Hasta La Gadget!

We’ve been toying with a Palm Pre 2 for a few weeks now, but given that it’s not “final hardware,” we can’t exactly make any firm judgments on the unit itself. Tim Pettitt, product manager for HP Palm, can. In speaking with MarkGuim.tv (and slyly handling a Verizon Pre 2), he not only confirmed that the company was relying on a layer of the famed Gorilla Glass to keep the front as scratch-resistant as possible, but also that the five megapixel camera is capable of capturing a shot every second. More importantly, however, he made clear that it wouldn’t be just the developers nabbing an unlocked GSM Pre 2. According to Tim, that very handset will be “available direct from HP.com,” though he stopped short of saying whether it would support T-Mobile’s AWS 3G band. For AT&T loyalists, however, we’re guessing this may be the best way to nab webOS on the network that’s still rethinking possible.

[Thanks, Fuu]

Continue reading Unlocked GSM Palm Pre 2 to be ‘available direct from HP,’ Gorilla Glass on the front

Unlocked GSM Palm Pre 2 to be ‘available direct from HP,’ Gorilla Glass on the front originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 30 Oct 2010 11:35:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Underwhelmed by the feeling of sameness with the Pre 2? Well, you may or may not be in luck; Chinese-based CENS.com is reporting that manufacturers Foxconn and Compal now have contracts to manufacturer up to six new Palm devices for 2011. That boils down to one for Compal, and either four or five for Foxconn. We’d venture a guess that PalmPad’s at least one of those, seeing as it’s due early next year, but what about the others? Whatever (stackable) cards HP / Palm have in hand aren’t exactly being laid out, and while we can’t confirm this report ourselves, rest assured, we’re hoping really hard that there’ll be more webOS options with non-pebble form factors.

HP contracts 5 or 6 new Palm devices for 2011? originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 27 Oct 2010 14:20:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve already known that Adobe would be bringing Flash Player 10.1 to Windows Phone 7, but the company has just now made that fully official at its currently-happening MAX conference (alongside its Air 2.5 announcement), and it’s also confirmed exactly which other mobile platforms the plug-in will be headed to. That includes WebOS 2.0, which we’ve already seen first hand, along with BlackBerry OS, Symbian, MeeGo and, last but not least, the LiMo platform — those will all of course join Android 2.2, which already supports the plug-in. Unfortunately, there’s still no timeline for a release on each platform, with Adobe only saying that Flash 10.1 is “expected” to hit each mobile OS. Head on past the break for the relevant snippet from Adobe’s press release.

Continue reading Adobe confirms Flash Player 10.1 is coming to BlackBerry, Windows Phone 7 and more

Adobe confirms Flash Player 10.1 is coming to BlackBerry, Windows Phone 7 and more originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 25 Oct 2010 17:31:00 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]