Robots, death, Epic Fascination, and tropicalia: genre-surfing tokenism dominates the Engadget Podcast this week. Hosts: Joshua Topolsky, Nilay Patel, Paul Miller Guest: Chris Ziegler Producer:Trent Wolbe Music: Castor – Rude Boy
[iTunes] Subscribe to the Podcast directly in iTunes (enhanced AAC). [RSS MP3] Add the Engadget Podcast feed (in MP3) to your RSS aggregator and have the show delivered automatically. [RSS AAC] Add the Engadget Podcast feed (in enhanced AAC) to your RSS aggregator. [Zune] Subscribe to the Podcast directly in the Zune Marketplace
Palm CEO John Rubinstein will continue to head up his webOS team under new boss HP, and will be working on smartphones, “future slate PCs and netbooks,” according to a statement from HP
The computer giant completed its acquisition of Palm yesterday, and announced that Palm will continue to develop both hardware and software, headed up by former Apple employee Rubinstein.
This will include new phones (the Pre and Pixi lines are now also owned by HP), but most exciting is the confirmation that there will be webOS tablets. After all, apart from iOS, name another operating system that is as suited to a tablet as the webOS (sure, Android is close, but still a little too clunky).
Better still, HP has the deep pockets to go up against Apple, and if Rubinstein and team are left to work on great machines their combined experience (many of them are also Apple alumni) should finally provide an iPad competitor. And even if you are a total, unashamed iPad fanboy, this should still excite you. Competition is good for us buyers. Take a look at the iPhone 4: Do you think it would be this good if Android and Palm weren’t chasing so close behind?
The major new feature of Apple’s latest mobile operating system, iOS 4, is multitasking. What took the company so long? Apple claims it was waiting to get multitasking just right before unleashing the feature for the iPhone. Meanwhile, the Android OS and Palm Web OS have supported multitasking just fine for over a year.
However, each platform handles multitasking quite differently. Let’s take a closer look at how each mobile OS’s multitasking works.
Apple iOS 4
How you use it When you press the Home button twice, Apple’s iOS 4 displays a “drawer” allowing you to switch between apps. The drawer shows your most recently used apps. This is similar to the “alt-tab” functionality we’re accustomed to on traditional PCs.
What’s going on When you leave an app in iOS 4, it’s not actually closing (unlike previous versions of the OS). Instead, it’s going into frozen, suspended animation, sitting inertly in the background. So when you relaunch an app, it opens instantly to pick up from where it left off before you “closed” it. That behavior allows you to switch between apps very quickly — a feature called Fast App Switching, which is the core functionality of Apple’s iOS multitasking. (TidBITS has an excellent in-depth explanation of Fast App Switching.)
Fast App Switching isn’t all iOS 4 multitasking does, as there are a few exceptions for specific types of apps. Apple allows apps that play audio, connect with voice-over-IP or use location detection to run quietly in the background while one thread is still active. So that’s why, for example, you can leave the Pandora app, and the music will still be playing in the background while you check your e-mail. Likewise, you can leave Skype while on a VoIP call, and you won’t hang up on your buddy while you’re browsing Safari, for example. Third, you can leave a mapping app or a fitness tracker like RunKepper and come back to it, and it’ll still have a lock on your location.
It’s up to third-party app developers, of course, to tell their apps to behave this way with the new iOS 4 software development kit.
Another sort of background activity iOS supports is push notifications, which keeps a specific internet port active while the iPhone is in hibernation, so you can receive e-mails, instant messages and alerts even when the screen is off. These alerts pop up on the screen in the same way as SMS on the iPhone.
WIRED Fast App Switching is indeed fast and stylish, avoids draining battery. All apps are constantly running inertly, so you can quickly switch between them all.
TIRED Only allows a single application thread to continue running; only certain kinds of activities are allowed to run in the background. Push notifications scream for your attention at the center of the screen.
Android OS
How you use it Hold down the Home button and a tray appears showing the apps running in the background. Switch to another app and it instantly opens.
What’s going on Android’s multitasking behavior is by far the most complicated to explain.
In Android, when a user switches to another application, the app you switched from doesn’t shut down: Its process is kept around in the background, allowing it to continue working (e.g., for downloading web pages in the background while doing something else), and come immediately to the foreground if the user returns to it. If the smartphone is running low on memory, Android starts killing off unnecessary processes to free up resources.
If a user later returns to an application that’s been killed, Android re-launches it in the same state as it was last seen, by keeping track of the parts of the application the user is aware of, and restarting them in the last state they were seen in. This last state is generated each time the user rotates the screen or leaves the application.
There are two basic components to control what apps can do in the background. Apps with “broadcast receivers” go into the background and wait to go off in an event, such as an alarm going off at a certain time, or if you receive a notification from Google’s server for getting a new message in Gmail. The other background component is called a “service,” which instructs an app to perform a task such as music playback or turn-by-turn navigation for a certain amount of time in the background. It’s up to the third-party app developers to embed these components in their apps so they behave these ways in the background.
WIRED Apps can stay fully functional while running in the background. Notification tray makes it easy for apps to give you information without interrupting what you’re doing. Users don’t have to manually quit apps when memory is running low: Android does that for you.
TIRED Getting multitasking to work just right in an app is a lot of work for developers.
HP WebOS
How you use it The HP (formerly Palm) WebOS displays apps as “cards.” Each card acts similar to a tab in a desktop web browser. You move between activities using gestures (swipe forward, swipe back, hold to readjust the positioning of the cards), and when you’re finished with an activity, you can throw the card off the screen to quit the application.
What’s going on WebOS allocates resources (memory, processor cycles, network access) to each card based on requests from the cards. The System Manager prioritizes the card in the foreground when allocating resources. Apps in the background are placed in a semi-dormant state, and their access to services is restricted.
If an application that the user isn’t currently interacting with wants to get the user’s attention, the app can display information in the notification area at the bottom of the screen. The information sits in the dashboard until acted on or closed. (Therefore, you can do something in a foreground app while dealing with a notification, whereas on the iPhone a push notification shows up in the center of the screen interrupting your task until you close it or leave your current app.)
Activities in the background do not have access to certain battery-intensive services. For example, apps cannot access accelerometer data and their frequency of network access is reduced. Third-party games are paused in place when moved to the background, reducing both their CPU load and memory consumption.
WIRED The card interface is neat, and it feels very natural to switch between apps. Notifications appear at bottom of the screen, not interrupting your current task.
TIRED After launching a specific number of apps that reach your memory limit, you can’t launch any more, and you have to manually quit an app before launching another.
It’s only been a couple short months since HP announced its intentions to buy Palm, but apparently all the investors are happy and the lawyers are rich, because the two companies have just announced that the $1.2b transaction is official and the buyout is complete — Palm is now part of HP. Yes, it’s the end of an era — Palm’s been a part of the tech landscape in one confounding way or another since 1992 — but it’s also the start of what could potentially be a webOS renaissance, as HP plans to use Palm’s ideas and OS on everything from smartphones (phew) to tablets to even printers. We still don’t know exactly how Palm’s people and structure will be folded into HP, or what exact role CEO Jon Rubinstein will play, but Palm’s already lost someimportantpeople, and managing that transition while still keeping the product roadmaps on course will be the next great challenge for these two companies. Here’s to the best — now how about some of that rumored new hardware?
P.S.- Now that things are official, we can’t help but wonder about the fate of the HP Slate — there have been rumors of its death since the buyout was announced, and HP’s gone from crowing about it to total radio silence. We honestly don’t know one way or another, but we’d sure love to find out.
It’s probably not the first Foleo to ever splash down on eBay, but this one might just be the most comprehensive of them all. Palm’s companion laptop-that-never-was will almost definitely remain a tech mystery for eons to come, but today, the chance is yours to own the flop of the last decade for just $750. Better still, that Buy It Now price includes a smorgasbord of applications, so you won’t have to go hunting in order to find programs that actually take advantage of the thing. The only downside is the lack of a VGA dongle and the original packaging, but there’s only so much griping you can do about a Foleo that costs less than an Adamo.
Update: And she’s gone! But strangely, it looks as if the entire auction has been removed. We’re guessing someone paid this fellow a couple million to end it early and take an under the table lump sum, Just a guess, though.
It’s probably not the first Foleo to ever splash down on eBay, but this one might just be the most comprehensive of them all. Palm’s companion laptop-that-never-was will almost definitely remain a tech mystery for eons to come, but today, the chance is yours to own the flop of the last decade for just $750. Better still, that Buy It Now price includes a smorgasbord of applications, so you won’t have to go hunting in order to find programs that actually take advantage of the thing. The only downside is the lack of a VGA dongle and the original packaging, but there’s only so much griping you can do about a Foleo that costs less than an Adamo.
Scene: Impossibly mature high school “girls” mingling in front of a locker. Action!
Bitter Barbie: “What are you doing? Is that a new phone?” Bland Barbie: “Yeah, I’m checking my Kin. I’ll just write on Hannah’s wall from here.”
End scene.
Yes, ABC’s new Pretty Little Liars show is the future of American television, where entertainment morphs into infotainment and bakes the minds of an entire generation into a lovely pie of corporate servitude. We blame TiVo. Oh, and just because Palm quit making creepy commercials doesn’t mean that they’ve given up on promoting its Pre to women. Looks like Roger McNamee was right about that backside mirror’s appeal. See what we mean in the PLL episode 3 embeds posted after the break.
Palm’s made a few half-baked attempts at wooing developers in the past, like that time in October when it waived the fees and review process for open-source apps (but not App Catalog entries) or when it provided discounted handsets that happened to carry a large carrier-specific ball and chain. This week, Palm’s decided to be a bit more generous — it’s eliminating the $50 App Catalog submission fee entirely and putting every last cent back where it came from. With only 2,684 apps in the store, that’s just $134,200 in total, but symbolically it’s a very welcome gesture, no? According to the official Palm Developer Center Blog, developers should see credits appear in their PayPal accounts soon — though perhaps not soon enough to spend it on the fruit of their fellow man’s labor at 50 percent off.
If you own a Pre, you like to tempt fate, and you don’t faint at the mere thought of your phone melting into a nondescript heap of plastic and silicon, have we got some exciting news for you: some crazy dude with a death wish has somehow eked an honest gigahertz out of the Pre’s OMAP3430 processor that normally plods along at 600MHz. Of course, this isn’t the first time the phone’s been overclocked, but traditionally, those overclocks have topped out around 800MHz — so if you need serious speed and don’t mind nuking your battery at a record pace, this so-called “F105 Thunderchief” kernel project is one that you’re going to want to keep an eye on. The project’s owner says “do not install this if you like your phone,” so… you know, proceed with extreme caution, especially considering that your warranty’s probably going to dry up as fast as your battery. Follow the break for the blood-curdling action on video.
Okay, we’ve got lots of Palm news tonight, so take our hand and let us walk you through it. For starters, the company filed a 8-K report with the SEC today, which is a requirement when major changes (e.g. a merger with HP) are happening. According to the paperwork, the transaction / acquisition was expected to close by July 1st… but it might actually be anytime within the first week of July. A PreCentral forums member claims to have listened in on a shareholding meeting today and heard that from VP of Investor Relations Teri Klein. Additionally, he also heard that under HP, current Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein will head up a smartphone / mobility unit that’s culled from both his company and another HP unit.
Finally, news has come in this evening in that VP of Public Relations Lynn Fox is joining the likes of Matias Duarte, Rich Dellinger, and Caitlin Spaan in leaving Palm. Though we understand she’s staying with Palm through next week, she is definitely not sticking around — according to her Facebook page, Fox “respectfully declined the opportunity to join HP after its acquisition of Palm” and will be pursuing other opportunities. So, when can we get back to talking about those mysterious new webOS devices? That aren’t printers?
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
