Hasta La Gadget!

Things must be getting a little weird at Palm right now, as every day seems to add a new piece to an already confusing puzzle. In just two weeks’ time the company has gone from a potential free agent, to a lone wolf, and then back to prospective purchase. Adding more noise to the proceedings, TechCrunch is now reporting that another senior staffer has hit the road, and this time it’s Caitlin Spaan, Palm’s VP of carrier marketing. Her name gets added to what looks like a growing list of recent Palm departures (not to mention that entire marketing department we hear has been canned). More troubling than that news, however, is a rumor which also appears on TC suggesting that CEO (and putative savior of the company) Jon Rubinstein may be on his way out as well. This report is pure hearsay at this point, but if true would be a major admission on Palm’s part that its plans to kickstart the ailing company nearly two years ago are failing (or have just plain failed). Of course, we need to stress that this is just rumor at this stage — the company offered no comment to Business Insider — and until we get more solid word, it should be treated as such. As for us, we’re hoping the company can pull something salvageable together from this mess and figure out a way to compete at a level of increasingly more difficult stakes.

Update: Apparently Jon showed up in a room of developers at the company’s currently-ongoing dev camp and said “I’m still here,” to big laughs. Hang in there, man!

Another Palm exec is out… and CEO Jon Rubinstein is next? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 23 Apr 2010 18:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We still don’t have a firm date for when Palm’s current wunderphone will be hitting AT&T’s soothingly-colored retail establishments (the site still says “coming soon”), but we do now have confirmation that at least one handset has reached its destination. A tipster was kind enough to send us these photos of an AT&T Pre Plus escaping its creamsicle confines and powering on for the first time. This doesn’t look like a retail unit, likely one of AT&T’s “practice” Pre Plus models that were supposed to ship earlier this month or some other promo phone, but regardless we’re guessing that we’re not far from yet another group of subscribers being able to massage the keys on this slider.

[Thanks, gueriLLaPunK]

AT&T Palm Pre Plus unboxed in glorious, orange detail originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 23 Apr 2010 09:42:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In the face of a near-constant stream of buyout rumors the past couple weeks, Palm boss Jon Rubinstein is holding the line he’s held ever since he’s taken the helm — well most of the line, anyway. In a chat with Financial Times today, the CEO said that he still believes that “Palm can survive as an independent company” and that he’s got a plan to get the company spitting black ink rather than red, but that “if someone comes to the board with a reasonable offer of course it’s something [they’d] have to consider,” which isn’t anything materially different than he’s said in the past — it’s just good business sense, and it’s a very cautiously-worded soundbite.

Rubinstein did say a couple things of note, though. First, he mentioned that they’re working “fast and furious on new handsets” with a “strong pipeline” of new goodies, which gives us great hope that we’re finally going to see something that doesn’t look like a Pre or a Pixi soon. He’s also opening up to the idea of licensing webOS to third parties, confirming sentiment we’d heard a few days back; he’s looking at it from a pretty objective business perspective, saying that “if there’s an appropriate strategic relationship or business deal that makes sense to us then of course we would license webOS because obviously the more scale we get the more the benefit there is to us.” That sounds good from our end, especially thinking back to the overwhelming awesomeness of the mighty Sony NZ90 back in the Palm OS days. Any way you look at it, though — independent or acquired — it sounds like Rubinstein has every intention of making more waves in 2010.

Palm CEO still thinks company can go it alone, open to webOS licensing deals originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 22 Apr 2010 20:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you’re a Pre or Pre Plus owner who has been watching longingly as we’ve covered the recent spread of overclocking hacks for the thing, but didn’t quite feel up to wading through page after page of forum discussions to figure out just how to apply them, the process just got a easier. Like, a whole lot easier. Super PreKernel enables you to go to 550, 600, 720, and even 800MHz with just a single tap. And, when it’s time to put on those fake glasses and play Clark Kent, you can drop back down to 500MHz just as easily. It’s all thanks to a number of Palm-loving hackers who have put together a truly moving video demonstration of the whole process that’s embedded below. We encourage you to enjoy it now, because the selection of copyrighted musical accompaniment for the clip will probably result in it surviving about as long as a bottle of Superman’s chosen hair product.

Continue reading Super PreKernel is the one-touch way to make your Pre or Pre Plus fly (video)

Super PreKernel is the one-touch way to make your Pre or Pre Plus fly (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 22 Apr 2010 08:43:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Four solid months after going into open beta, Palm’s entirely web-based SDK for webOS — the so-called Ares SDK — has reached version 1.0, bringing “lots and lots” of new features along for the ride. Biggies include UI-less components that add functionality to your application, in-line help, undo and copy / paste functionality (for the SDK, that is), and a plug-and-play multitouch-enabled Google Maps widget that you can drop into your own screens. Even if you don’t own a Pre and have no intention of commercializing a webOS app, it sounds like a blast to screw around with — and considering how important the third-party ecosystem is for Palm right now, we’d say that’s a good thing. Interested parties can get set up with the gold build right now.

Palm’s web-based Ares SDK goes gold originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 19 Apr 2010 18:42:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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