Hasta La Gadget!

Sprint has pushed out the 1.3.5 update for the webOS which runs on the Palm Pre. Along with this are Palm’s release notes, which are thankfully a lot more detailed than the single paragraph that Sprint teased us with yesterday.

There’s a lot going on in the update, from the merely aesthetic (a new font for the screensaver clock) to the welcome (better battery life in areas with poor signals) to the downright scary (“A user can perform a full erase by pressing and holding Sym + the orange/Option key + power for 10 seconds”). There’s even support for ancient technology, in the form of properly displayed animated gifs in the browser.

Most of the big changes, though, are in the app store. You can now download multiple applications at once, and they continue in the background if you want to do something else. There’s an “update all” button, auto-resume for interrupted connections and best of all, you can fill up the whole of the Pre’s memory with applications if you want to.

Once you have installed this update, future updates will be downloadable over a 2G connection, not just 3G.

But the best change is the silliest. You know that little line over the ē in “Prē”, the one everybody ignores? Palm has finally removed it from the default email signature, as apparently it wasn’t showing up properly on some receivers’ phones.

The update is free, and available now.

Software update information for Palm Pre Sprint [Palm]

See Also:

• Faster, Stronger, Longer: Palm Pre OS Update Today

We’d heard webOS 1.3.5 would be coming to the Pre on Sprint today, and here we go — it’s being pushed to devices right now. The official changelog is quite long, but the big-ticket tweaks include the removal of the app storage limit, better performance, and improved battery life. We’ll let you know how our update goes — you let us know the same now, kaykay? Kay.

Sprint now pushing webOS 1.3.5 to the Pre originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 28 Dec 2009 20:26:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Well, lookie here: it’s not up on Palm’s support site yet, but Sprint is showing a release date of December 28 — that’s today, by the way — for webOS 1.3.5 on the Pre. This is a pretty nifty little upgrade, you might recall — nifty enough to get none other than CEO Jon Rubinstein to name-drop it during the company’s most recent earnings call — thanks to the removal of the platform’s troublesome app storage limit, better performance, better battery life (particularly in weak cell coverage), and a host of bugfixes sure to put a smile on your pretty face. Let us know how those updates go, alright?

[Thanks, Gon Kim]

Sprint says webOS 1.3.5 is hitting the Pre today originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 28 Dec 2009 04:18:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’re still not totally clear on how exactly Verizon intends to enter (or rather, re-enter) the Palm stage in 2010; we know there’s definitely a WiFi-equipped CDMA Pixi out there that’ll likely find its way into Big Red’s clutches, but otherwise, we really need to wait for this event at CES next month. Well, maybe — we’ve got another little clue here in the form of some tips to PhoneArena stating that a “Pre Plus” has found its way into the carrier’s systems, which fits in nicely with info we’d previously received from one of our trusted sources that Verizon’s Pre would be somehow “different” from Sprint’s though we don’t yet know how. As far as we can tell, this isn’t the same as that WiFi Pixi (wouldn’t it be confusing if it was?), so we should probably expect at least two webOS models on Verizon over the next few months. In other news, that Motorola Calgary (pictured) appears to be shaping up as the “Devour” with a 3 megapixel cam and Blur running on Android 2.1 — yes, 2.1, not 1.5, which should give hope to CLIQ owners that an update is probably in the works. Finally, there’s talk of an LG VS750 in a mega-thin form factor running WinMo 6.5 with global roaming capability, but we don’t have a picture of that one just yet. Anyhow, back to the Pre Plus, we’re accepting all guesses as to what the “Plus” in the name might stand for — 16GB of integrated storage or a microSD slot seem like obvious candidates, but feel free to get creative with us.

[Image via BGR]

Verizon getting Palm Pre Plus and Android-powered Motorola Devour? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 18 Dec 2009 03:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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There are plenty of ways to measure smartphone marketshare. IDC measures units shipped from manufacturers whereas Gartner measures units sold to consumers. Then there’s comScore, the research firm that conducts monthly surveys in the US to measure the total number of devices (and thus operating systems) currently in use. Its latest data is summarized above for the three-month period ending in October. See those yellow lines? If our kindergarten skills haven’t failed us, then this data shows iPhone usage surpassing the once mighty Windows Mobile OS for the very first time. Unfortunately for Microsoft, Google’s Android OS is set to accelerate significantly by the time the February 2010 data rolls in as is WebOS just as soon as Palm can bring its fledgling OS to Verizon’s subscriber base. What’s most troubling to Redmond about this report though, is where we found it: on FierceDeveloper, a site for mobile software developers who will presumably use the data to help determine which platforms deserve their focus. Oh Windows Mobile 7, where are you?

ComScore: iPhone overtakes Windows Mobile use for the first time in US originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 17 Dec 2009 01:08:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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