Palm Treo news, forums, cases and accessories, since 2002.
Yesterday’s news that HP was ending support for webOS devices, was followed up by a story on This Is My Next that HP is “not walking away from webOS“. For webOS enthusiasts, it was the glimmer of hope that some hardware manufacturer will ride in on a white horse and save the platform. Like Palm before them, HP continued the tradition of feeding a silver lining to the webOS community. Don’t believe it.
It’s August 5th, a little over one month since the release of the HP TouchPad. Announced in February, there has been a slow march of hype surrounding the first tablet with webOS. We’ve seen this before with the original Pre launch. This time was going to be different. It was also an opportunity for HP to flex their marketing muscle beyond that of the cash-strapped Palm. Despite their best efforts, it hasn’t translated into an acceptable sales number. In what can be seen only as a last ditch effort, today we have seen a plethora of deep discounts. Woot, normally reserved for products that are on their way out, is one of many including HP themselves offering $100 plus off the HP TouchPad. Surely, this isn’t what HP management meant when they said the TouchPad would be number 1 plus. What’s happened since the February introduction of these new products and where do they take webOS from here?
Over the past few years, Palm has been great at creating hype to surround their events. They have been very successful in getting everyone in a tizzy before product announcements. Prior to this past CES, where they sat on the sidelines, Palm has done a fantastic job in creating buzz around their events. In many ways, I’ve considered Palm events to be Apple-like, save for the black turtleneck. When Palm announced the Pre in 2009, the run-up to the release was exciting and Palm delivered. Flash forward to 2011 and the hype machine is well underway. Now under HP, Palm is once again in a familiar place, on the big stage they’ve created. They skipped CES and now the lights will shine even brighter on the stage on February 9th. The invite says, “Think Big, Think Small, Think Beyond”. The past few weeks have brought no shortage of leaks surrounding Topaz, one of multiple webOS tablets expected to make their public debut on February 9th. Not much has been said or leaked regarding the most important piece of any mobile platform and that’s a long overdue update to webOS phones. Dan Ramirez at webOSRoundup put it best when he said, “smartphones are the epicenter of mobile computing”. The time for HP|Palm to deliver a hero phone is now and it’s vital to the success of any tablet or product that will be part of the larger webOS ecosystem said to be in the works.
“Palm customers, you want game? The carriers have their updates. Get together and ask for 1.4.5″.
One of the benefits of purchasing a webOS device are the free and often regular updates pushed out by Palm. I’ve lost count of how many software updates have been released for the Sprint Palm Pre, all of which have improved my user experience with the phone. There’s been plenty of discussion about fragmentation on other platforms, most notably on Android phones. Are we starting to see fragmentation on webOS phones as result of the carriers? The current version of webOS is 1.4.5 and it’s been available for both the Sprint Palm Pre and Palm Pixi since August 11th. That’s not the case with the other two US carriers.
Let’s take a look at Verizon. Yesterday we reported that webOS 1.4.5 was starting to ship for the Palm Pixi Plus. No word on the same update for Palm Pre Plus owners on Verizon, arguably the bulk of webOS owners on that carrier. No word on when that update is coming, this at a time when we are already seeing word of webOS 2.0 on the horizon.
AT&T hasn’t updated either the Palm Pixi Plus or Palm Pre Plus. As to when that might be happening, there has been no word from Palm or AT&T. Just yesterday, HP’s Rahul Sood on Twitter suggested customers nudge carriers for the updates. “Palm customers, you want game? The carriers have their updates. Get together and ask for 1.4.5″.
Palm has done a remarkable job with providing an operating system that can deliver updates OTA (over the air) with little effort on the part of consumers.
Why are the carriers so slow to push updates and is this the start of fragmentation across the webOS platform.
Today is our 8th anniversary covering Palm phones. Back on April 14th, 2002, we launched everythingtreo.com, as a resource for Handspring Treo enthusiasts. For many, including myself, the original Treo was transformational. Back in 2002, there weren’t many who were checking email from their phones and many scoffed at the idea. “Who needs to check email on their phone?” There was something magical about that “communicator” that looked like it was something out of a Star Trek movie. In the past eight years, we’ve chronicled Palm’s phones at our family of Palm sites — everythingtreo.com, everythingcentro.com and now everythingwebos.com. Our sites have amassed a wealth of information, most of which was borne from our community of just under 100,000 members. Our mantra has been to create a “friendly, knowledgeable site for Palm users” and that’s our goal moving into year nine.
A big thanks to our partners, Smartphone Experts and Mobihand. They make it all possible and have provided our customers with legendary service over the years.
It’s exciting to see that for many, the Palm Pixi or Palm Pre still provides that transformational experience for a whole new generation of smartphone owners.
It’s been a fun ride and I certainly look forward to the next eight years.
Palm’s webOS took years of development, but has only been publically available since June 6th of this year. We’ve seen a number of incremental updates and expect webOS 1.3.1 update to hit possibly this week. It will likely contain minor improvements, but we’ve starting thinking about how Palm might improve webOS for 2.0. There is no denying that webOS impresses against any of the current crop of mobile operating systems, but this young OS can certainly stand to see some improvements. Today, we’re taking a look at the launcher and offering our suggestions for improvements.
