News Reporter

Hear ye, hear ye. To all that be present at this reading, it is with great exhilaration and felicity that her majesty the most majestic Lady of the webOS announces the bestowal upon this great webOS Nation of a gift to be apportioned amongst its denizens both loyal and magniloquent. The elements of this most gracious of endowments are many, and are comprised of but not restricted to the following items of note: Smartphones of times past and smartphones of times present and smartphones of times unknown. Many mystical pods of power transfer, A tablet, but of bewitched design with the ability to conjure information from afar. The conventions by which these most plentiful of tokens shall be disbursed has not yet been imparted; the Lady of the webOS requests your presense in the coming days at this same digital venue of bulletins and forums for the recitation of further instructions. Petitioners seeking pecuniary acquisition of or bartering for these charitable offerings for the citizens of the great kingdom of the webOS Nation shall be summarily denied and excoriated with severity. So endeth this proclamation from her majesty the most majestic Lady of the webOS, Queen of All She Multitasks. View the full article

If you need to set an alarm on your smartphone, there are quite a few ways to accomplish this task. You can create a calendar entry at the time you need the alarm to go off, you can use third party apps like Power Nap, or you can just use the built-in functionality on webOS to create an alarm through the Clock app. While this is available on both webOS phones and the TouchPad, the steps are slightly different between the two types of hardware. But overall, the process is relatively the same. To set an alarm on your device: Open the "Clock" app on the device. Tap the icon on the bottom of the screen to switch to alarm view. On phones, you may need to tap the screen one time for this to become visible Type the "New Alarm" button on the TouchPad or the + button on the bottom-left of the screen on phones to view the "Alarm Preferences" screen to create a new alarm Edit the alarm details, including the alarm name, frequency, time, and ringtone sound, as well indicating if you want this alarm to be enabled by default. If you select Enabled = OFF, it will still create the alarm but you will need to turn it on in the future. Once done, tap the "Done" button on the TouchPad or swipe-back on phones to save the alarm Your alarm will be added to a listing of available alarms. If this if your first time creating an alarm, it will obviously be the only one there. But you can add multiple alarms and then flip the ON/OFF switch as necessary to activate or deactivate it or tap on any alarm to edit it. If you want to delete the alarm, simple swipe-to-delete the alarm and then confirm the deletion. Be aware that the alarm will use the volume setting in the Sound & Ringtones app. So, be sure to set the volume at an appropriate level to ensure you hear the alarm when it goes off. There is also a setting available in the Clock app that will allow you to either use or bypass mute switch on phones or the mute option on the TouchPad, so the alarm will still sound even if the system sounds are muted. To access this setting, swipe-down from the top-left of the screen while in the Clock app and choose "Preferences" from the dropdown menu. Be sure that the "Ringer switch off" option on phones or the "When Sounds is Muted" option on the TouchPad is set how you want it. View the full article

If you are a Star Trek fan and have ever owned a webOS phone with a slide out keyboard, chances are that you have been reminded of the old school communicators from the original Star Trek series whenever you slid open or closed the keyboard. If you want to take your Star Trek geekery to the next level, you need to install Star Trek Communicator, by Nate Craddock. Star Trek Communicator is free in the official App Catalog and allows you to turn your phone into a communicator, tricorder, medical scanner or phaser from the original series, complete with fun animations and sound clips from the show. But where this app really shines is in the communicator mode. When you can swipe up or down on the screen to "turn on" the communicator, the app makes the appropriate activation sound and you press some of the on-screen button to hear sound clips from members of the Enterprise crew. Swipe up or down again and to turn the communicator off. The app can also activate or deactivate the communicator--along with associated beeps and sounds--by simply sliding the keyboard open or shut, respectively, assuming your phone has a slide out keyboard (in other words, you are out of luck if you own a Pixi). And with the beauty of the way multitasking works on webOS, the app does not even need to be active for it to work. So, just leave the Communicator running in the background and every time you open or close the keyboard you get to pretend that your webOS phone is from the 23rd century! Want a little extra fun with the app? Go to the phaser section and use the sliding wheel on the bottom-left of the screen to set your phaser to the maximum setting. Wait about 30 seconds and be ready for bit of a boom. Star Trek: Communicator is available in the webOS App Catalog for free and is compatible with all webOS devices running webOS 1.4.5 or higher. Live long and prosper. View the full article

Last month we showed you how - if you want to - to make an iPhone look and behave more like webOS. We know that not everybody's going to stick with webOS through the very thin times ahead, and we don't blame you. For most of us, smartphones are tools. They're tools that we need to function and to keep up with our ever evolving needs. There's no guarantee that webOS is going to do that, with the last official updates well over a year in the past and progress on porting Open webOS to new hardware understandably a slow endeavour. The iPhone is a legitimate contender for switching, but making iOS be more like webOS is a project in and of itself. And while there are benefits to the locked-down nature of the iPhone, those of us that have been homebrewing on webOS for years now might not be comfortable in that arena. But what about our open source Linux-based cousin, Android? Well, that's a mighty bit easier. Turns out, Android actually has a lot in common with webOS right out of the gate. That's in no small part to Google's successful poaching of former webOS design lead Matias Duarte. He brought a lot of his design mojo to Android, implementing a lot of what we've come to love about webOS into Android. But it's different, and that takes some getting used to. read more View the full article

All webOS smartphones are, at their core, a phone. So it's only fitting that you know how to answer a phone call when one is received or you will be unable to utilize one of the most basic functions of the device. And because answering a phone call is such an important feature, you are actually given quite a few different ways to perform this action. As long as you can hopefully remember at least one of these options, you should never have to miss answering a call. And keep in mind that certain models of webOS phones--such as those with a slide-out keyboard--give you even more options, so make sure you know exactly what your specific type of hardware is capable of when reviewing the different options below If you have a PIN or password set in the Screen & Lock app and you have currently passed the "Lock After" timeframe and you can an incoming call, the caller ID will display at the top of the screen with the caller's name and number, and you will have an icon on the bottom of the screen. Just as when your phone is normally locked and you turn on the screen, just drag that icon up above the "Drag up to answer" line to answer the call or do nothing to ignore it. If you are currently using your phone or the password "Lock after" time has not been reached, then you should be presented with a notification on the bottom of the screen with the caller ID info and then two buttons: a green button to answer and a red button to ignore the call. Just tap the green button to answer. Note that if you swiped up from the notification area to minimize it, just can still tap on the notification the dashboard to answer the call For those phones with a slide-out keyboard, which would include any of the phones in the Pre-series or the Veer, you can also slide open the keyboard to answer the call. No fumbling with on-screen buttons necessary Finally, if the phone is Touchstone-enabled and is currently charging on a Touchstone when a call is received, you simply need to pick up the phone from the charging dock to answer the call. And don't forget that you always silence or ignore an incoming call by pressing the power button once or twice, respectively, if you do not want to actually answer the call. Also, if you have your phone paired with an HP TouchPad and set up to receive phone calls, you will get a similar option at #2 above where you just have to press the green answer button in the phone call notification to answer it. View the full article

Mobile Nations Podcast Feed Mobile Nations on iTunes Mobile Nations YouTube Debug 11: Don Melton and WebKit and Safari Iterate 43: Pocket Casts and going Android first Confirmed: Nexus 4 shipping with updated design The Google Watch with Google Now - A wearable computer for the present Ouya consoles now shipping to Kickstarter backers CrackBerry Vodcast 002: Better than expected! Thorsten Heins brings BlackBerry back in black BBM Stress Apr 1st at 12 Noon EDT. Be there!! Best Buy offering prepaid Verizon Palm Pre 2 contract-free for $51.99 Prevent autodial with No Call patches T-Mobile USA to begin selling iPhone on April 12 for $99, no contract AT&T vs Verizon vs T-Mobile vs Sprint: Which iPhone 5 carrier should you choose? iMore live at GDC 2013 Microsoft releasing Temple Run and five more games today for Windows Phone 8 AT&T Nokia Lumia 920 1308 firmware update is now available Which countries is Windows Phone outselling the iPhone? View the full article

This tip is only for HP TouchPads running webOS 3.0.5 and LunaCE 4.9.5 or higher Ever since the original Palm Pre was released running webOS 1.0.1, any time you tapped on the screen of a webOS device you would see a "tap ripple" animation to indicate the location of your tap. While it may be nice to know where you tapped on the screen, it can also cause a slight bit of lag on your device, especially in high frame-rate PDK applications. Unfortunately, you have never had any control over the presence of the tap ripple until the release of LunaCE for the HP TouchPad, the homebrew update for the TouchPad by WebOS Ports based off the Open Source "webOS Community Edition" (not to be confused with Open webOS). With a simple toggle in the homebrew Tweaks application, you can now turn the ripple on or off at will. Note that LunaCE is currently in beta so you will need to go through the process to set-up the beta feeds in Preware, which can be found at testing.preware.org. In addition, you will need to have Tweaks installed on your TouchPad to toggle this new feature. Once you have both of them installed, you just need to go to the "Gestures" section of Tweaks and toggle "SHOW TAP RIPPLE" to NO to turn off the tap ripple. View the full article

Use coupon HOP13 at checkout to save 15% on ALL webOS accessories Take me to the webOS Nation Store and let the savings begin! View the full article

This tip is only for webOS phones running webOS 2.1 and higher Whenever you tap a phone number within webOS, be it from a contact record, a missed call notification or the call log, the phone app will automatically load up and dial that number for you. While this may be a convenient feature to quickly dial that number, it can also lead to some accidental (and potentially awkward) situations for when you didn't intent to call that person. Luckily, homebrew developer Herrie has created a trio of patches that will interrupt this process and instead of actually dialing the number, it will just prefill the number into the dialer. You will still need to press the big dial button in the Phone app to initiate the call, and you can even edit the number before calling if you need to. Just install any or all of the "No AutoDial from Contacts", "No Missed Call Callback" or "No Autodial from Call Log" patches from Preware or webOS Quick Install and you should be good to go. Just remember that any time you try to dial a number, even if it's from a Just Type search or by using speed dial, you will still need to press that call button. That extra step takes some getting used to, as you will find yourself immediately putting the phone up to your ear after tapping a phone number and realize that your ear or cheek has continued to dial additional numbers. View the full article

If you're looking to cut costs on your cell phone contract and maybe upgrade from a beaten old Pre or Pre Plus, you might want to turn some attention to Best Buy and Verizon, as they have a Verizon Palm Pre 2 available contract-free for Verizon's prepaid system for the low low price of just $51.99. That sort of rock-bottom pricing doesn't come around often, even for two-year-old long-canceled smartphones like the Pre 2. There's no immediate indication that this Pre 2 is locked into only Verizon's prepaid service. Verizon actually allows you to bring any Verizon device onto prepaid, and there's nothing about this phone that says it wouldn't work the other way around too. Considering that these Pre 2 smartphones are likely excess stock that Big Red has been trying to unload for the better part of a two years, there likely hasn't been any reprogramming to lock them onto prepaid either. Verizon just wants them out of the warehouse, and Best Buy is all too happy to oblige. Prepaid service for a smartphone like the Pre 2 through Verizon will run you $60 a month for unlimited talk and text with 500MB of data, while another $10 will net you a 2GB data allotment. Not only is the $51.99 Pre 2 through Best Buy the cheapest smartphone offered for Verizon prepaid, it's a damn good price if you were looking to pick up a spare device or two should things go south with your current webOS smartphone. We'd actually say, if not for the fact that it comes with minimal support from HP and app developers, it'd qualify by far as the best smartphone offered on Verizon prepaid, either directly from the carrier or Best Buy. The other smartphones? The Samsung Illusion, running Android 2.3 under curved glass (while the Pre 2 went away from curved surfaces); the HTC Rhyme, notable as HTC's edearingly foolish attempt to create a smartphone "for women" with a silly "Charm Call indicator" meant to hang out of your purse and flash purple when you've got alerts, and the not-that-old-but-still-old-school BlackBerry Curve 9310. Against this motley crew, the Verizon Palm Pre 2 almost stands out as a value superstar. View the full article

Don Melton, former Engineering Director of Internet Technologies at Apple, talks to Guy and Rene about assembler on the Apple II, open-sourcing Mozilla, building Nautilus, creating WebKit and the Safari browser, teaching bears to dance, and cleaning cusses from code bases. type="audio/mpeg"> Subscribe in iTunes Subscribe in RSS Download Directly Show notes Bitsplitting Podcast Episode 1: Guy English Code Rush documentary Nautilus file manager WebKit.org Safari Keeping Safari a secret Safari is released to the world Why I retired from Apple Regarding fake projects and loyalty tests Guests Don Melton of donmelton.com Hosts Guy English of Kicking Bear Rene Ritchie of iMore.com Feedback Yell at us via the Twitter accounts above (or the same names on ADN). Loudly. View the full article

This tip is only for the HP TouchPad running webOS 3.0 or higher The Messaging app on the HP TouchPad allows you to consolidate all your instant messaging needs into a single app, even including text messages received from a paired cell phone. As you would expect, any time you receive a new message that TouchPad will notify you, either by a vibration or by playing a sound, depending on your sound or notification preferences. However, there is one annoying quirk of the app in that any time you send a message, it will also make a vibration or a sound. There is really no good reason for this, as you would already know that you were sending a message and wouldn't need an alert for it. In typical webOS community fashion, the homebrew community--specifically homebrew-extraordinaire Jason Robitaille--created a simple patch to prevent the TouchPad from alerting you whenever you send a message in the Messaging app. Just install the "No vibrate or sound on messaging send" patch from Preware or webOS Quick Install and you will never be annoyed by those unnecessary alerts again! View the full article

Mobile Nations Podcast Feed Mobile Nations on iTunes Mobile Nations YouTube Debug 10: Tammy Coron of Nickelfish and the iMore app Iterate 42: Marcus Adolfsson, David Lunblad and CrackBerry 10 HTC One Review Eric Schmidt: Chrome and Android to remain separate Note taking app Google Keep now available in Google Play and on the web CrackBerry video interview with BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins! The first ten things to do with your new BlackBerry Z10 BlackBerry Travel now available for BlackBerry 10 Switching to iPhone? Here's how to make it more like webOS Infinite card cycling with LunaCE Swinging for the stars: On Apple's hiring of Kevin Lynch How to enable two-step verification for your Apple ID WTF does Eric Schmidt want us to "ask Apple" about Google Now for iOS? iMore show 341: Boring, still a phone (with Clayton Morris of Fox News) Pandora for Windows Phone 8 is now available and we go hands on Upcoming AT&T Nokia Lumia 920 firmware update shows up on Navifirm, preparing for launch Sprint launches Windows Phone 8 landing page, signs of what's yet to come View the full article

As much as we love webOS, we know there's plenty of reason to move on to other platforms. Progress on the webOS Ports porting to other devices is going to be slow by the very nature of the open source work, and we have no guarantee that LG's ever going to bring webOS to smartphones or tablets again. Eventually our Pres and Veers and Pixis will stop working, eventually HP will shut down the cloud servers, eventually we'll have to start looking at what the other options are out there. When it comes to the multitasking prowess of webOS, there's still no equal, in our less than humble opinion. So what if you're looking at an iPhone? Is double clicking the home button to see the icons of your running apps really going to do it for you? We think not. Thankfully, webOS Nation Forum member i_maq dug through the iOS jailbreak scene (jailbreak? how sad they have to call it that) to find all the additions you'll need to make iOS look and behave more like webOS. i_maq found a number of useful installs, including enabling webOS-style app cards, gestures to switch between apps, a JustType kinda-sorta-clone, individually-dismissible notifications, and even rounded corners! Of course, if you're going to jailbreak your iPhone you're going to have to know how to do that. Thankfully, our friends over at our iPhone-obsessed sister site iMore know all about that and have detailed how-tos that explain exactly what you need to know and need to do. We know that many of you have switched to iOS already (your friendly neighborhood editor-in-chief actually has an iPhone on one of his lines - don't judge). Those of you that have, did homebrew spoil you to the point where doing this was but a foregone conclusion? And those that are considering a switch - does this sway you in any way? Sound off in the comments. View the full article

In the wake of the news that Google intends to shut down one of our most beloved services in the form of Google Reader this summer. We're as devastated as you are. While a number of outfits were quick to state their intention to pick up the mantle and run with it in one for or another, getting them to make a webOS app is another matter. But… there are already apps for webOS that will let you get your RSS on. One such app - Headlines 2 by The CodingBees - brings you your RSS feeds and includes handy features for TouchPad users like background syncing, offline article caching, optimized reading modes, and more. Plus we've got 100 copies to give away, all you have to do to have a chance at winning is submit a comment after the break! Contest: We have 100 copies of Headlines 2 to give away. Just leave a comment on this post to enter. Contest ends next Sunday at midnight US Eastern Time, after which time we will select 100 random entrants to win. Please only leave one comment, multiple entries won’t count. Promo codes are only valid in countries serviced by the App Catalog, and users must be running webOS 3.0.4 or higher with the latest version of the App Catalog. View the full article

This tip is only for HP TouchPads running webOS 3.0.5 and LunaCE 4.9.5 or higher Using cards in webOS has always been a great way to multitask on a mobile operating system and works just as well on the TouchPad as well. However, if you have a lot of cards or stacks open, you may find yourself doing a lot scrolling to find that app you want. If you have installed LunaCE--the homebrew update for the TouchPad by WebOS Ports based off the Open Source "webOS Community Edition" (not to be confused with Open webOS)--you can enable mini-card view or set your own card zoom level to see more open cards at once. Another option that LunaCE gives you is the ability to loop through your cards, so you can keep scrolling when you get to the last card to bring up the first card. It also works in reverse, where you can scroll continue to scroll to the right after you have reached the first cad and it will bring you to the end of the list. Note that LunaCE is currently in beta so you will need to go through the process to set-up the beta feeds in Preware, which can be found at testing.preware.org. In addition, you will need to have Tweaks installed on your TouchPad to toggle this new feature. Once you have both of them installed, you just need to go to the "Luna" section of Tweaks and toggle "Infinite card cycling" to YES in the "CARDS" section to activate this feature. View the full article

Mobile Nations Podcast Feed Mobile Nations on iTunes Mobile Nations YouTube Iterate 41: Doug Russell and accessibility Samsung Unpacked / Galaxy S4 Google I/O 2013 Tickets sell out in less than an hour Andy Rubin leaving the Android team, Chrome boss Sundar Pichai to take over BlackBerry Partner Purchases One Million BlackBerry 10 Smartphones WhatsApp for BlackBerry 10 now available Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile ready for the Blackberry Z10 Preware Enyo alpha hits Preware feeds WebOS Quick Install 4.5.0 goes open source Get real-time Twitter updates in exhibition mode with Flixi The "iPhone 5S" problem iPhone 5 vs HTC One iPhone and iPad new user guide iMore show 340: Nerd Talking Windows Phone 9 in testing with Nokia, HTC and Qualcomm hardware Microsoft rolls out Flash and firmware update for Windows 8, Surface devices Galactic Reign becomes the first 'universal' Xbox game for Windows Phone and Windows 8 View the full article

Saint Patrick's Day falls on a Sunday this year, so we're going to celebrate all weekend long here at webOS Nation with a webOS Nation Store sale!! Until Sunday, Midnight PST, you can save 15% on ALL accessories by using coupon code shamrocks at checkout. Take me to the webOS Nation Store View the full article

This tip is only for devices running webOS 2.0 and higher If you create or edit documents with your webOS devices, you have a few third party applications available to you over and above the stock Memos app. One of these options is TapNote by One Crayon that will give you a single app solution that will work on any device running webOS 1.4.5 or higher (including the TouchPad) and will even sync your documents across all your webOS devices providing that you have a Dropbox account. It also takes advantage of Just Type Quick Actions (requires webOS 2.0 or higher) that allows you to create a new document directly from Just Type. While document sync and Quick Action support are not unique to text editor apps, TapNote appears to be one of the only document editing apps that will allow you to append text to an existing document from Just Type. So, if you already have a document created and synced on your device, you can simply add to that document by typing in your text entry in the Just Type bar and then selecting the Tap Note "Quick Note..." Quick Action, providing that you had previously added TapNote as an available Quick Action . A pop-up screen will appear that will allow you create a new document with that text or "Append to" an existing one. On phones, you need to tap the "Append To Document..." button to be given a list of available documents, while the TouchPad will already display the list of available documents. Once you choose the document, it will open up with the next text added to the bottom. As mentioned above, in order for this to work the document needs to have already been created or synced to the device prior to adding to it. If you created or edited it on another device, you will need to open up the full TapNotes app and perform a sync to download it to the device before you can append text to it. TapNote (all devices) is available in the webOS App Catalog for $5 and is compatible with all webOS devices running webOS 1.4.5 or higher. You can also try TapNote Lite for free to try out the app, but will have some limited functionality. View the full article

The long-awaited Enyo rewrite of Preware is here, at least in an alpha form. Version 2.0.1 of Preware has landed in the WebOS Internals feed alpha feed in Preware, offering an Alpha look of how Preware will look and operate as an Enyo app. The old Mojo-based version of Preware launched more than three years ago and despite numerous upgrades never moved away from that legacy codebase. With Open webOS no longer support the old Mojo framework, the time was now to rebuild Preware with Enyo. Right now the Preware 2.0.1 alpha works in the most basic of senses. As developer Josh "shiftyaxel" Palmer points out, the alpha currently supports the installation, updating, removal, and launching of apps, patches, themes, everything else Preware has traditionally supported and not much more. Being an alpha, it's still in need of testing, so if you're trying out the Enyo Preware you're encouraged to share any bugs you encounter with the WebOS Ports bug tracker. Being an alpha release, you'll need to enable the testing feeds in Preware (if you're going to turn on the alpha feeds you might as well hit the beta feeds while you're at it). And, as always, we'll encourage you if you haven't recently to consider making a donation to WebOS Internals and WebOS Ports - these organizations are dependent on your generosity to bring the webOS homebrew works you love to life. View the full article