Palm Pre Makes Yahoo's List of Phones Doomed to be Collectibles

The most interesting thing about this piece is that it lays the blame for the Pre's demise squarely at HP's feet. And I think they're right. Palm was putting out a new update every month, slowly but surely improving the Pre by improving webOS. And then Palm sold itself to HP and nothing. There was a lot of talk and a lot of promises but ultimately those promises were broken as HP made webOS the centerpiece of their mobile strategy but showed little interest in actually making new phones. And the frequent updates which Palm had been so proud of dried up.

The Pre's immediate successor, the Pre 2 is only available on Verizon and sales people tend to steer people away from it. The Veer, a tiny little phone which combines the best features of the Pre and Pixi phones with some nice, fast hardware is only available on AT&T and is similarly neglected. The Pre 3 which was announced in January has yet to debut anywhere.

5 Best Cell Phones Doomed to be Collectible - Yahoo! Shopping

Bible Readers for webOS

I had a very religious upbringing and I still go to church regularly. And I've carried some form of bible reading software with me since I installed a the original OliveTree BibleReader on my Palm III back in 1999. So when I got my Palm Pre, I was very interested in looking for Bible readers on webOS. With the the Pre entering its seventeenth month of existence, the development of software in this area gives a good overview of the growth and lack of growth in webOS.

I have tried to take a look at the various Bible apps which I've encountered on webOS and will review them in turn. While this software round up will not be exhaustive I will try to be reasonably thorough.

webOZ Mobile Apps has created a number of readers for various translations of the Bible, each of which is sold separately (for $1.49-2.99). In addition, webOZ sells other Bible study tools like dictionaries which can be accessed from their Bible readers. Each of these apps are simple, fast, and intuitive. The Scrolling is fast and smooth. Tapping on an arrow on the lower left corner of the screen activates an auto-scroll function. To the right is an arrow which scrolls a page at a time. And in the middle is an options button which drops down a convenient menu for highlighting text, bookmarks, copying text, email, and search.

Each reader presents the user with a clean, friendly screen which makes it easy to drill down to the book you are looking for. Chapters are a little different as they appear on a drop down grid at the top of the screen once you've chosen your book. Verses however are awkward, you can't drill down to the verse you are looking for, you have to scroll through your chapter to find it. Searching is fast and intuitive (the app begins to search as soon as you begin to type) but it requires an active connection to the Internet to work.

The fact that every translation is sold separately is both good and bad. On the bright side, you can take advantage of webOS's native multitasking to run multiple translations side by side. On the other hand, you do get the uneasy feeling that you are being nickeled and dimed by having to buy each translation. (But they are cheap, so it's not too bad.) More worrying is the fact that webOZ simply does not have that many translations available for purchase. I'm Latino and I grew up using the Spanish language 1960 Reina Valera translation a lot and as far as I know webOZ only offers the 1909 version which uses older sounding language. When I'm reading in English, webOZ presents me with the opposite problem, they have the older King James version but not the 1963 Modern King James version.

Overall, webOZ presents a nice stable of clean, easy to use Bible translations for the casual churchgoer. But more serious Bible students should probably look into something a little more powerful.

YouVersion (simply called "Bible" in the webOS App Catalog) started out as little more than app wrapper for mobile version of the website of the same name but recently their Bible reader has improved greatly both in terms of looks and usability. It's tight integration with the YouVersion website is potentially very useful for serious Bible students.

YouVersion presents a nice, clean home screen which allows access to wide variety of Biblical translations. Once inside, it is easy to switch between translations. There is also an attractive dark theme for low light situations. It is easy to drill down by book and by chapter but as with webOZ it is impossible to drill down to specific verse, except by searching for it. Search is fairly quick but noticeably slower than with the webOZ Bible readers which search as you type.

Tapping on a verse allows you do a wide variety of things with the text, including copy it to the clipboard. But most other functions—even creating a bookmark—require you to have an account with YouVersion. But you can email the text and look at Contributions (essentially crowd sourced notes about the verse you've selected) made by YouVersion users. If you do have a YouVersion account, you can add Contributions of your own and share them with other users.

YouVersion is a fairly powerful Bible app but a lot of that power is due to its tight integration with the YouVersion website. So while hardcore Bible students will likely find it to be a valuable tool, more casual users might not be willing to commit to joining yet another website.

Bible Reader Plus ($1.49, free version available) is an app wrapper for the mobile version of excellent BibleGateway website which boasts "over 100 versions and 50 languages." But it does have a few interesting tricks. Once you've selected your verse, what you can do with it depends on the format of the Bible. The bibles come in three formats: web, database, and audio. Web bibles can only be copied and pasted like ordinary text you come across on the web. But text database and audio bibles can also be highlighted and shared online through, Facebook, Email, and SMS. And audio bibles can also, as the name implies, read the text back to you.

Bible Reader Plus also has tools for creating a Bible study plan with reminders, journals, and reports. Its web bibles also allow you to type out the book, chapter, and verse you are looking for and drill down to it which is a feature that other readers lack. Another nice feature is that it can open multiple cards so you can run several different translations side by side.

The biggest advantage of Bible Reader Plus is the sheer number of translations that it offers. But its many translations have an inconsistent look and feel and not all of its features can be accessed in every translation. As a result, Bible Reader Plus works best as a supplemental tool for serious Bible students or as a tool for casual users who occasionally look up a single verse.

BibleZ (Free) allows you download XML databases for a variety of translations of the Bible. The databases are quite large and don't always download nicely over 3G connections. They do however download well over WiFi . As with the webOZ offerings, you may not be able to find your favorite translation for BibleZ.

If you can, BibleZ offers the most attractive interface of the Bible readers I am reviewing here and allows you to switch between translations and drill down by book and by chapter easily via cleanly laid out menus and selection screens. As with most of the apps in this roundup, there is no way to drill down to a specific verse unless you do a search. And BibleZ is a little slower than the other apps to jump from its search results to a specific verse.

When BibleZ goes into landscape mode its interface elements disappear which is a nice feature when you just want to read. BibleZ also includes quick access to your reading history, notes, and bookmarks. It also allows you to tap on a verse to add a bookmark, note, highlight, and to either copy or share a verse through email or SMS.

All these features make BibleZ a very attractive and powerful app. The only thing holding it back is is the number of tranlations—BibleZ has a lot of them but it simply can't match the number of translations that online bible based apps like YouVersion and Bible Reader Plus boast.

Simple Bible (Free) Like BibleZ, Simple Bible depends on databases to load its biblical translations. Simple Bible has fewer databases and a clunkier interface. When you first start Simple Bible, it shows a splash screen with "What's New" and "Donate" buttons. This screen can be disabled, as can the the pop up encouraging you to download the Ten Commandments companion app. Once these screens are disabled, Simple Bible presents you with a list of your Bibles and a link to download more within the app. As with BibleZ, the databases are large and best downloaded over a WiFi connection.

Once you have opened your bible, a button toggles between the Old and New Testaments and menus allow you to select books and chapters quickly but you have to scroll to your verse or search for it. Bookmarking is rudimentary and clumsy. But Simple Bible does have one nice feature. You can tap on the screen and all the interface elements disappear, allowing for distraction free reading in either portrait or landscape mode.

Overall Simple Bible is something of a misnomer, while it is a nice free app it is also clunky and tends to get in your way more than it helps.

OliveTree BibleReader is an old school PalmOS program which runs well inside the Classic PalmOS emulator. I saved this program for last not because it's the best (even though it is) but because Palm's recent decision to stop supporting Classic means that the days when webOS users can run PalmOS apps on their phones may be numbered. Nevertheless, Classic still runs on the Palm Pre, Pixi, Pre Plus, and Pixi Plus for the moment at least so I'm including OliveTree in this roundup.

BibleReader uses databases for its biblical translations which much be purchased and installed separately from the reader in Classic. Some of these translations are free but others can be quite expensive. But OliveTree leverages the maturity of PalmOS to create an app with the kind of power and versatility which blows away the webOS apps in this roundup. In addition to bibles, BibleReader can also open commentaries, dictionaries, ebooks, maps, and more.

Every aspect of BibleReader can be customized with preferences for desktops, fonts, toolbars, and scrolling all of which can be tweaked by the user. You'll notice most of the apps in this roundup have one format the verses while YouVersion uses a different format which groups verses into paragraphs. As far as I can tell, the verse format cannot be changed in any of the webOS apps. But in OliveTree BibleReader this format can be changed.

Even though it looks pretty ugly next to the beautiful webOS apps in this roundup BibleReader is simply much more robust than its webOS competitors. It can remap the virtual buttons in Classic to control any of BibleReader's features. And BibleReader has a lot of features. Its bookmarks menu is better and easier to use than the bookmarking feature of any of the other apps in this roundup and it can be edited, saved, and exported as a file. It has menus for switching between translations and for quickly accessing your reading history.

BibleReader has a versatile and customizable verse chooser which allows you to drill down to a specific verse quickly and easily. And if you use one of the BibleReader desktops which support a "live toolbar" you can actually tap on any chapter or verse and select a new one from the verse chooser.

BibleReader's biggest weakness is that it was originally designed for a stylus-driven screen. Some of the screen elements are quite small and can require some pinching and zooming for large handed users. Similarly, the fact that it must run inside the Classic emulator is another weakness for BibleReader. Classic is slow to load and is about to be abandoned by Palm. So while in many respects BibleReader blows away the competition an one very critical respect, it isn't even in the race.

Conclusion: It's disappointing to see Palm abandon its Classic emulator so soon. While there are some good apps in this roundup, none of them have the power and flexibility of BibleReader and a similar story can be told about apps in other categories. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake for some who doesn't already have a large investment in PalmOS apps to try them right now.

As for the webOS apps, if it has your favorite biblical translation, BibleZ is your best bet. It has a great combination of flexibility and power. If you don't have a favorite biblical translation go with one of the webOZ translations. It's simple, fast, and perfect for casual users.

As Homebrew Reaches New Heights, webOS Needs to Grow to Accommodate It

My Palm Pre is fourteen months old and I still can't find a phone that can replace it. While I have had plenty of opportunities to play with Sprint's Evo 4G and am eligible to upgrade to it; every time I handle it my reaction is the same. I love the hardware but can't help wishing that its Android operating system were half as elegant and as usable as the webOS.

One of the things that has kept me so enamored with webOS is the Homebrew developer community that sprang up around it shortly after the Pre was released. Is your phone too slow? You can overclock it. Need an easy way to block unwanted phone calls? There's a patch for that. Not happy with your Calendar? There's a patch for that too. Ever wish you could use your phone's flash LED as a flashlight? There are actually several patches for that. Not happy with the Pre's messaging app? There are fifty patches for that.

One recent example of the power of webOS Homebrew patches is Advanced Configuration for App Launcher. This patch is a mouthful and so is the list of improvements that it adds to webOS's spartan App Launcher. It also exposes how bad most modern phones are at the seemingly trivial task of launching apps.

Back in the days of PalmOS PDAs and phones like the Treo, the app launcher was a relatively simple application but in comparison to the webOS launcher it is far more powerful and sophisticated. It allowed users to easily organize their apps with categories that could be added, deleted, and renamed. And there were numerous third-party launchers available for PalmOS which provided users with a wealth of customization options.

The webOS launcher by contrast comes with a measly three unnamed screens with no visible way to create more. (I'm oversimplifying things for the sake of the argument since webOS's Universal Search feature does make it easy to drill down to your apps by typing out the first letter or two of their names but do keep in mind that in the case of the Palm Pre, the keyboard is often hidden beneath its slider which adds one more step to your searches.)

And the situation on other platforms, the situation is not much better. Android borrows a page from desktop computers by shoving all of its apps into its launcher but allowing you to clutter your phone's home screens with shortcut icons. And it further complicates things for users by allowing each handset maker and cell phone carrier to customize the Android user interface, tweaking things just enough so users can't always just jump to a new Android phone without relearning how to navigate through its UI. Apple's IOS4 is the most mature of the modern smartphone platforms and has the most advanced launcher. With multiple home screens, folders, and multi-tasking; IOS4 approaches the power and ease of use that PalmOS had almost a decade ago.

The situation with application launchers is indicative of the atmosphere in which the webOS Homebrew community is operating. Modern smartphone OSes are powerful but they have also thrown away a lot of little things that made older smartphones like the Treo so easy to use and powerful in their own right. In the year since the Pre came out, numerous webOS patches have been created just to improve the launcher: patches for creating, naming, and organizing launcher screens; for hiding and unhiding apps; and for making it easier to navigate through app screens. Advanced Configuration for App Launcher brings all of these tweaks under one roof. It allows you add and delete named pages to the launcher, creates tabs for easier navigation between screens, the list of features goes on and on—but more importantly; this patch makes it easy to turn features on and off; so your launcher can be as simple, or as complex as you wish.

While Advanced Configuration for App Launcher is a potent example of how a handful of hackers working in their spare time can build powerful software for webOS, it also points to the limitations of what Homebrew can accomplish. This patch has been a huge pain in the ass to install in recent days. And since it is being updated frequently, it has to be reinstalled a lot. And the author of the patch even warns you that it conflicts with a lot of other patches. In order to get Advanced Configuration for App Launcher to install, I had to use the Emergency Patch Recovery utility to uninstall all of my patches and reinstall them one by one, beginning with the problem patch.

While in the past I haven't minded wiping out all my patches—I even appreciated the opportunity to rethink how I use my phone and which patches I want to install. But I don't want to have to do this every time one of my patches is updated.

And this problem is becoming more common. As the number of webOS patches grows, the number of potential conflicts between individual patches grows. While webOS Internals and other Homebrew developers have worked hard to create tools to make the patching process as painless as possible, there is only so much that they can do. Sooner or later, it will become necessary for Palm or perhaps HP to get involved with the Homebrew community beyond just offering gentle encouragement.

Many webOS patches are simple hacks which should have been in webOS from day one. Palm should be looking at the Homebrew patches that are out there and adding some of them to webOS. They should also create some sort of framework which will make it easier to add little tweaks (maybe HP-Palm can call them "extensions") to webOS without restarting the UI. As HP prepares to build a wide variety of devices based on webOS, such a system might even make it easier to customize webOS for use on a variety of form factors.

KeyBoss - PreCentral Forums

One of my favorite apps on my old Treo phones was KeyCaps a utility which allowed me to capitalize letters and enter function symbols without using the phone's shift or alt keys. KeyCaps greatly speeded up my input and was one of the apps which I really missed when I moved to my Palm Pre. Now KeyBoss is recreating that functionality on webOS. While KeyBoss is currently in Beta and should only be installed by advanced users, I have tried it and it works well. This should be a must have utility for webOS homebrew users once it becomes available the main Preware feeds. KeyBoss - PreCentral Forums

UberCalendar, Smart Up Your webOS Calendar

One of the shortcomings of the Palm Pre and Pixi the calendar application. While it is clean, simple, and arguably more powerful than its counterparts on the iPhone and Android; long time users of PalmOS can be forgiven for thinking that the webOS calendar feels dumbed down. Enter UberCalendar. A Homebrew patch for the webOS Calendar app, UberCalendar adds a number of enhancements to the calendar such as including the subject of an event in week view, more reminder times, the ability to remember and open the last calendar view when the Calendar app is reopened, buttons and shortcuts for entering new events, and a shortcut for launching the excellent Agenda Homebrew app which provides an at a glance view of all your upcoming Calendar entries. These enhancements along with others make the webOS Calendar more powerful and more pleasant to use.

The UberCalendar just debuted and is a little rough around the edges. One example of this is that UberCalendar supports the use of icons for events but these icons must be downloaded and saved separately on your phone's media partition. While this gives you more options for customizing your Calendar, it can be confusing for less advanced users. But then again, Homebrew software is by definition software for advanced users. More importantly, even with its current shortcomings, UberCalendar is the best add-on for the webOS Calendar available and is a must have for anyone who wants to get more out of their phone's calendar.

Once again UberCalendar is a Homebrew app and is not available through the official Palm App Catalog. It can be installed through Preware or with WebOS Quick Install.

zcorder Brings Voice Recording to webOS

One of the major omissions from webOS phones like the Palm Pre and Pixi is a lack of a voice recorder. While MotionApps has made its Voice Memo app a free add-on for users of its Classic PalmOS emulator, it has the disadvantage of needing to be run from inside another relatively slow-loading application. Worse yet, I personally have never been able to get Voice Memo to work properly on my Palm Pre.

I've never been a huge user of this feature but I do miss it. And some people swear by it; so the arrival of zcorder onto the webOS Homebrew scene should be welcome.

Zcorder records both voice and sound from other running webOS applications. It is a very simple application. Your recordings are saved as MP3 files to a folder on your phone's internal memory and while you can browse them when you connect your phone to a computer in USB mode or use the Homebrew app Internalz to browse through them but you cannot manage your recordings in zcorder as you can with a true "voice memo" application.

But it works and for now it is the best bet for voice recording on webOS.

Zcorder is a Homebrew app and is not available through the official Palm App Catalog. It can be installed through Preware or with WebOS Quick Install.

Brightness Unlinked

Brightness Unlinked is a Hombrew app which solves two common problems for users of the Palm Pre.

There is no way to adjust the brightness of the Palm Pre's keyboard independently of the screen's brightness. Normally this is not a problem but sometimes—particularly in low light conditions—you want to turn down the brightness of the Pre's screen as much as possible. But when you do this, the backlight on the Pre's keyboard can become so dim that it becomes hard to type. Enter Brightness Unlinked. With Brightness Unlinked running, you can crank up the lighting on your keyboard while cranking down the lighting of the screen.

But for me the best feature of Brightness Unlinked is the fact that it can turn off the Pre's screen when it is sitting on the Touchstone charger. In theory, the Pre can double as a bedside clock while sitting on its charger but in practice its screen—even at its lowest level—is far too bright for anyone who wants to get a good night's sleep. So while you may never find yourself typing away on your phone in gloomy twilight, Brightness Unlinked is a must have app for anyone who keeps their Palm Pre by their bedside.

There is also a patch which will allow Brightness Unlinked to run every time you restart your phone but I found that it seemed to make the phone sluggish when you are low on memory. I never quite figured out if it was because of the patch or simply because my Pre was low on memory. But in any case, I found the patch to be rather redundant since Brightness Unlinked can reside the webOS Dashboard and can continues to run even if you throw away its card.

Brightness Unlinked is a Homebrew app and is not available in the regular Palm App Catalog. It can be installed through Preware or with WebOS Quick Install.

Bean Bombed by Birds

Look closely at the picture below. At first glance it's just another picture of "The Bean" at Millennium Park. But a closer look shows that it has taken bird droppings in at least five places. It's just something I noticed today....

Teaching My Tether to Get Along With Classic

I posted this guide to Hotsyncing my Pre with my netbook using My Tether as a wifi hotspot in Precentral in this thread. I am archiving it here on my blog because I don't want to have to spend a lot of time searching for it on Precentral's vast forums.

Running My Tether and Can't Hotsync? Use My Tether to Hotsync!

---

I'm not sure if this post will fall into the "Duh, we all knew that already" category or the "That's just crazy enough to work!" category but it's new to me and I haven't seen it on these forums.

I was thinking about doing a hard reset on my Classic PalmOS installation in hopes of getting it to perform better but wanted to do one final Hotsync in order to back it up. But I had been having a lot of trouble performing a Hotsync. Wifi? Failed. Bluetooth? Failed. Then I remembered reading in these forums that a lot of users of My Tether were having trouble hotsyncing.

So I had what seemed at the time to be a crazy idea. Since My Tether is doing a fairly good job of turning my Pre into a wifi Hotspot, why not tether my Pre to my netbook via wifi and do a wifi Hotsync that way? Since I was having no success in Hotsynching while connected to my home wifi network, this felt like a rather unlikely solution but I tried it anyway. And it worked.

So to summarize:

The Problem: Cannot Hotsync Classic via wifi or Bluetooth.

The Cause: Users of My Tether often suffer this problem and it is widely believed that My Tether is the culprit.

The Solution:

1. Launch both My Tether and Classic.
2. Turn on wifi tethering in My Tether.
3. Connect to your Pre as you would connect to any other wifi hotspot.
4. Take note of the IP address which your Pre assigns to your computer.
   • In Windows 7,
     1. Click on the wifi icon in your system tray to bring up your wifi network.
     2. Right click on your wifi network (by default My Tether calls itself, AoNet).
     3. Click on Status and then click on the Details button.
     4. Your IP adress will be listed in the Network Details box that comes up.
   • In Windows XP,
     1. Your connection will sometimes put a network icon in your system tray.
     2. Click on it and select the Support tab of the status dialog that pops up.
     3. Your IP Address will be listed here.
        or
        1. If this icon is not in your system tray, open My Network Places instead.
        2. Click on View network connections in the sidebar and click on Wireless Network Connection.
        3. It will pop up the same status dialog as in the above example.
5. Launch the Hotsync app in Classic.
6. Tap on Select PC.
7. The Hotsync app will be unable to find a PC and will ask you to enter your PC's name or IP address by hand.
8. Enter the IP address that your Pre assigned to your PC.
9. Tap Done.
10. Tap Hotsync.

That should be it. You should now be able to do a successful hotsync. Or at least that's what I did to get Hotsync running in Classic.

Google Reinvents Graffiti

Google has added a new feature to Android which looks a lot like an old feature from another mobile OS. Palm's old PalmOS PDAs had stylus-based input system called "Graffiti" where you would enter characters based on set of predefined pen strokes. It worked very well for years until the emergence of smartphones required Palm and Handspring to adopt keyboards for their devices. Add a long lawsuit by Xerox and Graffiti disappeared into the mists of gadget history.

Sort of. The idea of Graffiti remains popular enough that there is even a version available for iPhones. So it was probably only a matter of time before someone tried to bring it to Google's Android OS. That someone turned out to be Google itself which recently released a Gesture Search application which allows you to run searches by simply drawing letters. This is essentially what you did with the old PalmOS Graffiti.

But Gesture Search is a single standalone application while Graffiti was an essential part of the PalmOS and could be used with every PalmOS application. In fact even after Palm abandoned having a dedicated Graffiti input area for its Treo phones, it was still possible to install an app which would allow you to enter Graffiti strokes directly on the phone's screen.

That has gotten me to think about webOS on my Palm Pre. While there is a virtual keyboard available for webOS, there is nothing like Graffiti or even Gesture Search available for webOS. And that's disappointing because after all, Palm was the company which made this sort of input work in the first place.

And I think that Palm is uniquely suited to make it work again. Palm already has the code to Graffiti and Graffiti II—the successor to Graffiti which Palm introduced in part because of the Xerox lawsuit. And Palm has a its dashboard notification system which would be a convenient place to keep the controls for a Graffiti-style input system. So there really is no reason why Palm couldn't create another version of Graffiti and have it work on the entire operating system.

I used Graffiti for years on Palm PDAs. And I've used smartphone keyboards for years. But I was never really able to get used to using virtual keyboards which is one reason why I never got an iPhone. Now if I could have Palm's old Graffiti writing system back and have it live in my Palm Pre's dashboard, that would be a great alternative to sliding open my Pre when I only have to enter one or two characters.

Official Google Mobile Blog: Search your Android phone with written gestures

Phone Angst

People have been obsessing over their phones for a while now but I think that Palm may be taking it to a new level with webOS on its Pre and Pixi phones. Since Palm has committed to a regular upgrade schedule for webOS with big updates coming once a month along with minor updates in between the big ones. All told Palm has put out nine updates for webOS since June 2009 and buzz for the tenth update, webOS 1.4, is growing among its users.

Part of it is just the newness of the platform. Google's Android has been around for well over a year. Apple's iPhone has been around for three years. Palm's webOS has been around for just eight months and is still very much a work in progress. webOS 1.4 is expected to bring among other things support for video recording, a feature which the iPhone and Android phones have had for some time.

But I think that an essential part of all the phone angst that webOS is generating among its users is that Palm has always generated a strange dichotomy of feelings among its user community. The loyalty of the Apple user community is legendary and with the iPhone it has only grown and reached ever more cult-like proportions. Microsoft has its fanboys too but mostly its users tend to show more of a grudging acceptance than actual love. With Palm, the feel of the user community is a lot more complicated. Loyalty tends to mix with anger over perceived wrongs and missed opportunities which make members the Palm user community like one half of a separated couple—still in love but distrustful and bracing for the worst.

My own phone angst is as much a result of the platform's newness as it is to the its rapid pace of development. I jumped on the Pre early on and I love to tweak the hell out of it using Homebrew patches which I load through Preware. And the Preware people have worked hard to keep up with the pace of webOS development. As result, I sometimes have to deal with days when I have to uninstall and reinstall almost all my patches. Today was one such day as the Preware folks in anticipation of webOS 1.4 updated their patches for compatibility with it. As result I found myself staring at a phone which needed to update over forty patches. Luckily the Preware developers have worked hard to make this process as painless as possible and I clicked the "Update All" button and Preware went to work:



Arrrrgh!

I decide to try the "Emergency Patch Recovery" (EPR) utility. This program has been useful to me in the past by allowing me to wipe out all of my phone's patches in one feel swoop rather than having to uninstall them one by one. But first I have to uninstall my phone's theme and do a Luna Restart (a quick restart that Preware can do when you don't need to do complete reboot). So I fire up Preware again and suddenly it only has to update seventeen patches instead of forty. Hmmm, that's new. So I hold off on running EPR and hit the "Update All" button again. So I close Preware and start it again. Now only nine patches need updating. So I hit the "Update All" button yet again. And this time Preware goes through the process without a hitch.

So all's well that ends well. I find a theme that I like, install it, and do a full reboot of my phone so all the updated patches can take effect. The surprising thing was that I did all this over the course of a couple of hours as I was going about my day. Except for the Java restart and the reboot at the end, my Pre remained in use doing other things while I had Preware churning away in the background (Preware takes a long time to load its list of applications and to do updates). It wasn't perfect but it was a much smoother process than what I've experienced in the past with having to update patches one by one. So my phone angst is a little lower at the end of this day...

...and that's a good thing because I'm going to have to do this all over again later this week or the next week when webOS 1.4 comes out.

Hurry Up and Wait—Palm's Update Cycle Slows Down

Ever since Palm came out with its Pre phone, they have been updating its webOS operating system approximately once a month. Sometimes the updates have been small and sometimes they can introduce bugs. But even so, it was OK for me since there would usually be another update just around the corner. Now with their latest update which brought webOS to version 1.3.1, the update cycle has apparently slowed down. webOS 1.3.1 came out in mid-November and now we are nearing the new year with precious little word of another update. While normally a delay in updating webOS might not be a problem for me but webOS 1.3.1 has unfortunately introduced a rather serious bug which causes Motionapps' Classic emulator to be very unstable. Worse yet, just running Classic now can leave my Pre so sluggish that I have to reboot it both before and after using this program. And just to add insult to injury, apparently Motionapps has already fixed this bug but can't release the fix until Palm does its next update.

A perfect storm of incompetence. Suddenly the new Palm is starting to look a lot like the old Palm.

Christkindlmarket (sp?) in Daley Plaza

A lot of German-American food, tiny shops selling holiday and Germanic themed trinkets, and a lot of people milling about. And also a puppet show!

Textured Clouds

I like the mix of bright, thick, and fluffy clouds layered on top of dark, thin, and wispy clouds. The scene in both pictures was originally much brighter than what my phone's camera could capture but I think I like the pictures just the same even if I'm pretty sure that it's the edge of my finger at the bottom of that second picture....

Art Near the El

I usually start my day by taking the train and there is some pretty interesting—is mural the right word?—near the station I usually use.

There is some pretty artsy Batman graffiti adorning a local parking lot:

And a more aspirational installation on the side of a church:

Are Pink Clouds Effeminate?

I took this picture last month during the afternoon before Thanksgiving. My phone doesn't do it justice but I really liked the subtle interplay of the wispy pink cloud against the blue sky and bright, nearly full moon.

A Cell Carrier Goes Underground

One of the most frustrating things about a long commute can be going into a subway and losing your phone signal. So an ad like this one can be rather hearkening:



I have T-Mobile and my G1 has been getting better coverage on the Blue Line subway in recent weeks. Unfortunately, this improved coverage doesn't help as much for data usage. T-Mobile's 3G coverage is already relatively slow to begin with and my G1 tends to drop to EDGE speeds in a subway so checking email and web browsing can be slow. On the other hand my Palm Pre tends to lose both voice and data in the subway so T-Mobile is ahead of the game here.

In Praise of Hard Buttons

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Winter hasn't exactly come early to Chicago but it is unseasonably cold right now—cold enough that I've had to break out a jacket and gloves. This kind of leaves me in a bind gadgetwise. I still love my Palm Pre and am satisfied with its little sliding keyboard but the cold weather makes it less useful when I'm out in the cold. While the Pre is a slider phone a perfectly usable little keyboard, when the slider is closed the Pre is basically all screen with a single button that does only one thing. Other than turning it on and off and changing the volume, all other interaction with the Pre is through its screen. Normally this is no problem—in fact it's normally quite enjoyable. But when you are wearing gloves suddenly it becomes impossible to interact with the Pre.

Now contrast that to my older T-Mobile G1. The most recent firmware update gave this phone a new lease on life by making it fast enough to be usable again. And now the cold weather is is making it a lot more relevant for me because it has something that the Pre lacks—real hardware buttons. The G1's trackball is very responsive and allows me to interact with the phone quickly and efficiently. The home button allows me to get to the G1's "desktop" and access my shortcuts. And finally, the back button helps me get around the phone even faster.

I've always felt that the G1 was something of a evolutionary odd duck. Not as pretty as the iPhone or as elegant as the Pre but an interesting phone because it shows the potential of Android as a phone OS. With the release of the Pre and its webOS operating system, suddenly the potential of Android doesn't fascinate me aas much as it used to. But the ability to scroll through a bus tracker web site on a cold day without having to take off my gloves doesn't need to be fascinating, it just needs to be quick and efficient.

Classic Takes One Step Forward, Ten Steps Back

There is something of a compromise these days between gadget and software makers and their users. They put out incomplete gadgets and software and we put up with it because we think it's part of the price for getting to play with the latest and greatest. Witness the Beta label which clung to GMail for years. And it's not just with software. It took years for the iPhone to get a basic feature like cut and paste.

Similarly, Palm was able to release the Pre without certain features, like video recording, and with few native apps, asking its users to trust in its ability to update their phone. And certainly Palm has been good about updating the Pre with updates coming on a monthly, sometimes even weekly, basis. And they smartly made sure that one of the first third-party apps available for the Pre was Motionpps' Classic, an emulator which allows its users to run PalmOS apps.

For me, Classic essentially sealed the deal and made me get my Pre simply because I have used PalmOS apps like SplashMoney and HandyShopper for years and could now use them on my Pre. And while Classic isn't perfect, sometimes it crashes and freezes up and it has even crashed the entire phone on occasion. But generally it has been improving through updates.

Until now. With the recent 1.2 webOS update, Classic gained the ability to Hotsync to a desktop computer over wifi. A second update added the ability to sync over Bluetooth. And yet, I still haven't figured out how to make this sync work even though I frequently used both Bluetooth and wifi to sync my older Palm devices. This isn't too bad, I'm willing to be patient with MotionApps as they have promised to put up a FAQ to help users sync to their computers. But the thing that really bothers me is the fact that ever time I start up an app in Classic it pops up the following message:

Great, a nag screen for all my older apps. Perhaps MotionApps think they are helping users. Perhaps it's trying to cover itself legally. Or perhaps they just want them to badger software makers into joining Classic's certification program.

Either way it is annoying. It gets in the way of my work. And worse yet, it reminds me of Microsoft's obnoxious User Account Control in Vista. Sure it only runs the first time I run an app inside Classic but unless I keep Classic running all day long—something which given Classic's stability problems is not realistic—I will wind up seeing this message hundreds of times a day as I start and stop Classic and apps within Classic.

Another new addition within Classic isn't quite so bad as the nag screen but it is puzzling. I give you full screen mode:

Not much to look at right? All it does is hide the Pre's top bar, giving you exactly zero extra pixels because it merely replaces it with its own considerably less useful and less informative top bar. Now if full screen mode would collapse the virtual d-pad and buttons and give you full use of the Pre's 480x320 screen, it would be something which I've wanted since the Pre debuted. As it is implemented now, Classic's full screen mode is both pointless and useless.

For the first time since I got my Pre I'm an unhappy user. Ever since updating to version 1.2.1, my Pre has been slow and buggy and I can't pin-point the reason why. Classic is getting in the way more than it is helping. And at a time when Palm is ramping up its efforts to get more apps onto the Pre, webOS doesn't want to load more than fifty apps at a time.

Are these just growing pains for a young platform with a bright future or is it a sign that Palm has reached the limits of its ability to create something good and useful for its users. I deeply hope that its the former and not the latter.

Urban Moon

Yeah, they're crappy phone-cam shots and they don't do their subject justice but nobody said that the expectations are high when you blog. My point with these pictures is something that can't easily be expressed without them. Typically, in a large city like Chicago, the glare from street lights obscures the night sky. But here the low-hanging, full moon in these shots holds its own quite nicely with the glare of the lights of downtown Chicago. A mere phone-cam can't do justice to the beauty of a full moon but it is a lovely sight that has to be seen for itself to be appreciated. And it can be seen every month. Just look up.