly prove functional one day, but just like Google Mobile made us think of Star Trek, this combines several cutting edge technologies in such a way that it makes us think of a dozen sci-fi heads-up displays and gorramit if we don't want that future today.

UI Gem of the Year: Tweetie 2 "Pull Down to Refresh"

Too small to be the overall innovation of the year, this category is for the tiny little tweaks that never the less make all the difference. Lots of developers continued to make drop-dead gorgeous iPhone apps in 2009, including Tapbots' latest Pastebot, Twitterrific 2's ability to hide so much functionality behind so sensible a layout, and Facebook 3.0 finally showed how to do massive social networking right on a local app, and Apple even rolled out new Voice Recorder and Compass app interfaces. It was something much simpler, however, much more insidious that got inside TiPb's user experience this year.

Yeah, it's totally Tweetie 2's terrific "pull down to refresh". Apple built the wonderful, tactile feeling elasticity of the "rubber band" effect into iPhone 1.x but never did much with it. Developer Atebits took it and made it a simple, intuitive way to request new data from an internet server -- in this case update your Twitter timeline. That many of us now try to use it to reload a page in Safari, or get new messages in Mail, or refresh anything and anything that feels like it should refresh when we pull down shows just how simple and intuitive it is. Sometimes it's not the big once-and-a-while's that make the difference, it's the little use-it-all-the-times.

Camera App of the Year: ReelDirector

iPhone 3GS brought a much improved camera and video recording, amazingly improved photo software, and even trim-able video recording. A lot of apps took advantage, both of the old gear and the new. Leanna covered five fantastic ones earlier, and since then a couple have even come around to offering video for the iPhone 3G.

But if video is the new still, ReelDirector ups the ante from Apple's trim to full-on (for a mobile) video editing. From titles to transitions, soundtracks to Ken Burns effects, it may not be Final Cut Pro but it's definitely a fun first cut.

Productivity App of the Year: Documents to Go Premium

Over two and half years in and some are still foolish enough to call the iPhone a toy. Unless, of course, they mean the iPhone can make even productivity work more fun than it has any right to be.

Documents to Go, which updated their flagship app to Premium and added PowerPoint editing and Gmail attachment support at almost the last minute gets our vote. Even though Apple still hasn't provided a universal document repository, or file picker (the way the picture picker works for images), Documents to Go continues to push the boundaries of what an Office-style app can do on the iPhone.

Social App of the Year: Twitter Clients

If Facebook had gotten push notifications, if Skype had actually gotten 3G access, this category might be even harder to decide than it already is. Likewise notification enabled IM clients such as BeeJive that now has group chat is a social powerhouse.

But those iPhone twitter clients just. won't. stop. We already mentioned Tweetie 2 and Twitterrific 2, but there's also Birdfeed, and both Twitbit and SimplyTweet made it into our staff picks of the year. And yeah, TweetDeck is on the iPhone now as well. In addition to the general-purpose clients, we have apps like Birdhouse that excel at writing and Reportage that make reading manageable. Heck, even Twitter's own WebApp got a great makeover.

Twitter exploded in 2009, and the quality of iPhone Twitter apps exploded right along with it. They're all so good, again we can't pick just one, so we're naming them all the social networking apps of the year!

Navigation App of the Year: Navigon Mobile Navigator

Another of app category made possible by iPhone 3.0 is turn-by-turn GPS navigation, and it didn't take long for top of the line, premium-priced market leaders like TomTom to come on board (and with car kits!), and subscription services like the TeleNav-powered AT&T Navigator have come on board, but low-cost, crowd-sourced alternatives have also flourished. And even with the 800lbs gorilla of the newly announced Google Maps Navigation staring them down all searchy and free, they've continued to update and innovate.

Navigon's MobileNavigator has been helping push the pace of those updates and that innovation. Whether it's text to speech or live-traffic, this maps-on-board solution took iPhone 3.0's APIs and didn't run -- it drove.

Action Game of the Year: N.O.V.A

If there was a theme to iPhone and iPod touch gaming in 2009 it was the maturing of the platform that brought both big franchises and games very much akin to the big franchises. There are literally too many to list (though Jeremy started and Chad focused in on FPS' a while back).

But N.O.V.A brought "Halo" to the iPhone. Maybe we should have found something more original, more uniquely dependent on the iPhone's specific technologies. But N.O.V.A brought "Halo" to the iPhone.

Racing Game of the Year: Real Racing

Given the accelerometer, racing games are just such a natural fit for the iPhone and iPod touch that it's no wonder there are so many great racing games for the platform (Chad's picked out a top 5 already!) And with iPhone 3GS and iPod touch G3 level horsepower and OpenGL 2.0 no doubt there's even better ahead (hey, we've seen a glimpse of it already).

For now, however, Real Racing is where it's at. Our 2009 Grand Prix winner is also a racing game of the year.

Puzzle Game of the Year: Ramp Champ

A lot of great puzzle games have hit the iPhone, from Peggle to Stoneloops to Bejeweled 2 and Tetris, to well almost every great puzzle game that could come to the platform. In 2008, however, Trism showed you could do an iPhone-proper puzzler and do it incredibly well.

Ramp Champ took a flick at it in 2009, with gorgeous graphics, one of the best implementations of in-app purchases to date, and arguably too much challenge for its (or rather its players) own good. There maybe puzzle games with bigger brands, more levels, and perhaps even better physics, but when we think about what we love most about iPhone software -- indie developers, attention to detail, love of UI -- Ramp Champ lands squarely in the bullseye.

Jailbreak App of the Year: ProSwitcher

Even post-iPhone 3.0, Jailbreak continued to fill gaps in functionality like theming, BT keyboards, lockscreen widgets, notification management, and -- of course -- unlocking the iPhone 3GS. If Apple won't do it, it's been proven time and time again the Jailbreak community will.

ProSwitcher did the same, but looked especially great doing it. Take a Jailbroken iPhone, add Backgrounder to get your multitask on, and then manage the whole thing with Safari Pages-style -- and yes, webOS cards-style UI candy.

Bluetooth Headset of the Year: Blueant Q1

Apple raised the stakes in 2009 by adding iPhone 3.0 support for A2DP stereo Bluetooth -- sort of. Apple forgot to add all the proper control protocols, so you can't skip tracks, but boy can you still rock out. Now iPhone and iPod touch users can enjoy music (and adjusting volume), and excellent products like the Motorola S9-HD and the Jabra Cruiser speakerphone.

And if that wasn't enough, our pick for BT headset of the year, the Blueant Q1 got an update -- really, how often to BT headsets get firmware update?! -- to enable A2DP. It's a premium product, just like the iPhone, but with voice control, and support for two phones (for you dual wielders), it's also a fantastic one.

Case of the Year: Otterbox Defender

Apple can't win. They change the design of the iPhone 3G and people with iPhone 2G cases complain their old accessories don't fit. They keep the iPhone 3GS in the same duds, and people complain it's boring. But at least the case makers could concentrate on better rather than different, and better they have. From the soft-stylings of the iSkin solo to the gloss of the Case-mate Barely There Chrome and the utility of the Golla bag, there's definitely a "case for that".

And if we're talking case, and we're talking protection, the Hummer of cases, the battle-armor of protection, is the OtterBox Defender. It's not for those who just want a sticker or a skin, a splash of color or the smell of fine leather -- it's for those who want their iPhone survive. And it's our case of the year.

EPIC FAIL of the Year: Capricious App Store Rejections

No doubt the App Store is such a smash hit that even Apple was unprepared for the tsunami of submissions they're now facing. The numbers are staggering, but not as staggering as the growth rate. But choosing to be a gatekeeper comes with it the responsibility of being a good gatekeeper. It's Apple's store and they can fill it's virtual shelves with what they want, but when the developers who make the apps those shelves are being filled with lose faith -- when they no longer trust Apple's rules, or realize there are no consistent rules being enforced, even if Apple and mainstream users don't lose out, the platform does. Sure, they've made some small improvements inside iTunes connect and with the RSS feed, but they're slow to the point of being arduous.

Some developers have been frustrated enough to leave the iPhone. A few returned only because the competitions' development environment, install base, and user experience wasn't competitive enough... yet. But that "yet" could change at any moment. And if the best and brightest developers are making the best and brightest apps for Android rather than the iPhone, that's not a loss to Apple's bottom line, it's a loss to their heart.

That's why rejected App Store apps, specifically the capricious, opaque way in which they're continuing to be rejected, is our epic FAIL of the year.

Story of the Year: iTablet

We've mentioned most of the other big stories already -- the still amazing Jailbreak journey, the still disappointing App Store rejections. And then there was the leave of absence, and triumphant return of Steve Jobs.

But iTablet/iStlate was the story that wouldn't quit, however, and the rumors, speculation, and rampant geek want built and built throughout 2009. We're not even sure actually announcing the device (which may just happen in 2010) could have been a bigger story -- anticipation is just that powerful. Whether (more likely when) it ultimate comes out, Apple's mysterious, mythical, magical, maybe iTablet is our story of the year.

Bring on 2010!

Well, that's it -- TiPb's Editor Awards for 2009 gone and done! What will we see in 2010? Who knows, but we're excited to find out!

Did you agree with any of our picks? Disagree? What would YOU have given the nod to? Feel strongly about it? Tell us -- or tell us off -- in the comments! (And we'll have our next Readers' Choice Awards coming up later in 2010 so you can put your apps where your opinions are as well!)

Happy New Year

--The iPhone blog team

The Competition: Palm webOS 1.3.5 Brings Speed, not iTunes Hackery

Rene Ritchie — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 18:47:00 +0000

So according to sibling site, PreCentral.net, Palm is now updating all proud Pre and Pixi devices to webOS 1.3.5, but among the list of features we can't help but notice...:

App limit fixed.
App Catalog downloads continue even after leaving the app's page.
App purchases have been expanded to US territories (sorry Europe, Canada, etc).
Switching between days in Calendar is now faster.
Sprint Navigation can be launched from a Contact.
Palm Profile app restores happen in the background, letting the user get to the phone faster.
Future webOS updates can be downloaded over 2G wireless (1xRTT).
Notifications now work in landscape mode (which has strangely lost the rounded corners).

...the utter lack of iTunes sync hackery. Congrats Palm! Here's hoping you can enjoy some OpenGL gaming in the near future, and a Verizon launch asap.

What, wait, they're getting on Verizon before the iPhone?! And another update while we still wait for ~~iPhone 3.2~~ iPhone 4.0!

(I know Palm -- and Dieter! -- did this deliberately just to mess with us during the Smartphone Round Robin!)

The Competition: Palm Launches Ares Beta, Browser-based webOS Development Environment

Rene Ritchie — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 02:07:48 +0000

Our friends over at PreCentral.net bring word that Palm has launched a beta version of their browser-based IDE (integrated development environment) for webOS called Project Ares (sounds Manga, harkens to the Hellenic god of war -- nice!). Supports Safari, Chrome, and Firefox (no mention of Internet Explorer?).

You can simply fire up your browser and go to http://ares.palm.com/, sign in with your developer account, and get coding.

Apple's iPhone SDK and IDE, evolved from the very mature Mac Xcode and Interface Builder, and the Cocoa Touch frameworks are often cited as reasons for the App Store's success and the quality and consistency of some of the very best apps. So, providing Palm webOS developers with similar tools (and frameworks?) is smart. And how utterly appropriate for a platform ballsy enough to be webOS, programmed in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, to be ballsy enough to move their IDE to the cloud. How Palm keeps out-Googling Google in the mobile space is amazing.

We throw the horns up in your general direction, sirs.

(We'll also reference back to Apple's PastryKit JavaScript frameworks, and wonder aloud again whether Apple will make it public, along with a Dashcode-style IDE for iPhone WebApps to go along with it? And would they -- or should they -- ever make it similarly cloud-basd?)

webOS 1.3.1 Did NOT Restore iTunes Sync, but is That the Least of Palm's Worries?

Rene Ritchie — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 13:13:27 +0000

Sure, okay, since Palm has been faking iPod status to provide iTunes sync for a while now, and Apple has been updating iTunes to stop them every chance they get, when a new version of Palm's webOS comes out and it DOES NOT re-enable that sync, it's news. Right?

So, to be clear, neither the newly introduced Palm Pixi candybar or the just-updated Palm Pre can sync with iTunes 9.0.2 (though older versions of iTunes 9 might still work).

Meanwhile, PreCentral.net's own Derek Kessler has a suffered through for a year. Of course, this gets the iPhone part of the blame:

But I’m afraid that Apple has also changed the mobile computing space for the worse on the features front. Apple made it acceptable to launch a phone without all the standard phone features intact.

Derek excuses Apple somewhat, the iPhone being their first foray into the smartphone space. He's not as forgiving with Palm, who've had decades of Pilot and Treo experience.

Given Palm's financial position and the limits of all human resources, I'll ask on their behalf what I asked on the iPhone's in 2007 - what feature that was implemented would you have had them not implement, so they could have implemented something else instead? Would you have waited 2 years for cut and paste so you could have a great music app at launch?

Give the full rant a read and let us know what you think!

Apple Was Going to Use Palm WebOS-style Widgets for iPhone in 2007, Abandoned Idea Due to Performance

Rene Ritchie — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 01:12:41 +0000

As part of the commentary on Jamie Zawinski leaving the Palm Pre for the iPhone (linked in the previous post), Daring Fireball adds:

Apple had a similar idea to WebOS for the iPhone, where certain apps would run as Dashboard-style widgets, written in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Apple abandoned the idea in the six months between the iPhone’s January 2007 announcement and when it went on sale at the end of June, concluding that performance for such apps was unacceptable and that they should go native Cocoa across the board. And Apple was only going to do it for small apps, like Weather, Stocks, and Calculator, not the flagship apps like Calendar and Mail.

Of course, web technologies have improved since 2007, especially JavaScript rendering. Usability and performance complaints aside, Palm embracing web developers in order to incentivize adoption of their platform was a smart strategy. Still, it's interesting to see Apple's reaction to it back then, and their decision to go 100% native. (Especially considering they're now being criticized for not having widgets).

Did Apple make the right choice, do we still want widgets on the iPhone, or is HTML5 and SQLite in Safari making them redundant?

Acceleroto on Developing Air Hockey for the iPhone vs. Palm Pre

Rene Ritchie — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 12:09:27 +0000

Acceleroto, makers of the iPhone apps Air Hockey [$0.99 - iTunes link] and Air Hockey Free [Free - iTunes link] have written an interesting post on the differences between developing their app for the iPhone App Store vs. the Palm Pre App Catalog. Some take away:

They charge more for the webOS version due to lower volume expectations
iPhone and Palm Pre are "remarkably similar" hardware-wise
They already knew Objective-C, but Javascript wasn't difficult to pick up
iPhone is native, webOS is interpreted, so there's a difference in execution speed (more important for game developers)
Getting code onto the Pre is faster. Debugging is much more difficult than iPhone.
Had to "skinny up" iPhone code to get 30-fps for webOS.
Multitasking and garbage collection impacts performance
Since webOS apps are "web pages", touch events are handled as mouse-clicks and aren't as smooth
No sound yet, because the requisite timing isn't possible.

So, as we've heard before, development for non-intensive apps is likely quicker and easier for the Palm Pre, but more intensive apps, like games, are still a challenge. Doubtless Apple will continue to work on making casual apps easier to deploy, and Palm on making deeper apps run better.

The full post also includes the backstory of how and why Air Hockey was ported to webOS, and shown off as part of the Palm Pixi introduction. Give it a read, and then let us know what you think.

[Acceleroto via PreCentral.net]

The Competition: Palm webOS 1.2, Android Donut 1.6, BlackBerry 5.0, Windows Mobile 6.5

Rene Ritchie — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 19:21:32 +0000

While TiPb is still waiting for an iPhone 3.1.1 bug-fix update, not to mention iPhone 3.2 betas to start dropping, it looks like the competition is getting their OS on this week:

Palm webOS 1.2 didn't re-enable the iTunes hack (kudos Palm!) but did bring some nifty new features including Amazon MP3 downloads over 3G, the foundations for paid apps in the App Catalog, improved cut and paste, and much more.
Android 1.6 Donut is expected to hit now'ish as well. A new Android Market is coming with it, but not multi-touch -- at least not yet.
BlackBerry OS 5.0 still doesn't seem to be official, but is leaking out all over the place (would that Apple had such porous pipes!). It'll make your Berry more Berry, though it doesn't seem to integrate a real browser yet, despite what the commercials say...
Windows Mobile 6.5 might be on 30 Windows Phones by 2010, though even Ballmer is finally admitting Windows Mobile 7 should have been out this year. Bottom-line, it's a skin-job, and even though it looks hawt'er than a old style centurion, it's still a machine on the inside.

What does that mean for the iPhone? Even if RIM looks locked in stasis, Palm and Microsoft appear to have up-hill battles re-gaining their traction, and Android is still slowly ramping up, Apple can't afford to coast. A new OS from RIM, a Palm-style rebirth from Microsoft, and webOS and Android gaining marketshare are all possibilities. Many of these updates have interesting new features that hopefully Apple is looking at and working their own magic on.

So, let's get on with the 3.2... and 4.0. March is only 6 months away, after all, and Apple needs something else to wow Smartphone buyers with at the next SDK event...

The Competition: Palm Abandons Windows Mobile

Rene Ritchie — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 02:13:05 +0000

Palm is abandoning Windows Mobile to concentrate their resources on their new webOS platform as currently found on the Palm Pre and Palm Pixi.

As former Palm users (I had a Treo 600 at the time), we still remember Bill Gates and Ed Colligan taking the stage together at CES 2006 and showing off the first-ever Windows Mobile Treo 700. (Talk about cats and dogs living together!) Picture speed dialing on the today screen was an immediate sign that Palm was working their "secret sauce" (TM, TreoCast) magic to customize WinMo and give Palm users as much Zen as they could. It was equally evident when the razzle dazzle ended that Palm's own PalmOS was reaching the end of its useful life and with Cobalt vaporizing, Palm needed something to pin their immediate future on.

A couple years and one long walk in the desert (TM, TreoCast) later, and now webOS is a fresh new take on the smartphone space, and Windows Mobile is the OS in danger of being left behind. Add to that Palm's limited resources, and the focus makes sense. It's also gutsy, going all-in on webOS, and Palm needs to be gutsy at this point. No better way to make people believe in your future than believing in it yourself.

In the video embedded above, which we're offering now in tribute, we argued the Palm Treo Pro was neither a Palm, a Treo, nor particularly Pro (it was an HTC running WinMo with a tiny keyboard). Now maybe they're a Palm with some new Apple blood and still stuck in tiny keyboard land, but give them a year or so of distance and pure webOS differentiation, and we're excited to see where they go.

We sympathize with Windows Mobile Treo fans, but cheers Palm. Now bring the competition, Apple needs it, and Apple's customers will benefit from it in the long run.

Check out PreCentral.net and WMExperts.com for ongoing coverage.

Palm Tries to Preempt Apple Again -- Announces Pixi Ahead of iPod Music Event

Rene Ritchie — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 04:44:10 +0000

Yes, Palm just announced the Pixi, rocking EVDO Rev A on Sprint. We knew Palm would be announcing what's basically the Centro to the Pre's Treo -- a lower end device based on their new webOS platform. We just didn't think they'd be gutsy -- or crazy, depending on your read -- to go head-to head with another Apple event.

Our sibling site, PreCentral.net, has all the details, videos, and first opinions you can shake an incredibly thin budget smartphone at, so head on over and check it out. We're not sure about the lack of center button, tiny keyboard, why it didn't go GSM on AT&T, or why they yanked the Wi-Fi out of the platform (Verizon snuck into the design committee?!) The latter may be especially irksome since EVDO Rev A doesn't allow simultaneous voice and data, and unlike the Pre, the Pixi won't have Wi-Fi to fall back on in a pinch.

Still, there's lots to like here, including the mind-bogglingly slim form factor, artistic back panels (iPhone users need to shell out for a Gelaskin to match that splash), and especially the amazing pace Palm is setting by releasing a second form-factor of a brand new OS so rapidly. Available before the holidays at a rumored $99 price point, it could bring some hurt to the BlackBerry Pearls and low-end WinMo's of the world. How it fares against a $99 iPhone 3G, however, remains to be seen.

As does the Pixi's position in the news cycle once Apple starts "It's only rock and roll, but we like it" and makes with the iPod and iTunes announcements while they're at it...

The Competition: Palm Pre/webOS Homebrew the Flip Side of Jailbreaking?

Rene Ritchie — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 13:20:40 +0000

Our sibling site, PreCentral.net has put together something we're openly and admittedly jealous of -- a brand-spanking new Homebrew Apps gallery for the Palm Pre. For those unfamiliar with Homebrew, think of it as something akin to the iPhone's Jailbreak ecosystem, where apps are developed outside "official" SDK channels and installed without the built in App Store (or App Catalog in this case).

Jailbreak, of course, is and has always been one of the brightest, most creative and vibrant parts of the iPhone (and TiPb!) community, and it looks like Homebrew is every bit the same for the Palm Pre (and likely future webOS devices).

What makes this particularly interesting is that Jailbreak sprang up initially because Apple didn't provide an SDK or App Store for 3rd party apps at all with the original iPhone 2G and iPhone OS 1.0. Jailbreak continued after the official SDK shipped and the App Store appeared with iPhone 3G and iPhone OS 2.0, however, because Apple took a very hard editorial line on approval (and rejection), creating a gap in functionality and leaving out whole classes of applications. And this has continued to be the case well after iPhone 3GS and iPhone OS 3.0 (See Jeremy's most recent Top 5 Must-Have Jailbreak Apps Post-iPhone 3.0 Edition for examples).

Palm Pre and webOS, however, had an SDK (in limited beta) before launch, was built on web-standards like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, shipped with an App Catalog in place, and seems to be aiming for a far more open, encompassing approval process than the iPhone or Apple would ever allow. So why Homebrew?

The webOS SDK wasn't generally available to everyone who wanted it, when they wanted it, and the App Catalog didn't have tons and tons of apps available when it shipped. Palm enthusiasts saw gaining dev access and developing Homebrew as a highly desirable mountain in their back yard that just demanded to be climbed. And now there are all sorts of wonderful Homebrew apps appearing and -- here's the kicker -- Palm thus far seems to be okay with it. They didn't lock down the system to the extent exploits are needed to Jailbreak (just the most awesome Konami code), and they're not petitioning to prevent any exemptions from the DMCA... yet.

It's easy to see the upside. You get super-passionate, uber-talented developers buying into your platform and building apps some of which will no-doubt end up in the official App Catalog, and some of which might just fill gaps that carrier or corporate policy require be filled unofficially.

Apple will likely never go the same route as Palm -- despite the overlapping executives and engineers, the cultures are different and need to be to compete. Looking at the Homebrew community, however, it's hard not to believe that even if Apple pulled a 180 and cracked the giant stone gates of the App Store well and truly open, Jailbreaking wouldn't continue as well, a test bed for new ideas, fringe cases, and future development of the platform (oh, and carrier unlock, of course...).

In the meantime -- we can't resist -- check out PreCentral.net and smellellellell what the Homebrew community is cooking!

The Competition: Palm Releases webOS Mojo SDK to Pre Developers

Rene Ritchie — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 18:59:37 +0000

Kudos to Palm for getting a webOS SDK out to Pre developers so quickly, and for the sheer genius of making web 2.0 standards like CSS, HTML, and Javascript, ubiquitous all, the major toolset.

There's a long road ahead to catch up with the iPhone's 56,000 apps, 100,000 registered developers, and 1.5 billion downloads, but that road would have been infinitely has Palm gone with more complicated development model.

Sure, hardcore gamers may have to wait for native access to write their racers to the metal, but anyone familiar with the 80/20 rule knows that for this market, at this time, webOS and web standards development was smart play.

Bring on the fart apps -- I have dibs on flashlight!

background: #fff

There. Done!

iPhone SDK "Hostile" Compared to Palm Pre's Mojo?

Rene Ritchie — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 18:28:31 +0000

Our sibling-site PreCentral.net points us to an interesting developer commentary up on Ars Technica which provides this little golden spitball of insight:

he had a lot of good things to say about how Palm is handing the extremely nascent developer community and his hopes for the future of the platform. The developer told us that he has explored mobile development on Apple's iPhone SDK and found much of the company's position towards their community to be "developer-hostile"—an obvious reference to their insistence on enforcing a pointless NDA well past its expiration date and their strong hand in regulating what can and cannot be developed for its platform.

Apple, of course, is providing Cocoa Touch, an iPhone-optimized version of their Objective C frameworks that, while highly administrated by Apple, provides desktop-class power with a hefty of amount of access to developers. Palm, by contrast, is using Mojo as an open, web-standards based framework for the webOS, which we're guessing will be something similar to how Widgets work (half way between WebApps and native apps).

Every solution comes with compromises, so in the end it will be up to each developer to choose which platform(s) best suit their needs and the apps they want to build, but is the way in which Apple treats developers -- something entirely outside the SDK -- going to be a concern as competing alternatives like Android and webOS become increasingly available?