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HP's been the number one manufacturer of personal computers since they acquired Compaq in 2002. Despite their numbers-based dominance, HP's recognized the threat to their business posed by Apple and the iPad. Having recognized that threat, HP's been working to update their business to respond to Apple - that threat posed by Apple's iPad and other mobile computing devices was exactly why HP spent $1.2 billion to purchase Palm and webOS in 2010 (even if that didn't go quite as planned). While Samsung's been duking it out int court with Apple over the former's copying of the latter's designs, specifically with respect to the iPhone and iOS, HP's been busy aping the design of Apple's laptops. Just look at HP's Envy laptops, with their machined aluminum bodies and glass-covered display panels. At a glance it can be difficult to differentiate between one of HP's Envy laptops and Apple's MacBook Pro line. One can argue that computers were 'headed in that direction' all they want, but it doesn't change the face that before Apple began achieving success in personal computing (success, in that Mac unit sales have continued to grow while the overall personal computer market experiences a decline - in part thanks to the iPad), this sort of design duplication didn't happen on this wide of a scale. This morning HP announced the new Spectre One, a new 24-inch all-in-one Windows 8 computer. The Spectre One makes the Envy line's copying of Apple design features seem like a warm-up exercise; the Spectre One is almost a spitting image of Apple's iMac desktop computers, even down to the included wireless keyboard and trackpad. The Spectre One does have a handful of differences from the iMac, such as ports located in the aluminum base, a removable panel on the back, and NFC compatibility, so long as you're using HP's apps on your Android phone. Plus, you know, Windows 8. HP's been eyeing Apple's products for some time, with the design of the TouchPad being heavily-influenced by the original iPad. HP's webOS tablet mimicked the dimensions, weight, battery life, screen size and resolution, and even the button layout of the iPad. Seemingly unable to predict the direction that Apple would take with future iPads (it always seemed like it'd be rather obvious to us: faster, thinner, longer-lasting, etc), HP chose to use the first generation iPad as the benchmark for the TouchPad. We've only heard bits and pieces about where HP planned to go with the TouchPad line, but word has it the TouchPad 2, well into development when HP pulled the plug on webOS, took further inspiration from Apple, including a higher resolution screen and a thinner and lighter metal body. HP may be drawing too much design inspiration from the likes of Apple, but are they going to face the same sort of legal action from Apple as Samsung has? It's hard to say, but as we said at the start, HP views Apple as a threat to their business - Apple doesn't seem to be all that fazed by HP. View the full article

In HP's seemingly unending quest to quell the bleeding, the company's employees have been in the firing line since May. Back then, CEO Meg Whitman announced that HP was looking to cut its 300,000-man workforce by 27,000. Today brought the news that another 2,000 positions are on the chopping block, as per a 10-K filing HP sent to the SEC. The new 29,000 total reduction count will reduce HP's workforce by over eight percent. HP hopes that a portion of those employees will leave HP as part of a "voluntary enhanced early retirement" program in the U.S. Given the current economic and jobs climate, getting enough workers to voluntarily depart HP (even in spite of HP's ongoing issues) and lose their benefits like healthcare coverage to make a dent in the expected layoff count has and will continue to be an ongoing hurdle. The restructuring plan and accompanying workforce reductions are expected to result in a total of $3.3 billion in accounting charges resulting from costs relating to the early retirement and severance packages from the layoffs. An additional $400 million in restructuring costs will come from consolidations in HP's real estate assets and data centers. View the full article

Touch-to-share was a grand concept introduced with the TouchPad, Pre3 and Veer to be able to share data between two devices by simply tapping them together. Unfortunately, the initial implementation of TTS only allowed you to share web page URLs, and it never even came to the Veer in the promised software update to webOS 2.2. So, unless you have a Pre3 and a TouchPad (or two TouchPads), you are seemingly just limited to sending website address to and from the browser app. It turns out, though, you are not just limited to the browser app to share these website addresses. We have already seen Zap Photoshare utilize touch-to-share to send the website address to view photos on a second device, and now forum member kmoll3ster noticed that the TouchPad's Facebook app also includes a Touch-to-share feature. If you are viewing a photo from within the Facebook Tablet app and then Touch-to-share with another TouchPad or Pre3, the browser will launch and load up the facebook.com website for that photo. Not exactly an extremely useful feature, but one that exists nonetheless and only for photos, as it does not work with other articles or posts. And be aware that this is a one-way feature as it's only built into the TouchPad's Facebook app and not the smartphone version, although you can use App Tuckerbox to install Facebook Tablet on your Pre3 to send it from a Pre3 to a TouchPad. Thanks to kmoll3ster in our forums for this tip! View the full article

Hot damn this community rocks. For everything the webOS community has been through, you can always count on the webOS Nation Forums to pull together to get things done. And get things done they have, in the course of three weeks the 2012 WebOS Internals web-a-thon raised a whopping $12,202.20 to support the ongoing operations of the homebrew organization. That's a good amount of dough that will help to sustain the operation of WebOS Internals and WebOS Ports for a good while, not that that's going to stop us from making more donations later on. Last year's web-a-thon may have raised a few thousand more dollars, but considering everything this community's been through in the past year (recap time!), it's staggering how much love this community can still show. And unlike last year, there were prizes beyond getting a badge of the webOS Nation Forums that screams "I'm awesome"; this year, WebOS Internals chief Rod Whitby tossed in am ultra-rare TouchPad Go for the highest donation, as well as four HP Pre3 smartphones for the next four donators. So what does will that twelve thousand dollars go to? It goes to paying for the servers and bandwidth that are needed for Preware, and it goes towards purchasing development devices so that the developers of WebOS Internals can work their homebrew magic. That latter point is going to be important going forward, as the future of official webOS hardware is questionable, those wanting to still run webOS are going to need modern hardware to do it, which means Internals is going to need to purchase modern hardware to build and test on. In a way, the donations made in this year's web-a-thon aren't going to just sustain WebOS Internals - they're going to help to sustain webOS as an operating system, and consequently sustain the webOS community. So for that, we at webOS Nation thank everybody for their donations - we don't really benefit directly from it, but anything to help further the webOS community is fine by us. Missed the web-a-thon? Don't feel bad, WebOS Internals accepts support donations all-year 'round. View the full article

Google's Android software is available on quite literally hundreds of devices. But on all but a select few it's been tinkered with at a bare minimum (or wholesale overhauled), moving it away from a 'true' Android experience. In fact, the number of 'Google' devices, i.e. those with unadulterated Android installed out of the box, can be counted on two hands. most of those are Google-directed Nexus devices. That's not to say that there's anything wrong with the modifications made by Samsung, HTC, Sony, Amazon, and everybody else toying with Android, but there's a contingent of people that want to be able to install stock Android on their device without the interference of others. Part of the code to make that possible has always been available as part of the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). Anybody can download that and do with it as they please, and installing it on a device should yield a 'pure' Android experience. So long as you're okay with probably not having access to a number of vital components with drivers that aren't open source and thus aren't part of AOSP. That hasn't stopped groups like CyanogenMod from repurposing the open source code of AOSP, including the project to install Android on the TouchPad. Google's head of the AOSP, Jean-Baptiste Queru, isn't content with that, and wants to bring the pure, unadulterated Android experience to more devices. His first experimental target: the Sony Xperia S. Despite Sony's history of siloing themselves off in proprietary technologies (MiniDisc and Memory Stick, anyone?), they've recently come to terms with being more open and have become more supportive of open source development. So it should come as no surprise that a few weeks after Queru started his quest to bring AOSP to the Xperia S, Sony's gone ahead and made available the binaries for the device. While such code won't be useful to the average homebrew ROM cooker, they should prove quite useful to the Xperia S AOSP project. We've said before that the biggest technical hurdle facing the adoption of Open webOS on the vast majority of devices is the lack of open source supporting software like the drivers and whatnot in the Xperia S binaries. With Google publicly pursuing getting stock Android onto at least one non-Nexus device, we have to wonder if this approach might be a useful one for HP and Open webOS. As of right now there are two forms of Open webOS, both in beta: one for Linux desktop installations, and another for embedded devices. The Linux version isn't exactly a cakewalk to install outside of the instructions provided by HP, so throwing it on that tablet you have sitting around isn't a simple task. And while the OpenEmbedded-enabled version of Open webOS is technically installable on any number of theoretical devices, it's missing a fairly major component: a user interface. But let's assume that HP's plans involve setting up Open webOS to run on more devices than just a 32-bit install of Linux Ubuntu, because that's simply not going to be useful to most people. In fact, we have to question whether it'd really be useful to any but a select handful. But thanks to a distinct lack of open source drivers for many things, there aren't a whole lot of options for Open webOS. That is, unless a company such a Sony is willing to step up as they have with the Android Open Source Project and pitch in useful code to make exciting things happen. While there's the obvious advantage to webOS enthusiasts such as ourselves who strongly desire to run webOS on new hardware, there's an advantage for the assisting device manufacturer as well. We're not talking about just goodwill here, of which there'd be plenty from a yearning-to-offer-goodwill webOS community. No, there's the advantage that said manufacturer would have an additional operating system in their quiver should they want to take the webOS route, and they'd have let the community do most of the work for them. View the full article

Way back in December of 2010 we were promised that Facebook Chat would come to the webOS Messaging app via Synergy in webOS 2.0. If you pick up your webOS 2.x device and fire up Messaging, you'll probably notice the distinct lack of Facebook in there. That's assuming you haven't gone all rogue and rouge added Facebook Chat support with a patch. But there is also a dedicated app to make it happen, from webOS developer pcworldSoftware (not related to the magazine and website) comes QuickChat for Facebook, an Enyo-based app for phones and tablets running webOS 2.1 or higher, that's dedicated to your Facebook instant messaging needs. Normally QuickChat would cost you $2.99 from the App Catalog, but it just so happens that we have 50 copies to give away to you, loyal reader. Contest: We have 50 copies of QuickChat for Facebook 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 2.1.0 or higher with the latest version of the App Catalog. View the full article

Mobile Nations Podcast Feed Mobile Nations on iTunes Mobile Nations YouTube Mobile Nations 18: Apple vs. Samsung special verdict edition Iterate 28: Marco Arment of Instapaper IFA 2012 - We were there and here is everything you need to know! Hands on with the Samsung Galaxy Camera Hands-on with HBO Go on Nexus 7 Many hands on BlackBerry 10 Phones: Ten things we're looking forward to so far What does the Samsung vs. Apple patent lawsuit mean to the Research In Motion? BlackBerry App World filling up with BlackBerry 10 apps Patch your Pre's carrier string to say whatever you want LunaCE graduates to beta status After two weeks of silence, App Catalog flooded with invalid listings No NFC bound for next generation iPhone iPhone photography: The ultimate guide How to set up two-step verification for Dropbox iMore show 308: Angry bits of mostly plastic Leaked photos of a new Nokia Lumia 820 with Windows Phone 8 finally appear HTC Windows Phone 8 devices will reportedly feature Beats Audio Microsoft unveils Samsung ATIV-S Windows Phone 8 device View the full article

Ask any webOS fan what device they were most looking forward to getting their hands on and chances are you will here them say the TouchPad Go. This seven inch little brother to the TouchPad was slated for release in "the coming months" after the original TouchPad's release. Despite the smaller size the TouchPad Go would have had many benefits to hold over its larger sibling's head like a soft touch back, a rear facing camera, and a better pixel density due to its smaller size. Add all that in together and combine it with the simple fact that a seven inch tablet makes for better portability and it's hard to imagine anyone who wouldn't want one. Unfortunately dear old Mr. Apotheker killed all hopes of anyone ever getting their hands on this awesome little tablet when he chose to pull the plug on webOS hardware development. This decision banished the TouchPad Go to the land of "misfit webOS devices" along with the Touchstone Audio Dock, the WindsorNot slab phone, and many other great devices most of us will never see. Despite the TouchPad Go's premature demise a few of these neat little tablets have managed to make their way into the hands of a few lucky webOS community members. One of these community members happens to be a dear friend of webOS Nation by the name of Rich Dunbar. Many of you you may be quite familiar with him from Twitter (@RichDunbar), the webOS Nation forums, or you may have even downloaded his app Tap for HELP. If you have had the pleasure of having a conversation with him you have probably gathered the fact that he is a very generous man that has helped many of people in the webOS community in many different ways. This time he's raffling off his beloved (and extremely rare) TouchPad Go (with a Touchstone charging dock) and donating all the proceeds to charity! read more View the full article

As we noted earlier today, one of our eagle-eyed forum members spotted that HP had opened up the build scripts and other open source components for the first Open webOS beta, and that said build of Open webOS was installable on Ubuntu. Well, turns out HP wasn't done open sourcing everything yet, and a short time later the OpenEmbedded build system was also announced. If you're not familiar with OpenEmbedded, it's a build framework for embedded Linux (the base of webOS) to support installs on embedded devices. In the case of Open webOS, the use of OpenEmbedded will make it easier to bring webOS onto new hardware, though it doesn't outright make it work on anything - there's still work you'd have to do. We've looked at the build instructions for the embedded version of Open webOS, and we'll be honest, it's waaaaaay over our heads here. OpenEmbedded will work with the ongoing ARM codebase of webOS, with the Beta release also including an ARM emulator for testing it. The emulator includes core services like db8, node.js, and the other services that make Open webOS tick. The desktop build, meanwhile, supports running System Manager (LunaSysMgr) as a standalone app on your Ubuntu machine, letting you run the core applications (Calendar, Email, et al) inside it. Oh, and 'many' third part Enyo apps are supported as well, but as we expect Open webOS to be missing some components that couldn't be replaced with open source, some of the stuff your app depends on might not be there. It's taken several months to get here, and there's still some stuff to do. But this beta milestone marks the release of 54 separate webOS components to open source, totalling 450,000 lines of code. At the very least we're excited to see that something like OpenEmbedded has been implemented with Open webOS. It's one step closer to being able to install the operating system on… something. What exactly, remains to be seen. But at least we know from the screenshot above that it's not going to look much different at all - it's still webOS. View the full article

Revealed today on the Open webOS GitHub was the next step forward for Open webOS: build instructions to install the operating system on an Ubuntu Linux desktop computer. The instructions, found by webOS Nation Forum member zacky59, go over the steps you'l need to take to download, build, install, and run the open source version of webOS, and the first prerequisite you're going to have to overcome is having an Ubuntu Linux machine. If we had to guess, that's not something the vast majority of you have or have access to. But if you do have Ubuntu installed on your computer, then all you need is a good internet connection for 500MB worth of downloads and 4GB of free space on your hard drive to get started, plus the patience to follow along in command prompt and wait for the build process to do its thing. And we know the next question you're ready to ask: no, there are not instructions to install this build of Open webOS on a TouchPad, Pre, or any other mobile device. Or your Mac or PC. We're not apologizing for HP here, but this is the beta release right now. Ubuntu Linux is better than nothing, we suppose, but for an operating system that was built around and for touch interfaces, we're not sure how well that's going to work. We're getting set up to install Open webOS ourselves (Derek doesn't have Ubuntu installed either, so don't feel bad), and will update you once we've got things rolling. View the full article

The Labor Day Long Weekend is here, and in honor of all of the hard working people of America, Canada and the rest of the world we're celebrating with savings at Store.webOSnation.com! You can save 15% on ALL Pre, Veer, Pixi, and TouchPad accessories through Midnight PST on Monday using the coupon code LDAY12 at checkout. And don't forget, if you're outside of North America we're now offering low cost shipping globally. Enjoy the weekend, and enjoy the savings! Take me to Store.webOSnation.com! View the full article

SynergGV 2, by Eric Blade, allows you to send and receive Google Voice messages directly in the stock Messaging app on your TouchPad (or webOS phone, if you are homebrew savvy), but has a pretty big limitation in that you can only initiate a conversation to someone in your Google Voice contacts list or by manually typing in the entire phone number. If you keep all your contacts in Google, this is a nonissue, but if you use your Palm Profile or Facebook to keep track of phone numbers, you are out of luck. That is, unless you know a little trick to initiate a conversation to anyone in your contact list, regardless of which synergy account they reside in. Unfortunately, you can not use Just Type to search for your contact, nor can you open an existing conversation with that contact. In addition, this new Google Voice messaging conversation that you are about to create will not be integrated into that existing conversation like all other Synergy messaging/IMing accounts do, but will rather remain as a separate thread unless and until you add that contact and their associated phone number to your Google contacts. Regardless, to send the Google Voice message to any contact, just follow the directions below Open up the Messaging app Tap the icon to create a new message Do a search for the contact and then tap on the number you want to send a Google Voice message to. You will see that the contact's name, and not their number, should be listed in the "To" field. Tap on that name to display the number. On the TouchPad, the number should be highlighted. Tap at the end of the number to place the cursor at the end of the number and then press the space bar On phones, the cursor should already be at the beginning of the number. Just press the space bar once Once you do that, the number will no longer be associated with your contact, but instead webOS will just think that it’s a number you manually entered. All you need to do is tap the icon in the "IM WITH "(XXX) XXX-XXXX" USING" to address your Google Voice message with that contact As stated above, if you don't want to go through this hassle you just need to add that contact to your Google account and you should be able message with them directly in the future. Note, though, that this will not be available immediately as you need to wait for webOS to sync back between your Google and Google Voice accounts before it will show in your SynerGV account on your device. SynerGV 2 is available in the webOS App Catalog for $4.99 and is compatible with all webOS devices running webOS 3.0 or higher. If you know how to use App Tuckerbox, you can install SynerGV on devices running 2.1 or higher after it was purchased on a TouchPad. View the full article

This time last year saw one of the greatest moments in homebrew history we've ever witnessed: the webOS community came together and raised a whopping $16,699.26 to support WebOS Internals. It was a huge sum, and it went a long way towards helping ensure the homebrew organization could continue to operate without its members needing to shell out for testing devices, server space and bandwidth, and other costs. Sure, it's open source, and while the code may be free, all the work that goes into making it happen and making it available comes at a cost. There are a handful of groups that can lay a claim to helping sustain webOS to this point. HP's standing in that group is debatable (though they're trying to redeem themselves), but no one can argue that WebOS Internals has performed miracles time and time again for the webOS community. There's a reason the community banded together to raise that sixteen thousand dollars last year. While Internals does have cash to continue operations for a while (sixteen grand will do that), they're always looking to ensure their future viability. With complex projects like WebOS Ports' LunaCE and whatever's about to go down with Open webOS on the horizon, sustaining WebOS Internals into the future isn't something even the novice webOS user should think twice about. This organization needs and deserves our continued support. Right now the 2012 web-a-thon has raised just over $4,000, and really that's just not enough. Sure, last year was one hell of a year, with the wound of HP's axe falling onto webOS still incredibly raw, but are we really going to let things stand at so paltry of a sum? One quarter of last year's total really isn't acceptable to us, and it shouldn't be acceptable to you either. To make a donation, head over to the WebOS Internals site support page to deposit your funds, and then go ahead and post in the web-a-thon forum thread with your donation amount. Even if it’s just a dollar or two, every little bit helps! View the full article

We've been watching what's going down over in Berlin at IFA 2012 mostly out of interest in seeing what devices we might maybe someday possibly be able to install Open webOS on, but then HP decided to bring some news back to America with some Windows 8 announcements of its own. There are two updated-with-touchscreens laptops that HP's releasing, a 15-inch Spectre XT TouchSmart in December for $1400 and the Envy 4 Ultrabook at 14-inches (no date or price just yet), but those are just laptops with touchscreens, no swivel, no detaching, just an awkward transition between the traditional laptop and full tablets. Then there's the brand-new Envy x2, which we've actually seen glimpsed before. Remember the Slate 8 we've been seeing in HP advertising? Well, here it is. HP's jump back into the tablet game is an Intel Atom 'Clover Trail'-powered Windows 8 tablet, supporting NFC, stylus operation, and coming with 32GB or 64GB of storage. At 1.5 pounds it packs an 11.6-inch IPS display (with a resolution of 1366x768), front-facing Beats Audio speakers (naturally), and a rear-facing 8 megapixel camera. The Envy x2 also has a keyboard/trackpad dock that attaches with magnets and a mechanical latch, converting the tablet into a laptop, complete with two USB ports, HDMI out, a full-size SD card slot, and an extra battery of undisclosed capacity. The Envy x2 shares the same sloped sides profile as the tablet teased in HP's ads, and it turns out the pill-shaped things spotted on the back are the tablet's power and volume buttons. One would be good to have close to where you're going to reach often (volume), the other might not be great placement (power). The black strip seen in the commercials is missing here - if the Envy x2 is anything like the iPad (there's more than a passing resemblance here), then the full-metal back is fine for standard Wi-fi and Bluetooth duties, but a bigger EM-transparent window of black plastic is needed if you're going to support cellular connectivity. So expect a second 4G-capable Envy x2 to be announced when we get closer to the release date. Oh, the release date? We don't have that yet. Or pricing, for that matter. HP's said to expect the Envy x2 to be released before the 2012 holiday season. At least that's a shorter timeframe than "first half of 2012". View the full article

November 2009. The original Pre and Pixi were the only webOS devices on the market, with Sprint still the exclusive carrier in the US. webOS 1.3.1 was just released and there were under 500 apps in the App Catalog. And Palm's backup servers were suffering some major backup failures causing people's Palm Profile backup data to be totally or partially erased when trying to restore their data. Unlike subsequent times when the Palm servers went down over the next few years when no data was lost, this failure was widespread and caused significant losses of data. So much so, that a class action lawsuit was filed against both Palm and Sprint a few weeks later. The case of Standiford v. Palm, Inc., and Sprint Spectrum, L.P et al., Case No. 5:09-cv-05719-LHK, United States District Court Northern District of California San Jose Division was settled back in November 2011, almost two years after the backup failures occurred. The settlement called for Palm (now HP, having been purchased over a year earlier) and Sprint to pay a total of $640,000 to be distributed as an online HP store redemption code or a Sprint bill credit. If you had a permanent or temporary data loss and had filed out the claim form before the May 29, 2012 deadline, you were entitled to either a $30 or $20 settlement, respectively, in the manner of your choosing. Now, a few months shy of 3 years after the backup failures, it appears as if those settlements were finally being paid out. This blogger - who had suffered a permanent data loss - received an email yesterday from settlement administration company GCG with the subject "Redemption Code for Standiford v. Palm, Inc. and Sprint Spectrum, L.P. Settlement" that contained an HP Official (online) Store redemption code worth $30 (you can read the full email after the break below). If you filed a claim but haven't received the email, be sure to check your spam folder. You can also contact the Settlement Administrator at the number listed in the email or refer to the official lawsuit website for additional questions. So, does $20 or $30 on your Sprint bill or as an HP redemption code make up for your loss of data three years earlier? Probably not, but the lesson learned from the original backup failures to always have multiple backups of your data and not rely on just a single source was truly priceless. read more View the full article

Just two weeks ago LunaCE was released by WebOS Ports in alpha status. The homebrewed improvement to the LunaSysMgr that was released as part of HP's webOS Community Edition project brought a number of enhancements to willing testers, including tabbed card stacks and app switching gestures. After a bunch of testing, bug fixes, and a few improvements, LunaCE is graduating up to the beta feeds in Preware. The set-up process for getting into the beta feeds is almost identical to that for the alpha feeds, so if you're interested in trying out the LunaCE beta, you can head over to testing.preware.org for instructions. It's important to note that LunaCE alpha testers will have to delete the Alpha from their TouchPad before attempting to install the beta. That said, our caveat from before - how you should tread carefully with alpha software - can be lightened a bit in this newfound beta status. Showstopping bugs should be squashed, and while everything's not necessarily perfect, LunaCE is by-and-large in the ironing out wrinkles phase and ready for wider-spread deployment. As before, if you've got something you think should be added to LunaCE, there's a place for that, and there's also a place for you to log and track any bug reports with the software. Speaking of wrinkles, there's a new little feature that's been added to the LunaCE beta: you can now turn off the not-that-iconic-but-it's-always-been-part-of-webOS ripple tap indicator. You know, that little ripple overlay that briefly appears on the screen when you tap on anything? Yeah, that thing. If that's the sort of thing that bothers you (after three years of webOS usage we've stopped noticing it), then the LunaCE beta now adds an option in Tweaks for you to turn the ripple off, no Luna restart needed. View the full article

Touchpad owners who use Google Voice received a treat last month when SynerGV 2 was released into the App Catalog with synergy integration of Google Voice messaging and voicemail transcription within the stock webOS Messaging app. But webOS phone owners were still left using the original SynerGV app without the synergy integration service due to differences between webOS 2.0 and 3.0. With its latest update to version 2.0.8, Eric Blade, the developer of SynerGV 2, has now begun to add support for those messaging plug-ins for phones running webOS 2.1 or higher. Unfortunately, you won't find SynerGV 2 in the App Catalog just yet because the app itself isn't yet ready for webOS smartphones. The messaging plugins may work, but the app isn't formatted correctly and you can't access critical areas of the functionality. Just because you can't load up SynerGV 2 in the App Catalog on your phone doesn't necessarily mean that you can't partake in its goodies. If you have a TouchPad to purchase the app and know how to homebrew, you can use Preware and App Tuckerbox to install it on your phone. Once installed, just open up the Accounts app and you should have an option to add a "SynerGV Google Voice" account using your Google email address and password. Be sure to allow the account to use both Contacts and Messaging when prompted. Once synced up, you will be able to use send and receive messages through Google Voice and get your voice transcriptions without the need of any third party app. Just as with the synergy service on the TouchPad, there are still a few limitations. While sending messages are instantaneous, there is no push service for receiving messages. Instead, it pulls down the messages based off a time period you set in the preferences section of the SynerGV 2 app (that part of the app still works). To combat this, you may still want to use Google's official SMS notifications of new messages and then just respond using the SynerGV plugin service. In addition, while you can send a new message through Google Voice to any number that you manually type in, you will only be able to search for your Google Voice contacts by name, including via Just Type. If you have all your contacts already in Google, this is a non issue. But if you rely on your webOS profile or Facebook for your friend's numbers, then you are out of luck unless you manually type in their number or they initiate the conversation first so you just need to respond within that conversation. If you decide to load up SynerGV 2 on your phone, remember that you are installing an app and service that is not officially released for your device. You are essentially a beta tester of the service until the time that the developer decides to release it into the App Catalog. However, if you are a Google Voice user and have either already purchased SynerGV 2 for your TouchPad or have $4.99 to spend, you may want to give it a shot. Even with it's shortcomings, having Google Voice messaging and voicemails integrated directly into the stock webOS messageing app is worth it. View the full article

Music Player (Remix), by Hedami Software, is a significant upgrade over the stock music play for either webOS phones or the TouchPad. While the TouchPad player has some additional features, such as the ability to create playlists, Music Player (Remix) has a lot more. One such feature is the ability to create favorites that show up on the app's homepage for quick access. These favorites can point to a single song, an entire album, an artist, a genre or even a playlist. Whenever you see an icon, that means you can pin that selection to your homescreen. All you need to do is tap that icon to access a pop-up menu and choose "Fave it!". A banner notification will appear confirming the selection, and then all you need to do is tap on that favorite on the homescreen the next time you want to play the song or songs. If you want to add only a portion of an album or artist or genre, the best way to do that is to select "Add to a flylist" instead of "Fave it!" to create a playlist with all the songs you want. Then back on the homepage, select "Flylists" from the choices on the right and then select the playlist. You can swipe-to-delete specific songs or reorder the playlist to get just the way you want it. Then, you can choose to favorite that Flylist from the Flylist listing.. Want to delete or reorder your favorites on your homescreen? It works the same as updating a flylist. Just swipe-to-delete the items you don’t want, or press-and-hold and then drag an item to rearrange. Music Player (remix) is available in the webOS App Catalog for $3.99 and is compatible with all webOS devices running webOS 2.0 or higher View the full article

A few days back Google made a change somewhere along the line that kicked webOS users back into the horrid days of WAP browsers. It was a change that shook us to our core as we were reduced to a wholly unacceptable three search results at a time and Google's sad attempts to give us mobile-formatted pages that required another tap to get to the content we wanted (as we type this we realize how spoiled we must sound). Never fear, for while it took Google a few days to come around to their senses and fix whatever coding travesty that brought forth this reign of terror, they have fixed it. So your TouchPads and Pres and Veers and Pixis can all safely waltz about the Googles, getting their ten results and tabbed headers and everything else Google to which we've grown accustomed. It works both in the browser's search bar and Just Type/Universal Search, with no workarounds needed on your end. Additionally, Google's actually improved things a bit. It seems this episode prompted them to actually pick up a webOS device and see how things worked on it. While the TouchPad has by-and-large received the full Google desktop experience (sans page previews) across all of the various avenues of search (everything, images, news, YouTube, etc), the version of Google served up to smartphones has been tweaked. If there was one saving grace about getting kicked back to the old-style search, it was that Google Image Search worked. With the last update to Google mobile search the image search function received a mobile-optimized formatting with an even grid and full-screen previews before sending you to the actual page or image. Problem is, it never worked fully right on webOS, and then at one point it stopped working all together, not allowing webOS smartphone users to view anything more than the grid of thumbnails. The old-style image search reverted to a less-organized set of thumbnails, displaying images at their original aspect ratio instead of perfect squares, but at least you could tap on them to view the image or the site. The updated back-to-the-new Google search on webOS smartphones melds in the old Google Image search with the rest of the new Google search, letting you finally get back to viewing the images you want. And if you're on a TouchPad you've got the full Google Image search experience, down to specifying image sizes, content, and coloration. It's good to be back. View the full article

August 15, 2012 was the last day the webOS App Catalog successfully received new or updated apps. That's nearly two weeks ago at the point that we published this post. The newest apps were Mobile1UP's Caveman apps, on both the TouchPad and webOS smartphones, themselves having received updates of an unspecified nature. After the app push of August 15th, the App Catalog went silent, with no new apps appearing for a few days, and then a week. The App Catalog going quiet isn't anything new, it's happened before, but with the current state of webOS we can't help but get a little twitchy any time things slow down on the App Catalog. Then a few days ago a massive app dump appeared, throwing thirty new and updated apps into the App Catalog. Excited, we tapped on one and after a tantalizing glimpse at the app page loading we were instead presented with a warning that "This is not a valid HP webOS application." We stammered back, "But, but it is. I have it. I installed it from this very App Catalog. I don't understand…" Assuming it was a temporary glitch, we moved on and hoped that things would get better. At least apps that have only had metadata updates, like the price changes for 10tons' app sale, seem unaffected. That was four days ago. Those thirty apps still display a warning of not being a valid app, despite the fact that many of them are heavy-hitters in the App Catalog, like MyQ for Netflix and Splashtop Remote Desktop. There are even some new apps we'd like to check out, such as Astraware Word Games and 2012 Football Score Predictions, but we can't. We can't even view their online App Catalog listings, as all the apps updated in the failed batch are displaying as broken online too. Yes, webOS is going through a transition right now. With the move to open source and the spinning off of the webOS GBU as kind-of-independent Gram, there's a lot going on. But for Gram to supposedly be focusing on the cloud and user experience yet having the App Catalog fail so miserably here isn't filling us with warm feelings. Come on, HP, let's get this together. Update: Literally as we published this post, HP's @webOSdev Twitter account woke up to reply to a selected backlog of complaints on this very issue, stating that "We are aware of the issue and are working on a resolution. I will update everyone when the issue is resolved." Which hopefully won't be too much longer now that we've made a big (and hopefully unneccessary) fuss about it. Update 2 [8am, Thursday]: Everything seems to be back up and running now. Let's hope it's a good long while before we have to do this again. Actually, how about never? View the full article

If you've been wandering about the App Catalog looking for a way to entertain yourself, you might have noticed that webOS games tend to be a bit on the pricey side, at least as far as tablet-based gaming is concerned. Much of that is due to economies of scale - there aren't as many webOS users to offset the cost of development as there are for the iOS (Android tablets might be another story). Looking to offer a refuge from the higher prices, webOS game developer 10tons Ltd. is for the next week offering their entire selection of webOS games at half price, brining the most expensive game down to a palatable $2.49 (really, the $4.99 full price isn't that bad). If you want to see the full list of what 10tons has to offer, we recommend just opening up your webOS device's App Catalog and searching for 10tons. There you'll find apps like Sparkle HD for $2.49 or Puzkend down to $0.99. In all there are sixteen excellent games in the 10tons webOS catalog, so you've got plenty to pick from for some savings. If you're the type that owns multiple webOS devices, say a Pre and a TouchPad, then there's some additional good news for you: some of 10tons' games work on both large- and small-screened webOS devices. Azkend 2 at $2.49, Joining Hands at $1.49, and Puzkend at $0.99 work on all manner of webOS devices all the way back to webOS 1.4.5, with full-size graphics for your TouchPad. So buy once and play everywhere, which is a perfect recipe for killing all of the available free time we have (which happens to be not a whole lot). The 10tons sale on webOS games is expected to run for about a week, so if you want some half-price but full-value webOS games, head on over to the App Catalog and buy now. View the full article