During an investor conference Webcast on Thursday, Verizon Wireless executive Lowell McAdam revealed that the carrier has big plans for device launches for the rest of 2009. Launches that include the Palm Pre and RIM BlackBerry Storm 2.
"Over the next six months or so, you will see devices like Palm Pre and a second-generation Storm," Lowell said. He added that Verizon will also support Android phones, but was less specific about the time frame, only saying that they would be available later this year.
Verizon plans for the Pre comes just a day after AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said announced that it, too, will go after the Pre once Sprint's exclusivity is up on the smartphone. The terms of Sprint's exclusivity has been in question, but given today's news, it looks like six months is when the carrier's hold runs out.
So which are you more excited about? The Pre, BlackBerry Storm 2 or Android devices on Verizon?
[Orginally posted at precentral.net]
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Pre Download Speed Test: High Speed, Low Latency
Xenophonite in our forums engaged in one of our favorite pre-phone-launch activities for any phone: checking out DSL Reports Mobile Speed Test results and looking for browsers attached to unreleased phones. To wit: the Palm Pre. The results: fast.
1728 0.157s (1024k) spcsdns.net Mozilla/5.0 (webOS/1.0; U; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.27.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/1.0 Safari/525.27.1 Pre/1.0
1685 0.188s (1024k) spcsdns.net Mozilla/5.0 (webOS/1.0; U; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.27.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/1.0 Safari/525.27.1 Pre/1.0
533 0.125s (1024k) spcsdns.net Mozilla/5.0 (webOS/1.0; U; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.27.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/1.0 Safari/525.27.1 Pre/1.0
550 0.117s (1024k) spcsdns.net Mozilla/5.0 (webOS/1.0; U; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.27.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/1.0 Safari/525.27.1 Pre/1.0
711 0.134s (400k) spcsdns.net Mozilla/5.0 (webOS/1.0; U; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.27.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/1.0 Safari/525.27.1 Pre/1.0
1391 0.14s (1024k) spcsdns.net Mozilla/5.0 (webOS/1.0; U; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.27.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/1.0 Safari/525.27.1 Pre/1.0
In plain English, this means you're looking at download speeds of between 500k and 1700k - which is mighty fast. Faster, we think, than most people are managing on iPhones.
Just as important as speed is latency. Speed is how fast your data comes down, Latency is how long it takes to get your connection going in the first place. Latency is notoriously bad on mobile networks, but it's darn good on Sprint's EVDO network - coming in reliably under .2 seconds, while an iPhone's latency on AT&T's over-stretched network often is longer than a second.
Add in the Pre's lightning fast rendering time and you can expect that your browsing experience on the Pre will be a joy. Maybe, just maybe, it really will be 4 times faster than the iPhone.
[Orginally posted at precentral.net]
1728 0.157s (1024k) spcsdns.net Mozilla/5.0 (webOS/1.0; U; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.27.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/1.0 Safari/525.27.1 Pre/1.0
1685 0.188s (1024k) spcsdns.net Mozilla/5.0 (webOS/1.0; U; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.27.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/1.0 Safari/525.27.1 Pre/1.0
533 0.125s (1024k) spcsdns.net Mozilla/5.0 (webOS/1.0; U; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.27.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/1.0 Safari/525.27.1 Pre/1.0
550 0.117s (1024k) spcsdns.net Mozilla/5.0 (webOS/1.0; U; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.27.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/1.0 Safari/525.27.1 Pre/1.0
711 0.134s (400k) spcsdns.net Mozilla/5.0 (webOS/1.0; U; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.27.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/1.0 Safari/525.27.1 Pre/1.0
1391 0.14s (1024k) spcsdns.net Mozilla/5.0 (webOS/1.0; U; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.27.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/1.0 Safari/525.27.1 Pre/1.0
In plain English, this means you're looking at download speeds of between 500k and 1700k - which is mighty fast. Faster, we think, than most people are managing on iPhones.
Just as important as speed is latency. Speed is how fast your data comes down, Latency is how long it takes to get your connection going in the first place. Latency is notoriously bad on mobile networks, but it's darn good on Sprint's EVDO network - coming in reliably under .2 seconds, while an iPhone's latency on AT&T's over-stretched network often is longer than a second.
Add in the Pre's lightning fast rendering time and you can expect that your browsing experience on the Pre will be a joy. Maybe, just maybe, it really will be 4 times faster than the iPhone.
[Orginally posted at precentral.net]
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Pre could launch with less than 150,000 units available
Sweet mother of whatever you find holy, I thought that 400,000 was bad! If Ashok Kumar of Collins Stewart investment bank is to believed, Foxconn manufacturing of Hong Kong is having major problems building the Palm Pre. He was quoted in Barron’s saying:
“About two weeks ago, Foxconn was having problems with the flexible printed circuit board for the Pre and having trouble getting adequate yields for the capacitive touch-screen display. Now, it appears Foxconn has found more hardware problems, and it’s not clear if the problem is with Texas Instruments’s OMAP application processor, or with some basic design issue.”
Apparently the problems have forced Foxonn to check each Pre by hand instead of running the devices through an automated testing process as normally be done for such a high-volume production run.
It is worth noting that Mr. Kumar does not officially cover Palm as part of his duties at Collins Stewart. One of his areas of concentration is Qualcomm, which manufactures the radios for the Pre, and Kumar does not expect that any problems the Pre may be facing will have an appreciable impact on Qualcomm’s shares.
[Originally posted at precentral.net]
“About two weeks ago, Foxconn was having problems with the flexible printed circuit board for the Pre and having trouble getting adequate yields for the capacitive touch-screen display. Now, it appears Foxconn has found more hardware problems, and it’s not clear if the problem is with Texas Instruments’s OMAP application processor, or with some basic design issue.”
Apparently the problems have forced Foxonn to check each Pre by hand instead of running the devices through an automated testing process as normally be done for such a high-volume production run.
It is worth noting that Mr. Kumar does not officially cover Palm as part of his duties at Collins Stewart. One of his areas of concentration is Qualcomm, which manufactures the radios for the Pre, and Kumar does not expect that any problems the Pre may be facing will have an appreciable impact on Qualcomm’s shares.
[Originally posted at precentral.net]
Palm Pre Fact Sheets, User Guides Leak out
Mahootzki points us to Coal's post over at Sprint Gurus leaking a bunch of Palm Pre box documents in PDF form. We have all the (heavily watermarked) action after the break!
Leaving aside the feeling that it's relatively difficult to distinguish between a manual and three different kinds of 'guides,' we're feeling pretty happy about the full user guide. It's fully of crunchy tidbits -- some new and some not -- like:
Synchronization of Facebook and Google accounts is scheduled to happen every 15 minutes. (we hear that Gmail is IMAP-idle-sytle push, but that's still unconfirmed)
You hold down the orange button to switch to moving the cursor around character by character, you hold the shift key to go into text selection mode.
If you're 'throwing' items to the right off-screen to delete them (as with the notifications area, for example) and you get a delete confirmation message, you can just throw a 2nd one off screen to confirm it. Very fast!
Notifications for Operating System updates and 3rd party application updates are automatic and give you "install now" and "install later" options - Plus "Install All" and "Install Free" for 3rd party apps.
Palm will offer "Palm Music Assistant" to aid in transferring music over USB from the Pre to your computer.
Confirmation that you can view DOC, DOCX, TXT, XLS, XLSX, PPT, PPTX, and PDF
You can switch the online backup service off or switch it to manual as well as delete backups.
You can switch the "full swipe" gesture from two different behaviors -- switching between apps or just 'back'
MP3 ringtones are in full effect, but it uses 'the first few seconds of a song' instead of letting you pick.
Removing and re-attaching the battery cover takes up no fewer than 4 pages, so it's apparently not easy.
We could go on, but you get the picture. There's plenty to see here. We are almost a week away, folks!
[Originally posted at precentral.net]
Leaving aside the feeling that it's relatively difficult to distinguish between a manual and three different kinds of 'guides,' we're feeling pretty happy about the full user guide. It's fully of crunchy tidbits -- some new and some not -- like:
Synchronization of Facebook and Google accounts is scheduled to happen every 15 minutes. (we hear that Gmail is IMAP-idle-sytle push, but that's still unconfirmed)
You hold down the orange button to switch to moving the cursor around character by character, you hold the shift key to go into text selection mode.
If you're 'throwing' items to the right off-screen to delete them (as with the notifications area, for example) and you get a delete confirmation message, you can just throw a 2nd one off screen to confirm it. Very fast!
Notifications for Operating System updates and 3rd party application updates are automatic and give you "install now" and "install later" options - Plus "Install All" and "Install Free" for 3rd party apps.
Palm will offer "Palm Music Assistant" to aid in transferring music over USB from the Pre to your computer.
Confirmation that you can view DOC, DOCX, TXT, XLS, XLSX, PPT, PPTX, and PDF
You can switch the online backup service off or switch it to manual as well as delete backups.
You can switch the "full swipe" gesture from two different behaviors -- switching between apps or just 'back'
MP3 ringtones are in full effect, but it uses 'the first few seconds of a song' instead of letting you pick.
Removing and re-attaching the battery cover takes up no fewer than 4 pages, so it's apparently not easy.
We could go on, but you get the picture. There's plenty to see here. We are almost a week away, folks!
[Originally posted at precentral.net]
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Pre Originally Sported Resistive Touch Screen?
Fortune Magazine has an article up trying to make the case for a storied history of rivalry, hatred, and bitterness between Apple and Palm. Reading through the timeline of this (somewhat trumped-up) soap opera, we were waiting for the part where Ed Colligan gets amnesia and Jonathan Ive kidnaps Palm's lead designer when we came upon a little nugget about Jon Rubenstein, who left Apple, spent some time in Mexico, then rode in on a white horse to save Palm -- so the story goes. Anyhow, get this:
Rubinstein started, in his words, "hanging out" with Palm people in late June. He didn't like what he saw. The hardware for the Pre needed to be scrapped and rebooted. For one thing, prototypes were using old "resistive" touchscreen technology that responds to a user physically pushing the screen, not the newer "capacitive" technology manipulated by the electricity in the user's body. Rubinstein tossed out the old phone's hardware and built a new one in about 15 months. "We were basically running a marathon and doing a heart transplant in the middle of it," says Rubinstein.
A resistive touchscreen is the kind that you see on PalmOS Treos and Centros and Windows Mobile phones -- the kind that usually requires a stylus for any sort of accurate touch interaction. Let's just say that if the Pre had launched with a resistive touch screen we would be slinging the word "Catastrophe" around a bit.
Our pal Rene Ritchie at TiPb reported on the day the Pre was announced that during Rubenstein's time at Apple he pressed to get a physical keyboard on the iPhone and was denied. If he truly did lead a complete redesign of the Palm Pre, then it sounds like he has gotten his wish.
[Originally posted at precentral.net]
Rubinstein started, in his words, "hanging out" with Palm people in late June. He didn't like what he saw. The hardware for the Pre needed to be scrapped and rebooted. For one thing, prototypes were using old "resistive" touchscreen technology that responds to a user physically pushing the screen, not the newer "capacitive" technology manipulated by the electricity in the user's body. Rubinstein tossed out the old phone's hardware and built a new one in about 15 months. "We were basically running a marathon and doing a heart transplant in the middle of it," says Rubinstein.
A resistive touchscreen is the kind that you see on PalmOS Treos and Centros and Windows Mobile phones -- the kind that usually requires a stylus for any sort of accurate touch interaction. Let's just say that if the Pre had launched with a resistive touch screen we would be slinging the word "Catastrophe" around a bit.
Our pal Rene Ritchie at TiPb reported on the day the Pre was announced that during Rubenstein's time at Apple he pressed to get a physical keyboard on the iPhone and was denied. If he truly did lead a complete redesign of the Palm Pre, then it sounds like he has gotten his wish.
[Originally posted at precentral.net]
Gmail and Facebook Users: Time to Resign Yourself to Extra Contacts
We know the Palm Pre and webOS will pull contacts from three sources at launch: Google, Facebook, and Exchange. Actually, it should handle multiple Google and Exchange accounts -- hooray! All while automatically merging dupicate contacts into a single card and keeping your sync sources "siloed" so they don't infest each other with their data. Truly, Synergy is a wonderful system. Except for one little thing...
As a long-time Google Contacts user, I have a piece of news that's difficult to impart: get ready for your contacts list to get unnecessarily big. I've been using Google EAS mobile sync for multiple devices now and I can tell you: Google is aggressive at adding contact emails to you list. Even if you cull it regularly, it becomes messy.
It gets a bit more complicated with the Pre, as we're discovering in our forums. Turns out that the webOS syncs All Contacts instead of "My Contacts," meaning all those extra "suggested contacts" are included in your sync. Sure, you can delete them, but it's still messy.
Add in the fact that you can't delete Facebook contacts or choose which ones you want to sync to the Pre and you're looking at a pretty messy contacts list. Sure - you'll have few to no duplicates and that helps, but you're also going to have your great aunt Suzie who just joined Facebook last week and let's be honest: you'll never call her.
Of course, if you're just an Exchange user you likely won't run into these sorts of hassles, congratulations.
For the rest of you Google and Facebook users, however, I have a small piece of advice: Use Universal Search to find contacts and don't let the ballooning size of your Contact's list get to you. I've basically given up on having a contacts list of only the people I think I want in there. After years of therapy, I've come to accept that there are dozens (approaching hundreds) of people in my contacts that I'll never call, email, or IM.
All of which is why type-to-find/Universal Search is an essential feature for smartphones. Use Universal Search instead of scrolling through your contacts. Use Universal Search and just let those extras sit in there, they're not huritng you, are they? Use Universal Search and it'll be ok, I promise.
[Originally posted at precentral.net]
As a long-time Google Contacts user, I have a piece of news that's difficult to impart: get ready for your contacts list to get unnecessarily big. I've been using Google EAS mobile sync for multiple devices now and I can tell you: Google is aggressive at adding contact emails to you list. Even if you cull it regularly, it becomes messy.
It gets a bit more complicated with the Pre, as we're discovering in our forums. Turns out that the webOS syncs All Contacts instead of "My Contacts," meaning all those extra "suggested contacts" are included in your sync. Sure, you can delete them, but it's still messy.
Add in the fact that you can't delete Facebook contacts or choose which ones you want to sync to the Pre and you're looking at a pretty messy contacts list. Sure - you'll have few to no duplicates and that helps, but you're also going to have your great aunt Suzie who just joined Facebook last week and let's be honest: you'll never call her.
Of course, if you're just an Exchange user you likely won't run into these sorts of hassles, congratulations.
For the rest of you Google and Facebook users, however, I have a small piece of advice: Use Universal Search to find contacts and don't let the ballooning size of your Contact's list get to you. I've basically given up on having a contacts list of only the people I think I want in there. After years of therapy, I've come to accept that there are dozens (approaching hundreds) of people in my contacts that I'll never call, email, or IM.
All of which is why type-to-find/Universal Search is an essential feature for smartphones. Use Universal Search instead of scrolling through your contacts. Use Universal Search and just let those extras sit in there, they're not huritng you, are they? Use Universal Search and it'll be ok, I promise.
[Originally posted at precentral.net]
Examining Universal Search, finding companies and Twitter
So, Mr. InvisibleMan over at PalmPreForums.org is have way to much fun with his illegitimately-obtained Palm Pre emulator. And we’re fine with that, because as long as he’s having fun with it, we’re learning more about the Pre without actually having any to, you know, use. And the videos just keep coming. This time he’s hit up the much-touted Universal Search feature of webOS and discovered a few interesting things.
Twitter has been added to Universal Search, or at least that’s what the big Twitter button in the Universal Search window is telling me. Also, while we know that you can start off searching for an application or contact and can move on to a web search. But when you have an application or contact that matches what you’re searching for (say, I have President Obama’s contact info in my phone and want to see his Wikipedia page), all I have to do is hit the “Find…” bar and it will forcibly give me the web search options (Google, Google Maps, Wikipedia, and now Twitter).
Since it appears that the contacts application does not have the ability to categorize your contacts, we’re going to be in need of a way to narrow things down. If you have company information added into your contacts (President, United States of America for my Obama contact) you can search for that company and get all contacts that match that company. Carrying over from the old Palm OS Contacts application is the ability to search by initials - first name followed by last name (typing “boba” will bring up Barack Obama and Barry Obando).
Lastly, we get a look at how search works in other applications. In Memos searching will dig through the content of your notes, and in Messaging it will search by contact name. Unfortunately, these search capabilities are not integrated into the from-the-launcher Universal Search, but chances are if you’re doing a search, you will at least know in which application you intend to look.
See rest of InvisibleMan's Videos here
[Originally posted at precentral.net]
Twitter has been added to Universal Search, or at least that’s what the big Twitter button in the Universal Search window is telling me. Also, while we know that you can start off searching for an application or contact and can move on to a web search. But when you have an application or contact that matches what you’re searching for (say, I have President Obama’s contact info in my phone and want to see his Wikipedia page), all I have to do is hit the “Find…” bar and it will forcibly give me the web search options (Google, Google Maps, Wikipedia, and now Twitter).
Since it appears that the contacts application does not have the ability to categorize your contacts, we’re going to be in need of a way to narrow things down. If you have company information added into your contacts (President, United States of America for my Obama contact) you can search for that company and get all contacts that match that company. Carrying over from the old Palm OS Contacts application is the ability to search by initials - first name followed by last name (typing “boba” will bring up Barack Obama and Barry Obando).
Lastly, we get a look at how search works in other applications. In Memos searching will dig through the content of your notes, and in Messaging it will search by contact name. Unfortunately, these search capabilities are not integrated into the from-the-launcher Universal Search, but chances are if you’re doing a search, you will at least know in which application you intend to look.
See rest of InvisibleMan's Videos here
[Originally posted at precentral.net]
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
