Posted Friday, September 18, 2009 7:50:17 AM PST
by Tim Carroll
Engadget's new live variety show/podcast (entitled, fittingly, The Engadget Show) is now
available for viewing, and of course the big item of interest for us here at PIC was the appearance of Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein. The pleasantly unassuming Ruby sat down with editor-in-chief Joshua Topolsky for a good half-hour, discussing his own storied career in the technology industry, his role in Palm's comeback efforts over the last couple of years and some of the challenges facing the little mobile computing company that could. (Not to mention capping it all off with an Oprah-style "Everyone gets a
Touchstone!")
Nothing earth-shattering was uncovered over the course of the conversation, but it still proves an interesting watch, especially some of the unscripted quotes. Ruby's dig at the tech press "digging through Apple's garbage cans" earned a well-deserved big laugh from the crowd, but perhaps the most fascinatingly excruciating moment to your correspondent was watching Jon turn to the crowd and ask how many Pre owners are out there, only to be met with the lonely sounds of crickets chirping and tumbleweeds bouncing by.
How did you find the interview? Firecracker or flop? Why not hit the jump and post your thoughts?
Posted Thursday, September 17, 2009 2:15:12 PM PST
by Ryan Kairer
During today's investor quarterly conference call, Palm Chairman and CEO Jon Rubinstein announced that Palm will be focusing exclusively on webOS going forward. Rubinstein stated that all engineering and product development from here on out will be dedicated to webOS platform. His exact comments were:
Given the importance of webOS to our overall strategy, we've made the decision to dedicate all future development resources to the evolution of webOS, which means that going forward our roadmap will include only Palm webOS- based devices.
The remarks bring an uneventful end to Palm's Windows Mobile experiment and long history of Palm OS based devices. While there are still some Palm Centro's and Treo Pro's actively being sold in current channels, these now seem to be destined to be the last of their kind.
Posted Thursday, September 17, 2009 1:12:12 PM PST
by Ryan Kairer
Palm, Inc. today reported that total revenues in the first quarter of fiscal year 2010, ended Aug. 28, 2009, were $68.0 million. Gross profit was ($2.8) million, and gross margin was (4.1) percent. These results include the effects of subscription accounting applied to Palm webOS products as required by GAAP. In accordance with this methodology, revenues and direct cost of revenues for Palm webOS products (currently
Palm Pre smartphone) are deferred and recognized over the product's estimated economic life.
"We're making significant progress with Palm's transformation, and our culture of innovation is stronger than ever. We're launching more great Palm webOS products with more carriers, and turning our sights toward growth," said Jon Rubinstein, chairman and chief executive officer.
Posted Thursday, September 17, 2009 1:05:00 PM PST
by Ryan Kairer
Palm, Inc. today announced that it intends to offer, subject to market and other conditions, approximately 16 million shares of common stock. In connection with this offering, the underwriters will have an option to purchase up to an additional 2.4 million shares of common stock to cover over-allotments, if any. The company is conducting the offering pursuant to an effective registration statement under the Securities Act of 1933.
The company plans to use the net proceeds for working capital and general corporate purposes. Elevation Partners has indicated its intention to buy $35 million of Palm shares in the offering, at the public offering price.
Posted Thursday, September 17, 2009 8:54:21 AM PST
by Tim Carroll
The most advanced webOS homebrew installer continued its seemingly-unstoppable march towards 1.0 yesterday, as the dauntless
WebOS Internals crew pushed out the latest version of their little piece of open-source magic.
Preware 0.9 is now available for one and all to download from the usual sources: you can access it (and the required accompanying Package Manager Serivce) via webOS Quick Install or grab the source direct from the
git repository.
New to 0.9 are two very cool bling options: firstly, the PreThemer package feed has been added to the list, allowing you to install new themes directly to your Pre without going via the PreThemer website. (To restore the default Palm theme, simply use Preware to remove your custom one.) Second, Preware itself now offers an option to use the ultra-sexy Palm Dark theme. Schwing!
Don't walk, run. Download now - and try not to drool too much. Also: please hit the jump for a full list of Preware credits - and details on a special way you could show your appreciation.
Posted Wednesday, September 16, 2009 3:51:44 PM PST
by Tim Carroll
Updated: Re-skinning your Palm smartphones is a time-honored custom, with apps like the (excellent)
PalmRevolt helping us all pretend the era of Cobalt had arrived long after the dream had already died its horrible, drawn-out death. We may soon have the opportunity to re-live our crushed 2004 hopes on webOS, though, as the artistically-inclined Marcus F has launched
PreThemer, a new site for the uploading and free sharing of custom webOS skins.
It's definitely early days, and the selection is still small. But it's all perfectly usable: currently available are custom wallpapers, icon sets, and boot logos (my favourite being this sweet U.S.S. Enterprise, complete with glowing deflector). All the mods are available as ipk file downloads, making it a snap to install them with webOS Quick Install. If you want to restore the default Palm theme, a tipster has pointed us to a download link here. Might want to grab it while it's hot, since it may not stay up forever.
Posted Wednesday, September 16, 2009 9:24:02 AM PST
by Ryan Kairer
PearMobile continues to release new utilities for classic Palm OS users.
PearHideIt is their latest title which brings a new way to customize your device. PearHideIt allows you to hide a select applications from your launcher. It also comes with some other useful data protection features such as the ability to password protect apps, hide apps in rom/ram/sd and removal protection so the app can't be turned off.
PearHideIt v1.0 is available now for $3.95. It is compatible with Palm OS 5 and above and includes a free trial period.
Posted Wednesday, September 16, 2009 9:06:41 AM PST
by Ryan Kairer
Palm OS Garnet and
Windows Mobile devices. Sudopix is a new picture based puzzle game. It takes a grid like format combined with elements of sudoku to great a newly addictive experience with a hidden drawing to be revealed. Sudopix offers no less than 90 grids to solve and as many drawings to be discovered with over three levels of difficulty.
Sudopix v1.0.8 is available now and comes with a free trial period. It is available for Palm OS and Windows Mobile and costs $9.95.
Posted Wednesday, September 16, 2009 8:30:44 AM PST
by Ryan Kairer
TechCrunch has posted a brief video interview with the founders of CitySourced, a new mobile app. Halfway into the clip (also embedded after the break), TC's Sarah Lacy asks how much
the company is being paid to bring their app "to Palm." After a bit of joking and dancing around the question, She eventually discovers that Palm is indeed paying developers to create webOS specific versions of their apps.
While licensing and bundled third party apps are common practices on mobile devices, specifically paying companies to create platform specific versions of a title is somewhat new ground. While this certainly shouldn't shatter anyones worldview, the author admits the figure was under the $500k range.
Posted Monday, September 14, 2009 10:50:26 AM PST
by Ryan Kairer
Palm OS Garnet users finally have a decent Twitter application to check out thanks to
MetaViewSoft.
2TwitMe is a full featured Twitter client for Palm OS 5 and above. The app enables all the usual things such as the ability to read tweets, post messages, DM and TwitPic support, link previews, background operation and the ability to use multiple accounts. Aside from the usual Treo's and
Palm Centro, the application is also compatible with PDA's such as the
Palm TX and can even be used in landscape mode.
2TwitMe v1.0 is available now. It is compatible with Palm OS Garnet 5.0 and above and also works on Classic. It costs $7.00 and comes with a free trial period. It is currently on sale in the PalmInfocenter Store for $5 until Sept 19th.
Posted Monday, September 14, 2009 9:07:35 AM PST
by Tim Carroll
If that headline got your hopes up, allow us to cruelly dash them: no, this is not the official launch for the
European Palm Pre. Rather, the upcoming invitation-only Playbite technology trade show in London is being billed by Palm's PR department as the chance for the UK tech press to get a first look at the hotly-anticipated GSM Pre, which is hopefully a sign that the official launch is not far off.
Of course, the more cynical side of us wonders whether or not Palm will allow journalists to actually touch the Pre, given how jealously guarded it was in the run-up to its American debut. Playbite is taking place at the Congress Centre on Great Russell Street in London on September 15th. You can catch Sky News' coverage of the event here as it breaks and find further information on Playbite's page.
Posted Sunday, September 13, 2009 9:26:31 PM PST
by Tim Carroll
The new
Palm Pixi differs from its big brother, the
Palm Pre, in a few important ways. One of those is the hardware that runs the whole shebang: the Qualcomm MSM7627 chipset. On Tuesday,
we linked to Qualcomm's February press release announcing the MSM7
227 (which is very similar in most respects) and posted the accompanying specs.
Qualcomm have now been kind enough to share with us the full spec sheet for the MSM7627. Like the Pre, it also supports hardware-accelerated 3D graphics, with an OpenGL 2.0-supporting 200MHz GPU - so there should be no worries for Pixi gaming, once Palm manages to get those graphical engineers up to speed. Read on for the full list of specs!
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