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In addition to today's release of the core apps and LunaSysMgr for Open webOS, we got some news that's both surprising and heartbreaking: Open webOS will not support existing webOS devices. According to today's blog post on the Open webOS Project Blog, the development team is "aiming for support on future hardware platforms where SoC's [system-on-chips] support Linux 3.3+ kernel and where open source replacements for proprietary components are integrated. Existing devices cannot be support because of those many proprietary components, including graphics, networking and lack of drivers for a modern kernel". Feel like you just got punched in the gut? Yeah, us to. Despite being a modification and enhancement of the existing webOS, Open webOS will not be able to support any existing webOS devices, including the most-recently-released TouchPad and Pre3. Reasoning? Their processors don't support the Linux Standard Kernel nor are there complete open source replacements for hardware component drivers. If you were hoping to run Open webOS on your TouchPad, you're going to have to rely on the community to get it done, not HP. We're not at all thrilled with this decision. HP already has access to the proprietary drivers for the TouchPad, Pre3, and a whole slew of webOS devices and could put together a release of Open webOS for those devices. But yet again, HP's made the decision to neglect off a small but loyal customer base in favor of pursuing bigger dreams. We understand that the resources available to the Open webOS team are limited - certainly much more limited than they were eighteen months ago when HP decided not to bother finishing a webOS 2.0 update for older Pre and Pixi devices and buried it under the news of the TouchPad, Veer, and Pre3 announcements - but this pattern of dumping on those who have stuck with the platform isn't the makings for continuing loyalty. People love webOS, but they can only put up with being slighted for so long. As pointed out in the blog post, there is at least the webOS Community Edition release for us to tinker with for existing devices (i.e. the TouchPad), which included the older version of the LunaSysMgr as released in webOS 3.0.5. Today's announcement crystallizes the Community Edition's reason for existence: it was a pre-appeasment meant to be there, ready for this news, so HP can say, "But we already gave you that! Isn't that enough?" There are two things to keep in mind moving forward. One: there's a large and growing number of Android devices out there that offer support for the Linux Standard Kernel 3.3, and given the number of devices supported by the open source CyanogenMod Android project there are plenty of drivers available for those components. Two: The webOS homebrew community cannot and will not be held back. They've already started working on the webOS Community Edition release of LunaSysMgr to see how well they can get it to work on the Pre3, and it'll only be a matter of time before they figure out how to get the goodness of Open webOS to work on our current webOS devices, HP be damned. View the full article

Just about all of the board games and basic computer games have made the full leap to the smartphone and tablet space. But in that translation some of those games just turned out to not be so exciting. What's a game developer to do? Combine them! That's what BdR Games did with their app Snake Slider, a combination of the classic parking lot shuffle game and the old school arcade snake game. The goal is relatively simple: move the yellow snakes around the level to create a clear path for the green snake, but as you go there are complications - like snake-extending apples, moveable blocks, and canal-style locks. All-in, the one hundred puzzles of Snake Slider cost $0.99 for webOS smartphones and tablets (that's less than a penny a level!), but if you comment below, you might just get one of a hundred copies for free! Contest: We have 100 copies of Snake Slider 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 2.0 or higher with the latest version of the App Catalog. View the full article

A little change this week for the Monday Brief as our normal host, the adventurous Ashley Esqueda, is off in London right now taking in the London 2012 Olympic Games. No, you'll not see her on any diving boards or dressaging any horses herself but you can check her adventures on the her Samsung Global Blogger page. The show as they say though, must go on so go ahead and check out what's been happening around Mobile Nations below. Mobile Nations Podcast Feed Mobile Nations on iTunes Mobile Nations YouTube Android NFC 'hacking' is ingenious, but not yet dangerous Apple's earnings call is a sign that the lawsuits can never stop Samsung restores local search on international Galaxy S3 with new OTA Photo editing options getting revamped for BlackBerry 10 RIM preparing BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.1 rollout as PlayBook 4G launch nears Video Store for the BlackBerry PlayBook now available in Canada Microsoft, HP, webOS, and the contract that complicates future HP webOS hardware App Review: Audio Headlines Did HP show off an upcoming tablet in a new commercial? OS X Mountain Lion now available, and what it means for iOS users AT&T vs Verizon: Which shared data plan should you get? Siri: The ultimate guide Windows Phone 8 SDK Preview: Application platform overview and Windows 8 APIs Windows Phone Central visits Microsoft headquarters Microsoft Surface Tablets priced over $1000? Not so fast... View the full article

Sometimes HP does okay with advertising, sometimes they do poorly, and sometimes they shoot for the aspirational and miss the mark. The latest sixty-second spot from HP (after the break) does a bit of all three, and in typical HP fashion has done little to explain to me why I should want, let alone buy, HP's gear. But what it did do was show off something we haven't seen much of to this point: a new HP tablet. Seen only from the rear and twice in the commercial (once from afar and barely on the screen around 0:34, and again up close at 0:56), the tablet appears to be in the 10-inch screen-size ballpark and has a metal body with a big black plastic antenna window along one side. Even though the glances are brief, we're kind of getting an 'Envy' vibe from the tablet. Seeing as there's no seeing of the front, there's no telling what software the tablet's running. If we had to guess, it's probably got an Intel chip running Windows 8. But fear not, webOS fan, for all it takes is one recollection of HP's decision to use the Linux Standard Kernel in Open webOS for us to conjure the possibility that this hardware could also run the upcoming open source successor to webOS. Or it could just be HP's mad men making things up, as they're prone to do… read more View the full article

Notes HD, by Inglorious Apps, is the TouchPad version of the popular Notes text editor app. Completely rewritten in Enyo, Notes HD features most of the same features from its little brother, such as Google Doc sync, but also has a few additional tricks up its sleeve. One such upgrade includes the ability to password protect categories of articles. In the left sliding pane that shows the listing of Folders, you can press-and-hold on any category to edit it. In addition to changing the name and color of the folder, you can also toggle the "LOCKED" option to YES to set a password. Tap "Save" once done Once a password is set, you will need to enter it every time you change to that folder in the app. Just don't forget your password, because you will not be able to access that folder within the app if you do. However, it's important to know that your password is only for on-device protection. If you have online syncing enabled, you will still be able to access your notes via the online service without needing your password. Noted HD is available in the webOS App Catalog for $1.99 and is compatible with all webOS devices running webOS 3.0.0 or higher View the full article

We're sad to report that longtime friend of the site, webOS community activist, and webOS developer relations guru Lisa 'Adora' Brewster is leaving HP. Lisa joined HP in October of 2009 after organizing the PreDevCamp series, taking up a position in the Developer Relations department where she managed everything from app approval and developer technical support to actually creating the review policies and standards for the App Catalog. More recently, Lisa dodged the layoffs axe and transitioned over the the Enyo team in February 2012 where she took on the roll of Technical Marketing Manager, working on building developer support for the Enyo application framework. Said Lisa in her departure announcement: As a friend who’s been ex-Palm for longer than I’ve worked here once told me, Palm DNA is strong. Employees will come and go like so many renewed cells in a body, and they will continue to make amazing products. Enyo 2 exited beta just last week, which marks a new beginning for web developers to bring this DNA beyond webOS, same as I’ll bring this DNA with me. I will always consider myself a friend of the Enyo project, and will continue to support and promote Enyo developers as I can. While we don't expect Lisa to drop off the face of the Earth (or Twitter, for that matter), we are still sad to see her leaving webOS. Lisa was one of a handful of employees that had been with Palm through all its trials and stuck with it through thick, thin, and thinner. She's always a respected voice in the community, both on behalf of Palm and HP and as a mobile enthusiast in her own right. That's not to mention her work as part of the Developer Relations Team, where she was tireless in her support of those developers, even if it meant butting heads with the higher-ups to make things right. So revered and respected is Lisa that she got her own bobble head app (which she of course immediately approved and published to the App Catalog). So where's Lisa off to now? She hasn't confirmed her next destination, but a source close to the situation has told us that Lisa Brewster's next stop is going to be at Mozilla, where she'll be in charge of the Firefox OS app store. They'll be lucky to have her. View the full article

Do you have that Karate Kid inside you? Are you ready to train to defeat your foe and master the shuriken? You must maintain balance and harmony, but be quick as the rabbit, and quiet as the wind. In Ninja Camp you can become a ninja star able to slice wood in a single throw. read more View the full article

If you were hoping to get yourself out to Sunnyvale, California, for next weekend's Enyo Hackathon at the Palm Campus, well, you waited too long to go through the simple registration process. Don't you feel silly? As announced today on Twitter, the event's free tickets have all been claimed. Exactly how many tickets that is, HP's not saying, though we imagine it's a good many that will be in attendance on Saturday, August 4th. The all-day event will feature presentations by notable webOS developers like Hal Saville and Ryan Rix, hours of developer hack-a-thon-ing, and of course pizza, prizes, drinks, and the like. In addition to the public schedule, HP Developer Relations manager Enda McGrath hinted that there might be "some surprises " in store for attendees. If you're still interested, but for some reason didn't manage to get around to claiming a ticket for yourself, there's a waiting list available should anybody have to cancel in the next week. Just don't count on it - if the pizza is anything like what Palm brought out for the last developer event on site, nobody's going to want to miss that. Update: Apparently there are bunch of slackers out there who thought they could just waltz right in to the Enyo party. Not so, but because there are enough of you pounding on the virtual doors, HP's seen fit to expand the capacity of the August 4th Enyo Hackathon, though we can't imagine they've added a whole bunch of new slots - if you want to go, register now or forever hold your Pre's. View the full article

With the current not-great state of the webOS App Catalog and the unsurprisingly dwindling userbase, it's not at all unexpected that nobody went out of their way to create an official or unofficial webOS app for the London 2012 Olympic Games. These Olympic games kicked off today (soccer takes time, the opening ceremony isn't for two more days), and even though there's no app, you can still get yourself some Olympic coverage on the go via your webOS smartphone. Frustratingly, even though NBC secured a multi-billion-dollar multi-year contract to broadcast the Olympics and opted to put every single event live online (so long as you have a valid subscription to a partner cable or satellite service), those streams aren't available on webOS smartphones or tablets. And it's Flash, which our devices actually support. Granted, they're using a custom version of the YouTube app to stream these live feeds (it's quite nice, with down-to-the-second fine scrubbing), and the webOS-compatible version of Flash wasn't great to begin with and hasn't been updated for well over a year. But still! We digress and set forth for a solution. Unable to watch the streams at all (unless you want to set up some manner of remote desktop app, but that seems to be overkill in our eyes), we'd at least like to keep tabs on what's going on, who's scored what, and how far ahead Team USA is in the medal race. For that we turn to a free app that's been around for a good long time: ESPN ScoreCenter. Recently added to ScoreCenter's options under mySports in the app's settings is a 2012 Summer Olympics choice. As with the other options in ESPN ScoreCenter, 2012 Summer Olympics adds a page in their left-right swipe panels that gives you the latest scores, upcoming events schedule, general Olympics news, and a breakdown of the overall medal count. The scores and schedule are broken down by sport, with thirty-three options at your disposal, from archery to BMX to fencing to synchronized swimming. If there's a competition happening in London this summer, it's available in ESPN ScoreCenter. To add the Olympics to your selections in ESPN ScoreCenter, just tap the gear icon in the bottom left corner of the app, select mySports, tap 'Add a Sport', and select Olympics. From there you'll have an extra bright blue panel with all the Olympic news, scores, and medal counts that you can handle. View the full article

If you happen to have the The New York Times app installed on your webOS smartphone, well, we're sorry. The Old Gray Lady has decided that your smartphone is no longer worthy of their attention, and has stopped publishing new content to the feed servicing the app (the last news story you'll see is from Monday, chronicling the sanctions levied against Penn State football by the NCAA). At the top now is a 'note to readers', stating that The New York Times is no longer supporting their apps for BlackBerry or webOS smartphones, instead recommending you try out their mobile website. While The New York Times is no doubt pulling support for both platforms due to the low number of users left, we can't help but acknowledge that the apps are of the past, both in features and structure and in the services supported by the paper. Since the webOS app was last touched by the Times back in December 2009 (yeah, two and a half years ago), the paper's switched to a subscription model for their online services that limits free article views to ten per month on their website and modern apps to just the top stories. If you want to see the rest, you have to subscribe, and that starts at $15 a month ($20 if you want tablet access). Seeing as the webOS app hasn't been updated in more than thirty months, the app would need a significant overhaul in order to support the subscription service. Rather than invest the time and money in that, the Times has opted to stop supporting the app all together. We can't say we blame them, but it still stings to have another big name pull out like this. At least there's the mobile site… and a subscription to go with it. View the full article

Pairing a Bluetooth keyboard--especially the official HP Wireless keyboard--to your TouchPad is an excellent way to increase your productivity and typing efficiency. But there are times that you may still want to use the on-screen virtual keyboard, even if you have a Bluetooth keyboard connected to your device. With the official HP Wireless keyboard, all you need to do is tap on the key (top row, third from the left) to toggle the virtual keyboard on or off. You can even still use the Bluetooth keyboard when the virtual keyboard is active on the screen. Unfortunately, the only way to initiate this toggle is from the Bluetooth keyboard itself. If the keyboard is not within reaching distance and you want to use the virtual keyboard, you either have to toggle Bluetooth off in the Device/Connection Menu, or go into Bluetooth Preferences and tap on "HP TouchPad Wireless Keyboard" to disconnect it from the TouchPad. To reconnect the Bluetooth keyboard once you want to use it again later, you just need to start typing on it and it should automatically reestablish the connection. View the full article

Fifty or sixty years ago, when we didn’t have tablets or social media dictating the speed and accuracy of the news and what was important to you, you got dressed and headed to the store to pick up a newspaper (or if you were smart, you had one delivered to you ever morning). For those under the age of forty, it’s that big stack of folded paper that your mom bought to clip coupons. it was loaded with pertinent information about world news, weather, and just sport score you could imagine, plus those you couldn't when the paper needed a few more column-inches filled out. The best thing about technology these days not only does it inform us in the blink of an eye, it actually helps people with disabilites of all sorts. We've all heard how tablets and smartphones are helping those with cognitive and communications disabilites, but for being very much vision-based, smartphone and tablet technology is making a surprising jump into the vision-impaired space too. What's proven to be the most useful for the vision-impaired is also useful to the average citizen: text-to-speech. With Audio Headlines on the TouchPad we get the very latest latest news headlines delivered as spoken word. Sure, text-to-speech isn't a new technology, but we're still pleased any time we see a good application of it. read more View the full article

When HP announced their intent to purchase Palm back in April 2010, we were all caught off guard. The world's biggest PC maker had just plopped down $1.2 billion on little 'ole Palm with the promise of spreading its webOS operating system from smartphones to the brave new world of tablets, printers, and even desktop computers. Microsoft, too, it seems was caught off guard. Shortly after HP went public with the Palm buyout, Microsoft got their largest customer to agree to a contract that wasn't a big deal at the time, but now could make things more complicated for the future of webOS at HP. read more View the full article

Have you ever needed to know how many threads per inch there are on a #0 screw and how big of a drill bit you should use to create a hole in a sheet of aluminum into which to screw that screw? (the answers are 80 and 3/64, obviously). That sort of information comes from years of experience, or cumbersome reference sheets that you've spilled coffee on more than a few too many times. How about a digital form on your TouchPad? Yeah, we can do that, just look at Mechanical Reference Charts, which will tell you everything you need to know about screws, pipe fittings, sheet metal, drill bits, and everything else for use in the machine shop. This app is $1.99 in the App Catalog, but if you're game enough to leave a comment after the break, one of 50 copies could be yours for free. Contest: We have 50 copies of Mechanical Reference Charts 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 50 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 3.0.0 or higher with the latest version of the App Catalog. View the full article

So you are browsing the App Catalog on your TouchPad and you come across an app that you think you might be interested in that you don't necessarily want to purchase or download right then, but you also don’t want to forget about it or have to search for it again in the future. Instead of emailing yourself the link or writing down a list of apps to go back to, you can simply bookmark it in the catalog. For any app that is not installed on your device, you will see a icon next to the price, in either the app detail screen or the scrollable listing of apps. Tapping on that icon will turn it into , indicating that it has now been saved. Want to remove the bookmark, just tap it again. To quickly access those bookmarked apps in the future, just tap on the "Bookmarks" tab on the bottom the screen. Every time you add or remove a bookmark, the total number of apps will be updated in the tab name As Colonel Kernel noted in the comments below, you can only save up to 50 bookmarks at once. If you try to save a 51st bookmark, your first one will be removed from the list, View the full article

Mobile Nations Podcast Feed Mobile Nations on iTunes Mobile Nations YouTube Google confirms Nexus S Jelly Bean roll-out, lists carriers Restoring your Nexus 7 using Google Factory images -- a guide [from the forums] HTC confirms Jelly Bean updates for One X, XL and S, we feign surprise RIM is rebuilding their fanbase one person at a time RIM scores patent for BlackBerry 10 keyboard BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha update now available for developers webOS Community Edition gets card stack management that makes sense Enyo 2 officially out of beta and available to the masses App Review: Atlantis Sky Patrol HD iPad mini: Why Apple will do it, and how they’ll pull it off AT&T vs Verizon: Which shared data plan should you get? Watch iMore today! Our new 3 minute daily video update! Microsoft’s financial health is simply unquestionable Nokia’s price drop of the Lumia 900 was not a sign of weak sales, the media has it wrong Nokia shuts down main store in Helsinki for September re-launch—something big planned View the full article

You rmission, should you choose to accept it to save the world be defusing doomsday devices discovered in cities around the globe. You're the best pilot in the Air Force, you know it, the General knows it, and the President knows it. You are the leader of the elite Atlantis Sky Patrol, and your course of action is to match moving balls and solve puzzles. read more View the full article

Since webOS Nation launched more than a decade ago as Visor Central, two of the most frequently asked questions we receive from visitors outside of the United States is "When will the webOS Nation Store ship to my country?", and in the case where we do ship to that country, "Why is it so #&@% expensive to ship to my country?" Today I'm happy announce we've finally improved the service offering in our US-based the webOS Nation Store to much better support our international customers! We've also rolled out free shipping to AFP/FPO destinations around the globe. To our international customers - thanks for the patience. And thanks for the ongoing support. Now keep reading for all the details! read more View the full article

Have you ever been using your webOS phone, browsing the web or playing a game, knowing that you had plenty of battery left and then all of a sudden the battery level drops to 0%? And then shortly afterwards, the phone shuts down because it thinks there is no battery left even though you know it has plenty of juice in there? While this bug doesn't hit often (and seemingly most often on a Pre3), it seems to rear its ugly head at the worst possible times just when you need your phone most. The good news is that there is a rather simple fix for this, the bad news is that it may be a bit inconvenient for you. Actually, the simplest way to fix this is to swap out the battery with a spare, if you have one. If you don't have an extra battery with you, all you need to do is plug in your device to a power source and leave it plugged in for a bit until the device recalibrates the battery to the correct level. Once your phone turns back on, it will still only show a low battery level, typically under 5%. But if you keep the phone charging, it will eventually jump back up to its "correct" levels. It may slowly charge up to 20% after 10 minutes and then jump to 90%, or it may take 20 minutes and then go back to 100%, or it may only take 5 minutes, but eventually it will return to normal. Here's just hoping that the next time this happens you are close enough to a power outlet to charge up your phone, otherwise you will have a nice paperweight that you get to carry around for a bit. View the full article

Break out the cigars and pop the champagne because Enyo 2 is finally out of beta and available to the masses! We last reported on Enyo 2's beta progress way back in March where Beta 3 delivered sliders and progress bars to the Onyx user interface within Enyo. Since then the Enyo crew has been hard at work to get the framework out of beta and available to the public despite losing a handful of team members. "So what's new?", you ask. Well first up they have added several new Onyx widgets. Now a handy developer can make use of Menu, Picker, Tooltip, Tree, Drawer, Scrim, and “MoreToolbar,” a responsive toolbar that adapts to different screen widths from the Onyx widgets library. Next up there is a snazzy new Enyo 2 sampler to help those interested familiarize themselves with what Enyo 2 has to offer. Last but certainly not least, there is a new contributor process that will allow code contributors to be able to submit larger quantities of code while keeping the codebase Apache 2.0-compatible. Oh and before we forget, the Enyo website has received a sexy new makeover! We know that is a lot for the layman to take in but ultimately it means that Enyo 2 is ready to roll. Whereas Enyo in its birth was built around the TouchPad, Enyo 2.0 is platform agnostic and will allow developers to use it regardless of the platform they wish to code for. It makes us feel all warm and fuzzy inside that Enyo will carry on the web-centric legacy of webOS regardless of the fate of our most loved mobile OS. So in essence a little piece of webOS will always live on so long as developers take to Enyo which we have a hunch they will. View the full article

How do we love the work going into improving the open source webOS Community Edition? Let us count the ways… While we're counting, we're going to direct you to the video above, posted by Andrew Holbrook (the same guy who whipped up the tabbed card stacks) is another improvement to LunaSysMgr, this time making it a whole hell of a lot quicker to manage your card stacks. The alteration makes it possible to hold a stack with one finger and use the other hand to drag an outside card into it. You can also do the opposite, holding the stack and dragging off a card, but here's where things get awesome: grab two cards in the middle of a stack and pull them apart to split the stack. We know, right! So yeah, we're excited to see this and other improvements we haven't yet conjured in our heads brought to the Community Edition and can't wait until it's ready to be installed on our TouchPads. We're also just plain happy to see a better way to manage card stacks. As much as we love the concept, we could never quite the the hang of the slow drag to move a card into a stack and the seeming surgical precision that it took to get the card place in the stack where you wanted it. This modification looks to make things quite a bit easier. View the full article