Dec/111
WebOS to be open sourced
TechOps Guy: Nate
Probably the best thing that could of happened given the scenarios on the table happened to WebOS:
HP Decided to Open source the whole thing, end-to-end
HP intends to fully open source every component of webOS, right down to its Linux core. They aren’t ready to give a public timeframe for exactly when that open sourcing will happen, because there’s some work that has to be done first.
I think it’s wonderful news myself, I did not relish the thought that so many people wanted the likes of Amazon to acquire WebOS which made absolutely no sense to me.
Maintaining an operating system is a lot of work, and I can understand other mobile device makers not wanting to take on the mammoth task of doing so themselves.
Open sourcing it I believe will give it a bright future.
I really was not expecting HP to maintain such.. commitment to the platform. I’m sure if the previous CEO was still around they would not be investing to open source the software, so score a big one for Meg in my book with this decision, good job, this is a great x-mas present for WebOS users and fans alike.
It may be a year or two before another company attempts to release a WebOS product based on this code base but I’m more confident now than I was before that it’ll happen. The OS really is great, and now that it will be pretty much the most technologically advanced fully open mobile platform on the planet (more so than Android I believe) it’ll come back from the depths of the abyss it was in just a few months ago.
I always felt that the likes of the Touchpad, the Veer, and the Pre- were released before they were ready, they were rushed to market. More so on the software front than hardware for the former, more on the hardware for the latter. The Pre3 was going to be released 6 months too late to make any sort of dent in the market. I think there was too much pressure to deliver products in such a short time frame they didn’t have the time they needed to do it right. With open sourcing of the OS, things will likely move at a slower pace at least initially but the chances of getting it right I believe go way up.
wooohoo!
(I use my Pre3 and one of my two Touchpads every day)
Aug/113
WebOS device sales still hectic
TechOps Guy: Nate
HP announced recently they are going to manufacture another round of Touchpads to meet more demand, and limit one TP per customer. Best Buy has also been selling TPs with a limit of one per customer.
You can see in the Precentral Forums as well as the Palm Developer forums the frustration by the existing user base that many are not able to get their hands on hardware.
The limit per customer should help get TPs in to more hands without having to resort to the scalping market, though many folks wanted to buy a couple extras as gifts. One is better than none..
While the Touchpad continues to make headlines with the fire sale what hasn’t made any headlines is the desperate struggle many users are going through to try to get their hands on the HP Pre3 which was released in Europe mere days before the big HP announcement that they were getting out of hardware.
My own experience mimics that of many others, I put in an order to a UK reseller on the 20th whom appeared to have stock on hand. It took a few days to get past their security checks but I got past them, and then they went to go to their distributor to get stock (they apparently had none at the time), and their distributor told them they couldn’t have any stock, someone upstream (maybe HP, maybe another carrier the speculation runs wild) has blocked it. So the company refunded my money and that of many others who ordered. Unfortunately this took until Thursday of last week to find out I was not going to be getting Pre3s from this company.
So I set out on a quest to find Pre3s from someone else, every place I came across said no stock, there was talk about the Palm Eurostore selling Pre3s, BUT they only require both that your billing and shipping addresses are in Europe. No shipping to the US.
There is a UK reseller mobiles.co.uk which is requiring all orders be shipped to the UK. They accept US billing and shipping addresses but have canceled every order that had one after the order was placed.
There are people trying to order from expansys.fr over in France whom have a stock of AZERTY based Pre3s (I had never heard of AZERTY until then), but their shipping forms do not list U.S. as an option (I think people have tried anyways not sure of results). I have seen other stories of people in Asia getting their orders canceled by expansys.fr with the company directing those users to the Asian version of the site (which has no Pre3s of course). While it’s apparently not hard to change the keyboard layout in the phone itself, there is still the physical keyboard where the keys won’t be right once the mapping is changed. But users are willing to make the compromise in order to get their hands on the device (I would too if they’d ship to the US). I was about to order from them when I saw the billing address had no place to put a state. Only City, Country, and street address. Also no mention of U.S. shipping options, so it seemed pretty clear to me that they weren’t going to ship my order so I didn’t submit it.
So I began searching Ebay and came across another company KICK MOBILE over in the UK and I ordered a pair of Pre3s from them last Thursday morning. I emailed them later asking if they really did have stock because the last place did not, they said they are sold out *right now* but are 99.9% confident they will get 100 units the following day. The people/person at Kick Mobile has been very nice and friendly. Unfortunately Friday came and mostly went and Kick Mobile sent out an update saying they have not gotten stock yet but have confirmed their upstream supplier has 100 units set aside for them (out of 1500 units on hand), and they are still highly confident they will get them because Kick Mobiles is doing them a favor in buying a couple hundred older Blackberry phones to liquidate. They said they won’t know for certain until the end of this month or maybe the 1st or 2nd of September. The upstream supplier was waiting for authorization to release the units to the resellers.
I haven’t gotten an update directly yet (have not asked) but did see someone else post an update from them saying that Kick Mobiles no longer has confidence they will get that stock, though the final nail is not in the coffin yet (probably will be in the next 24 hours though).
What’s more frustrating is that Kick Mobile mentioned if I had placed the order a mere 24 hours earlier I would of gotten the phones. Getting the bad news back from the first reseller took too long!
I don’t blame any of the resellers they are all doing everything (or have done) they can to try to get the product to the desperate customers and have done a great job.
So yesterday I went on Ebay again and found a pair of Pre3s from what appears to be an end user who had two of them, and I immediately hit the buy it now button to buy one. I’m normally not one who likes to use auction sites I don’t know why I just don’t feel comfortable doing it but at the moment if I want a Pre3 (and I want one as you can clearly see) I have little choice at this point, it seems as time goes on there are fewer and fewer available, even though there is good information that says there are at least hundreds to thousands being held up in warehouses with an uncertain future. You can probably bet there are hundreds to thousands of AT&T and Verizon branded Pre3s as well which people speculate may just be outright destroyed rather than sold.
With each attempt to buy a Pre3 the unit price has gone up by roughly $125. There’s one report of someone paying over $900 for one.
There have been rumors of a fire sale of Pre3s as well but so far very few have been able to get them at those prices, even the official Palm Eurostore says they were not able to resell at those prices and in fact is unable to get more stock and is canceling all outstanding orders and not accepting new orders. Not a good sign. Contrary to initial beliefs the Eurostore is not directly affiliated with HP or Palm but is a 3rd party reseller like most others. From their web site
Update Wed 31st Aug 15:00 :
From the contacts we initiated since last Friday ;
- We have cancelled and refunded all orders where we received notification to cancel.
- We have shipped all orders for those people we had contacted and who accepted the order for a single unit at the standard/agreed price.
- We are still awaiting response from some of the people we contacted
We are now going to set a deadline of midday (BST) on Thursday 1st Sep. A final reminder email has gone out to these people. We will have no option but to cancel those orders after that point if we have not heard back from them.
The European Pre3 only works on one of the two AT&T 3G frequencies, so will be crippled to some degree(mainly when used in doors), by contrast I read that the way T-mobile uses their frequencies the Pre3 would have no 3G coverage at all. T-mobile apparently uses one frequency for upstream and one for downstream, AT&T has both frequencies available for up and down.
I’ll take what I can get though, assuming I can get the Pre3. I got a Pre2 in yesterday (can’t use it yet because I don’t have a SIM card). Was supposed to get a Veer (with AT&T SIM) yesterday, but fedex screwed me on the delivery claiming my address was wrong and before I could pick the package up at the local facility shipped it back to AT&T. I have another Fedex package coming from HP today with a Touchpad and some accessories in it, will see if they screw up again. I’ve recieved a lot of UPS and USPS packages at my address so I know it’s right, it is a new address, the building has only existed for about 1.5 years but hard to believe Fedex hasn’t delivered a package here before, there’s a couple hundred people living here.
While the initial reviews of the Pre3 are very positive at least from the WebOS community(which is biased of course), they are not suitable devices for the general public in the U.S. as you will have to jump through hoops and stuff to use them due to the frequency differences and general lack of support. But for more hard core technical users it’s clear it’s by far the best phone to come out of Palm since the first Pre launched back in 2009.
In case your wondering why I have been trying so hard to get my hands on a Pre 3. Well part of it as I have mentioned in the past is, for several different personal reasons (won’t elaborate again here), I won’t really go near a Android, iOS or Windows mobile device for myself at least. The Pre2 and Pre3 will keep me on a platform I like for a while to come until I need to make a decision about where to go at that point. I’ve been using a feature phone from Sanyo for the past 8 months while I waited for the Pre3 to be released. It’s an OK phone, I like that I don’t have to charge it often, though it’s not as nice as the Sanyo phones I used to have, the software is quite different, and in general not as good. It may be because the phone might just be Sanyo in name since they were bought by Kyocera (the phone itself says Sanyo by Kyrocera) Though I guess one thing I will be able to finally test without being too paranoid is how rugged this rugged phone really is, your supposed to be able to completely submerge it in water and have it be OK. I’ll finally test that out!
Meanwhile my order for 4 Touchpad 16GBs which was accepted by HP’s systems on August 21st at 2AM (26 hours before their cutoff period for canceling orders) is still pending shipment, I assume they are out of stock now. The order status page says it is in an “Admin” state. My 2nd order was processed before my first which I thought was unusual. My 2nd order is the 5th Touchpad with accessories, in order to secure a discount on accessories I had to buy another TP. I was in such a hurry to buy the original Touchpads I did not pay attention to accessories or discounts on the 21st as I was busy fighting server errors on HP’s side.
My original Palm Pre, which has been disconnected from the Sprint network for 8 months did something unusual on Monday – it showed I had a new voice mail. I checked my normal Sprint phone it too said I had a voice mail. I would not of expected the Pre to show that (it never has before). Just because I was curious I tried to check the voice mail on the Pre and got a message from Sprint saying my account could not be verified. So clearly the phone wasn’t authorized to operate on Sprint anymore, must’ve been some sort of temporary hole opened in the Sprint network which allowed the phone to log in for a moment and detect the new voice mail.
I only wish management at HP cared enough to handle this whole situation better in the first place. I do feel sorry for the entire WebOS division (hardware+software), including the leadership who were just as blindsided by this as everyone else. I can’t imagine the stress the leadership is under to try to maintain morale at this point.
Over 2,000 words for this post, not bad.
Aug/111
Windows Phone 7 is dead
TechOps Guy: Nate
That is the headline of this news article, and as I read the article, and more importantly the comments I couldn’t help but think about the parallels between both of those and HP’s now defunct WebOS (yeah I know officially HP has committed to continue support but most people expect nothing to come of it unfortunately).
Here is part of the list, see the article for the rest
- Sales are plummeting – Same was said for WebOS
- Mango (new version of Windows phone 7) is taking too long – Same was said for WebOS 3, Pre3, and the Pre3′s lack of running WebOS 3
- Customer’s don’t care – Similar things said about WebOS
- Nokia doesn’t matter – HP at least believed the Palm brand didn’t matter since they killed the Palm name earlier in the year..
I’d say a good 8 out of 10 of those points could of applied to WebOS/Palm as well. I also suspect that the same could possibly be said of RIM as well.
But the comments from the community responding to the article were much more similar to what the hard core WebOS community would say than I would of expected and thought that was fascinating.
Maybe it’s coincidence, but I have seen more than one suggestion from the WebOS community that Windows Phone 7 is the closest user experience to WebOS.
I was never a strong defender of the WebOS platform, I used it for myself, thought it was a solid product line, never tried to talk someone else into using it, though often times I wanted to try (unlike some other products/companies I talk about on this site). I suppose deep down I knew they needed “more” to appeal to more users so I was patient – waiting until the day they had those core elements completed, HP wasn’t so patient though.
For me, I ordered a pair of unlocked Pre 3 phones from the UK for about $500 each last night in the hopes they will ship. Far more than I’ve ever spent on a phone before, but given the retirement of the hardware and no future prospects of new hardware at this point, ironically it was a pretty easy decision to make. I just hope they have stock. The price point almost assures there won’t be a mad dash to buy them like with the Touchpad. If I get lucky and HP has a fire sale of the remaining stockpile of Pre3s in the US, I’ll pickup more. My only real concern is batteries – what’s the best way of storing a battery if your not going to use it for a year or more ? Should it be fully discharged? Should I keep it on the charger the whole time? Maybe it doesn’t matter what I do.
At this point I guess I’m glad HP left the Pre 3 with WebOS 2.2 where there was/is a stronger development base on the Mojo(?) SDK with many more applications. WebOS 3 by contrast that runs on the Touchpad uses another, incompatible SDK Enyo.
One of the strange decisions HP/Palm made was when they built the original SDK they didn’t take into account large screens, so when the Tablet came around they had to re-do it. Unfortunately for some reason they didn’t make the new SDK good for small screens for some reason (I assume that reason was lack of time and resources for the schedule), so developers were stuck having to use two different ways of writing apps to support the Phone vs Tablet, not a good way to attract developers from competing platforms.
But like most of the faults I believe it would of been fixed at some point in the not too distant future(~1 year or so), once Palm had the ability to stabilize and catch their breath from the break neck pace they’ve been working at for years now.
I think what hurt Palm/HP/WebOS more than anything is they didn’t have enough resources to pull off what they needed to in the time allowed. I have little doubt they tried to hire like crazy after HP bought them but there just wasn’t enough time to develop these 3 products, and ramp up hiring / get people familiar enough with the platform to be really productive at developing by the time they had to launch their products.
Made me think back to this post about a year ago.
The main difference between WP7 and WebOS, as I’ve mentioned before, is that Microsoft is not going to give up on their platform. WP7 may die, or may not, I don’t know. But if it does MS will re-work it, and try again. I had expected and hoped, as mentioned before, HP was going to do the same with WebOS.
Aug/110
RIP: WebOS
TechOps Guy: Nate
UPDATED I have been a user of WebOS based devices for a couple of years now, I bought a Palm Pre in late 2009, and a Touchpad on launch day. WebOS in general has been a pretty good user experience, it worked quite well from a functional perspective in my view. The devices weren’t the fastest(though since I really never used any others I had little frame of reference), I think mainly to the web-centric nature of the OS instead of running mostly native code.
The Pre was my first Palm-branded product, though I did own a couple of Handspring Visors for a long time.
WebOS seems to have been, for the most part widely praised from a user friendliness angle from a wide selection of folks, though that alone wasn’t enough to carry the platform forward for HP.
Myself, I had a firm belief that HP was committed to the platform for the long run – at least 2-4 years before making any decisions about the future. Primarily because of the situation of the market. With Microsoft, Nokia, and RIM all struggling in one way or another, and wide fragmentation of Android leading to, from what I’ve read, poor user experiences on the platforms (granted there are probably some really good ones but given the number of Android devices it appears most of them are pretty bad). There was, and still is room for someone to play in the space with a unique product offering.
I can only assume the new leadership at HP just didn’t agree with the previous leadership which is too bad. I mean it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize it’s going to take multiple billions of dollars of investment to build up such an ecosystem, you don’t need an army of consultants and market analysts to figure that one out. Unfortunately for Palm, WebOS, and the user base the new management didn’t want to commit to the platform in the way they needed to in order to drive it.
The best comparison I have I think is perhaps Microsoft – they have been in the mobile phone space in one form or another for more than a decade, and they have low single digit market share to show for it — but they haven’t given up (and it looks like they won’t either). I felt that same level of commitment from HP early on, unfortunately I guess the folks that make the big decisions decided to change their mind and cut their losses(either that or the people that make the big decisions themselves got changed out).
It wouldn’t surprise me if the current HP management wouldn’t of been willing to pay the $3 billion for 3PAR either if they had that opportunity today. Well I’m glad HP has 3PAR — if for nothing else it kept them out of the hands of Dell. Their quarterly report today mentioned “triple digit growth” for the 3PAR platform, which in general is kind of confusing – I mean it seems most everyone is reporting massive storage growth — this can’t all be net new storage — someone has to be at the losing end of it — who ? HDS ? IBM ? (I haven’t noticed either talk too much about growth but I haven’t tried to look for their comments either). Maybe in 3PAR’s case most of their growth is at the expense of EVA(which should just go away), I haven’t tried to find details. From the folks I know at 3PAR it certainly seems like they can’t keep up with demand.
The news that they are killing WebOS is quite sad to me, it was a platform with a lot of promise, it just needed more work – I have no doubt they were short handed and rushed to market with many things which hurt them — but it was a choice, either release something now, as a sort of stop gap, or wait 6-12 or maybe even 18 months and release something good. You lose either way (at least until you have a polished end-to-end system) but I think the strategy they chose they “lost” less. You have to keep the news coming, the products coming etc.
I plan to keep my Touchpad myself, and if I see a fire sale on them will probably pick up more, it’s a good device, I’ve been using it pretty much daily for casual use since I bought it and really have very few complaints (even before the 3.0.2 OS upgrade).
If the Pre3 does come out in some form (un clear whether or not they ever manufactured it), I’ll try to pick up one/more of those as well – I’d assume no carriers will sign on to sell it, so the only way to really use it would be unlocked, on a GSM network. That is assuming that the device isn’t a total brick. I was happy with the functionality I got on my original Pre with WebOS 1.4, in some cases I’m not hard to please (hey – I’ve been running Linux as my primary Desktop since ~1997 if that gives you any idea). The 64GB “4G” Touchpad was supposed to launch soon, but now who knows – I suspect the launch will get canned.
Even if HP continued WebOS development I have no doubt the Pre3 would struggle to find relevance in the market given it’s late arrival. Most folks were expecting it months ago – the most recent estimations put it at mid September – right smack when the iPhone 5 is supposed to launch, as well as the free iPhone 3GS.
As time has gone on the Pre3 hardware has gone from looking really good to nothing special. Compound that with the fact that HP apparently wasn’t going to use the next generation WebOS 3.0 on the Pre3, instead using the older generation of WebOS software with a completely different SDK, I suppose it wouldn’t be too far fetched to say the Pre3 was going to be mostly DOA, performing no better(perhaps worse) than previous WebOS devices due to the poor timing of it’s release. I have struggled to try to think of why it was taking them so long to get the Pre3 out the door, especially since they weren’t going to use WebOS 3.
I’m not expecting anyone else to pick up WebOS — instead I think others will just mimic it’s functionality on their own platforms – sort of like how RIM did with the multitasking on their Playbook tablet.
What was more surprising to me in general was that tablets in general are not selling. As many people have said – there really isn’t much of a tablet market out there – there is an iPad market, but not much of a tablet market. I have read things recently that seem to indicate almost all of the Android tablets are faring even worse than the HP Touchpad was – Android as an aggregate has been doing fairly well but the individual companies pitching their tablets – the sales are quite poor in general (with a couple of standout exceptions), There’s gotta be what – 50+ different Android tablets on the market now?
I’m really too sad to be mad at this point, I have no regrets in buying into the platform – it’s more sad about seeing such a promising platform be killed prematurely.
I suppose I should end this on a positive note — the one thing HP did give WebOS was another chance, Palm was pretty much flat broke when HP bought them. So I thank HP for that…
UPDATE - Barely 24 hours after they kill the platform they launch the 64GB White Touchpad for a mere $599.
The 64GB "White" Touchpad - what they don't have Photoshop? Or maybe they just don't care.
I guess not everyone got the memo yet.
Jul/110
HP Touchpad – first thoughts and tips
TechOps Guy: Nate
I have been anticipating the release of the HP WebOS-based Touchpad for several months now. I picked one up yesterday at Best Buy shortly after they opened. As I expected there was no line around the block to get them, I got there about 10:45 (they opened at 10) and I believe was the first person to buy one, they hadn’t even unpacked the pallet yet. There was one other person there that was looking really closely at the Touchpad, other than that not many customers in the store.
I have been using it for a few hours and wanted to post a early review of it as well as a tip which seems to work around a bug related to copying files to the device (at least in Linux).
I’ll preface this by saying – I don’t like Apple, I don’t like Google, and am not that fond of Microsoft either. So that said, WebOS is a natural choice for me, and it was one of the reasons I decided to pick up a Palm Pre a couple of years ago(the other being the ability to run ‘classic’ PalmOS apps in an emulator – this option is no longer available on current models). Turns out the OS was quite a bit better than I was expecting and I came to like the software quite a bit.
I have spent probably a grand total of 10 minutes of time using the iPhone (from various friends), maybe 5 minutes using Android phones, and probably 3-5 minutes using an iPad 1. So I can’t speak from the angle of other products may be bad because of X, or WebOS is better than Y, because well I haven’t used them, and really have no plans to.
But what I can say is the Touchpad has actually exceeded my general expectations for the device, being a day 1 adopter (I think this is the first time I’ve ever bought something the day of it’s release normally I wait a few months at least). The reviews around the net were by no means very positive, so that kind of got my hopes down in the last couple days leading up to the release.
It’s a pretty snappy tablet, audio works really well, good web browser, has integrated skype (integrated so well I spent about 15 minutes trying to find the ‘skype’ app only to figure out it’s built into the messaging application). It also has the ability to integrate several different sources into your contacts, for me that is LinkedIn and Skype (it supports many others but I don’t use them). It’s really neat to see all of the contacts integrated in one place, if there are duplicates(different names from different sources) it handles them seamlessly.
Since I already had a Palm profile from my Pre, I re-used that and the Touchpad automatically synced all of the compatible applications from my phone (which is now retired because it’s on it’s deathbed) to the tablet. I had heard that some apps would be capable of “scaling up” to the higher resolution and others would run in a sort of emulation mode with a mini phone on the screen. To my surprise the apps that scaled up were the more complex games, rather than the simple applications. I was expecting the other way around.
I bought a bunch of apps and games in the HP app store to screw around with, also synced a bunch of music, photos and video to it to try out.
The media sync is where I ran into my first real issue IMO, but fortunately I believe I have figured a workaround (which is prompting this post in case it helps someone else).
I am using an Ubuntu Laptop as my source computer, so I don’t have a Mac or Windows system to test this with. The behavior that I see though is that there is a built in indexing system on WebOS that gives data to the local Palm-specific apps such as the Photos app and the Music app. I copied all of my MP3s over to the Touchpad, and the Music app saw nothing. I copied several hundred pictures over and the pictures app saw nothing. I rebooted the Touchpad just in case, nothing. I was doing the same process as I did on my Palm Pre which worked every time.
I ended up engaging support (there is a nice live chat on the touchpad itself), and chatted with them for about an hour or so, and didn’t really get anywhere. Then I saw a different behavior (I wasn’t doing anything different) when I unplugged the Touchpad from my laptop. Rather than gracefully going back to the main screen it paused for a while and said “OWW! That hurts! Next time please unmount the drive from the desktop.” or something like that before returning to the main screen. At that point the music and pictures started showing up (took a while to index it all).
That “OWW!” screen repeated several times during testing last night even though every time I sync’d the file system buffers and unmounted the volume before unplugging like I do with any USB device (I know sync’ing is done automatically during umount I do it out of habit).
This morning I copied over a couple thousand more pictures, and when I unplugged, I didn’t get that screen, and I didn’t get any new pictures showing up in the application. So what I ended up doing was plugging it in again, syncing the file system buffers and then unplugging it while it was still mounted, this caused the “OWW!” screen and then triggered the indexer – my pictures showed up.
It’s gotta be a bug of some kind of course, I saw something similar from a reviewer on PreCentral.
One thing I did look into was the VPN connectivity, since VPN support is built into the OS, I was eager to find out what kinds of VPNs were supported, and at this time at least only Cisco VPNs are supported. Though I plan to get something like OpenVPN installed to securely connect to my home network. Hopefully some of those web-based SSL VPNs work too.. I imagine with HP’s enterprise user base targets they will work to get as wide scale VPN support as possible.
Overall I’m quite happy with the device so far, it will be something fun to play around with. The only thing it is really lacking in my opinion (and I knew this going in) was a Mini/Micro SD slot for more storage. I can imagine it must be pretty trivial to have one on something this big. HP did make an agreement with some cloud company named box.net to give every Touchpad owner 50GB of free cloud storage for the duration you have a box.net account. My question is what would cause someone to lose a box.net account, I mean if your not paying for it how could you get to a point where you don’t have one?
Speaking of cloud I will be getting out of the cloud soon, I bought a more up to date server and just got it installed at a new co-location in the Bay Area. I was thinking again about off site backups, and looking at how much it would cost to back up 1.5TB to the “cloud” convinced me to go it alone once again, my new server has more than 3TB usable space with ESXi, and I will migrate everything to it in early August. I need to take it off line for a couple of days to do my initial sync, 1.5TB over a consumer broadband link is just not reasonable. Will write more about that project later.
Like pretty much all WebOS devices in order to get access to the underlying Linux OS there is no jail breaking, no hacking, no exploiting security holes, just type a simple code to enable developer mode, install some software on your computer (compatible with Linux, Mac, Windows) and type a command and you have a root shell.
One thing that I haven’t found yet that would be handy is a terminal application. I had one on my Pre a long time ago, not sure what it was called, didn’t find any on the Preware homebrew site, though I did install bash, and OpenSSH(client and server).
nate@nate-laptop:~$ novaterm
Spaz / # uname -a
Linux Spaz 2.6.35-palm-tenderloin #1 SMP PREEMPT 129.1.17 armv7l GNU/Linux
Spaz / # free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 941916 508700 433216 0 24496 141132
-/+ buffers/cache: 343072 598844
Swap: 524284 0 524284
Spaz / #
Some screen shots
Another tip: to reduce the default logging from debug to normal – use the phone application and call ##LOGS#, from that screen you can individually adjust logging levels for each application, looks very syslog-like.
Looking forward to the over the air updates HP says is coming soon to address some/many of the current software bugs with the device, I can’t help but think the launch Touchpads have probably not had software updates in 2-3 weeks since they started manufacturing them.
Looking forward to the Pre 3 as well, it will integrate with the Touchpad so you can do things like SMS, send/receive calls from the Touchpad through the Pre transparently via Bluetooth. What would be even cooler is if the Pre was able to share it’s GPS information with the Touchpad, since the Wifi-only version lacks a GPS. There is also the touch to share functionality which can transfer web urls between the Pre 3 and the Touchpad by touching them together.
True multitasking is nice as well, which has been native on WebOS since it’s inception. Since I so rarely touch the other platforms out there I keep forgetting that so few of them offer multitasking.
There is also a $50 mail in rebate for previous Palm Pre/Pixi owners, apparently all you need is a serial# from the original device, don’t need a receipt. Offer good until the end of July.
I’ve only been using it for a short time of course, but so far I like what I see, and still believe there are good things coming for WebOS. Especially given the situations that Nokia and RIM (especially RIM) seem to be in, there is a good opportunity for HP to capitalize on RIM’s scrambling to get their QNX stuff out the door, time will tell if they are able to execute or not and the level of commitment they have to the WebOS platform longer term. The smart phone, and tablet markets still have a tiny amount of market penetration, so it’s really a long term strategy.
I give it a thumbs up, though suggest if you are a particularly picky and impatient person and want to try the Touchpad, given what I’ve read on other reviews you may want to wait a month or two for first couple software updates to be released.
If your on the fence, and have the cash, go get it, you can always return it if it doesn’t work out. I bought mine at Best Buy and they seem to have a 14 day no questions asked return policy(not that I expect to return it).
Jun/112
Buy your HP Touchpad at…a Furniture store?
TechOps Guy: Nate
I’ve been a fan of WebOS since I got my Pre. Contrary to what some may believe I had never owned a Palm product prior to that. Although I do have a pair of Handspring Visors which was pretty much a better palm than palm back in the day, eventually they got bought out by Palm.
I’ve been awaiting the release of both the HP TouchPad and the Pre 3 for some time now. I almost pre ordered the Touchpad then figured I will just go buy it when it comes out in a local store, like most, I am not expecting a line around the block of people waiting to buy it on the first day like your typical Apple product.
For no particular reason I was browsing the Palm site (aka hpwebos.com) and saw a list of the official places you can pre order the Touchpad.
Much to my surprise, was what seems to be a big furniture store out in Nebraska. Nebraska Furniture Mart – America’s Largest Home Furnishings Store.
I’ve never been to that part of the country so maybe it’s not uncommon, maybe it’s the only place people have in Nebraska to buy electronics from?
I mean of all the places to sell some new piece of technology. I realize now after looking at their site they have an electronics section(which I can’t view because I declined their cookie requests), but still of all the places to launch a product…….
I look at the TouchPad myself is mainly a toy, something to play with, maybe I’ll find some good uses for it with work I’m not sure. Would be nice to see support for wide ranging VPN options as well as perhaps native versions of various HP management tools (looking at you 3PAR). To those out there that say your better off with a notebook or netbook, I agree. I already have a netbook and a notebook.
Apr/110
Palm Pixis as PDA/Media player
TechOps Guy: Nate
So my pair of Palm Pixi Pluses arrived yesterday. I’m by no means a hardware hacker, have never really had a whole lot of interest in “breaking in” to my systems unless I really needed to (e.g. replace Tivo hard drive that is out of warranty).
Palm Pixi Plus for Verizon
I have read a lot over the years how friendly the WebOS platform is to “hacking”. For one you don’t have to root the device, there is an official method to enable developer mode at which point you can install whatever you want.
First thing I wanted to do was upgrade the OS software to the latest revision, the units shipped with 1.4.0, latest is 1.4.5. Given Palm is working on WebOS 2 and WebOS 3, I’m not really expecting any more major updates to WebOS 1. Upgrading was very painless, just download WebOS Doctor for your version/phone/carrier and run it, it re-flashes the phone with the full operating system, then reboots it.
One of the things I didn’t really think of when I ordered my Pixis were the fact that they would require activation in order to use (on initial boot it prompts to call Verizon to register, and of course I am not a Verizon customer and have no intention of using these as Phones).
Fear not though, after a few minutes of research turns up an official tool to bypass this registration process, and is really easy to use:
nate@nate-laptop:~/Downloads$ java -jar devicetool.jar Found device: pixie-bootie Copying ram disk................ Rebooting device... Configuring device... File descriptor 3 (socket:[1587]) leaked on lvm.static invocation. Parent PID 947: novacomd Reading all physical volumes. This may take a while... Found volume group "store" using metadata type lvm2 File descriptor 3 (socket:[1587]) leaked on lvm.static invocation. Parent PID 947: novacomd 6 logical volume(s) in volume group "store" now active File descriptor 3 (socket:[1587]) leaked on lvm.static invocation. Parent PID 947: novacomd 0 logical volume(s) in volume group "store" now active Rebooting device... Device is ready.
So now I have the latest OS, and I have bypassed registration (which also includes turning on developer mode by default). I do lose some functionality in this mode such as:
- No access to online software updates (don’t care)
- No access to Palm App Catalog (not the end of the world)
I had installed OpenSSH on my Pre in the past (though never tested it), this time around I was looking how to get a shell on the Pixi, and looked high and low on how to get SSH on it, to no avail (the documentation is gone, and I can’t find any ssh packages for some reason). Anyways in the end it didn’t really matter because I could just use novaterm, another official Palm tool to get root access, I mean it doesn’t get much simpler than this:
nate@nate-laptop:~$ novaterm root@palm-webos-device:/# df -h Filesystem Size Used Available Use% Mounted on rootfs 441.7M 394.8M 46.9M 89% / /dev/root 31.0M 11.3M 19.7M 37% /boot /dev/mapper/store-root 441.7M 394.8M 46.9M 89% / /dev/mapper/store-root 441.7M 394.8M 46.9M 89% /dev/.static/dev tmpfs 2.0M 152.0k 1.9M 7% /dev /dev/mapper/store-var 248.0M 22.7M 225.3M 9% /var /dev/mapper/store-log 38.7M 4.6M 34.1M 12% /var/log tmpfs 64.0M 160.0k 63.8M 0% /tmp tmpfs 16.0M 28.0k 16.0M 0% /var/run tmpfs 97.9M 0 97.9M 0% /media/ram cryptofs 6.4G 549.6M 5.8G 8% /media/cryptofs /dev/mapper/store-media 6.4G 549.6M 5.8G 8% /media/internal
I don’t think I will need to access the shell beyond this initial configuration so I am not going to bother with SSH going forward.
I have a bunch of Apps and games on my Palm Pre and wanted to try to transfer them to my Pixis. I was hoping for an ipkg variation of dpkg-repack but was unable to find such a thing, so I had to resort to good ‘ol tar/gzip. All of the apps (as far as I can tell) are stored in /media/cryptofs/apps. So I tarred up that directory on my Pre and transferred it to my first Pixi and overwrote the apps directory on it, then rebooted to see what happened.
It worked, really much better than I had expected. Several of the games (especially the more fancy ones) did not work, I suspect because of the different screen size, a couple of the other fancy games started up, but the edges of the screen were clipped. There are probably Pixi versions for many of them, but that wasn’t a big deal, all of the apps worked.
I put the phone in Airplane mode to disable the 3G radio, installed a few patches (which modify system behavior) , and a few more free apps/games via WebOS Quick Install. Copied over some music to test it out, works awesome. The speakers on the Pixi sound really good in my opinion.
After the apps are installed there is roughly 6.3-6.5 GB of available storage for media.
Only thing missing? Touchstone charging, the custom case to support that looks like it starts at $20, I already have 3 touchstone docks, if I did not, that runs $50.
The UI in WebOS is really great, with full multi tasking, a great notification system, and has everything integrated really well.
Having all of these apps, some games, full wifi (which I can use on 3G/4G with the Sprint Mifi that I have), media playback abilities, a keyboard, nice resolution screen, camera with flash, GPS, user replaceable battery, no carrier contracts, all for $40 ?! I really wish I did buy more than two.
Really looking forward to the Pre 3 and the Touchpad.
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