Palm Warns Against Overclocking Your Palm Pre

March 29, 2010 by Leave a Comment

Palm, via their developer blog, issued a warning regarding the overclocking patches that are now available for the Palm Pre. Simply put, they don’t recommend it and you’ll void your warranty if you fry your Palm Pre. To our knowledge, this hasn’t happened yet. Overclocking in general usually means you’re limiting the life of your {insert device name}. It could mean days, weeks or months off the life of your Palm Pre. Is it worth the risk? That’s up to you, but let us know if your Palm Pre starts to sizzle. Their official statement:

Palm is working hard to improve the speed and performance of webOS, as shown in our recent 1.4 update. While we appreciate the effort the webOS community has put forth to try and help us along that path, the use of this application is neither endorsed nor recommended by Palm and will likely result in a voided warranty. Palm encourages webOS users to let Palm release official updates that provide safe, reliable, over-the-air features that improve their device in a number of areas, as we have in the past at a rate of approximately once per month.

palm-pre-overclock

via PreCentral

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Not So Fast on webOS Speed Fixes

November 7, 2009 by Leave a Comment

A few days ago we reported on Palm’s acknowledgement of speed issues affecting the UI of webOS and it was suggested that improvements would be forthcoming in “the immediate future”. PalmInfoCenter points us to an update to the post on Ajaxian that pours a bit of cold water on our hopes these speed improvements might be imminent.

webos131-speed

Some of the notes have been taken out of context, so we wanted to clarify: We started with a talk on the the future of the mobile Web. This talked about the potential of the Web as the platform for devices, and why we were excited to join Palm… We don’t comment on our specific SDK plans, and while we are personally excited about the Web gaining GPU acceleration via technologies like WebGL and CSS Transforms, and we would like to see webOS gain these capabilities to allow web developers to better leverage our fantastic hardware, we were answering a question about our personal opinion on what we’d like to see happen to the platform. We don’t believe the term “immediate” was even mentioned by us, and we are sorry that people have read too much into this particular topic.

Doesn’t appear that webOS 1.3.1 will feature the speed increase the UI needs and most users want. In lieu of a speed increase, would a native Facebook app suffice?

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Palm webOS Update Will Address Speed of UI

November 3, 2009 by Leave a Comment

One of the frustrating parts of using Palm’s webOS is the lack of speed when accessing menus and in general the UI at times feels sluggish. With hardware on par with Apple’s iPhone 3GS, the speed of the UI just doesn’t feel as fast as it should given the hardware. Longtime Linux (and webOS) developer Jamie Zawinski left the Pre citing performance as one of the reasons. While the speed has been improved with the last few updates, the good news is that speed of the UI is definitely on Palm’s radar. At a webOS Developer Event in London, Palm’s dynamic duo Ben and Dion spoke about the issue.

shake-bake-palm-pre

On ease of use, multitasking has been great; UI latency is still an issue even though the hardware is comparable to 3GS. The problem is the path to the GPU didn’t exist, but now with CSS transforms, that will be solved in the immediate future.

With the Palm Pixi set to debut on November 15th, it will no doubt feature a later build that 1.2.1. We have no idea as to the number of the build, but we’re all for seeing speed improvements in the next webOS update. That plus of course we’re hoping for a killer Facebook app. How about you? What are you looking for from Palm in the next webOS update, outside of a little shake and bake?

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