Hasta La Gadget!

You can spend all the money in the world, but an acquisition isn’t really complete until everything has been sufficiently re-branded. By that measure, it’s time to officially welcome Palm into the HP family.

Goodbye orange dot, hello branding afterthought. The new HP Palm logo looks as though someone slapped the word “Palm” onto the thing last second. It all seems a bit…mismatched… At least this puts to rest early speculation that the company might more or less abandon the Palm name.

It doesn’t particularly instill us with confidence about the company’s aesthetic future, however.

Curious where Palm model number P102UNA — the North American UMTS variant of the Pre 2 — might be headed? Since Bell and Telus rolled out their HSPA networks, Canada’s become far more averse to CDMA than the US has, so it makes sense that they’d be getting Palm’s latest handset in a GSM flavor, not a CDMA one (à la Verizon). To that end, MobileSyrup‘s managed to score some shots of a Rogers-branded Pre 2 strutting its stuff, though they don’t have a date or price — and Palm’s official line is still “in the coming months.” Anyone out there planning on moving to France to get it sooner?

Palm Pre 2 for Rogers in the wild originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 27 Oct 2010 16:18:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Ah, standards. Palm and Nokia know what we’re talking about, which is why they support similar methods of developing native Linux apps, namely SDL 1.2. Add on the hardware similarities between the Palm Pre and the N900 (OMAP3430, PowerVR SGX, Open GL ES 2.0 support) and you have a beautiful recipe for cross-platform gaming. Some hardcore Maemo users have taken this to heart and released a new “Preenv” package for the N900 that allows the phone to run unmodified webOS games. Of course, you’ll need to root your Pre to get at those games, and if you want to make a launch icon for the game on the N900 you’ll have to root it as well. Still, this is exciting beyond the potential for playing Need for Speed on much-lauded Nokia hardware: with easy portability between platforms, there’s all the more reason for a developer to be attracted to MeeGo and webOS in the future.

[Thanks, Andy D.]

N900 can run unmodified webOS games, what can your Linux-based phone do? originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 26 Oct 2010 00:56:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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So the Pre 2 has been announced for SFR in France and Verizon in the States, along with an unlocked model for developers… but so far, we’d only seen one of the three in the FCC. Well, here are the other two: on the left, the P102EWW, and on the right, the P102UNA. Palm’s naming convention is a little strange, so it probably bears explaining again — the “P102” tells you that it’s a Pre 2, while “EWW” indicates CDMA and “UNA” indicates North American GSM / UMTS. From the UNA model’s filing, it would seem there isn’t any AWS capability on board, so users of T-Mobile are going to have to plod along at 2G speeds if they want to play ball. You know, Murphy’s Law and all.

Palm Pre 2 hits FCC in CDMA and North American GSM flavors originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 19 Oct 2010 21:34:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Palm Pre 2 [Palm]

Why webOS 2.0 goes to 11 [Palm blog]

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