News Reporter

There's something to be said for playing a real physical board game. The feel of the dice, the satisfaction of moving your pieces, being able to ponder the board in front of you and how best to proceed. But there's something that's not so satisfying: keeping score on a sheet of paper. But, as they say, there's an app for that: Tallier. Made by Ewac Software, Tallier is a basic score tracker at its core, but it offers much more beyond a simple tally. read more View the full article

Here recently we have kept all of our readers up to speed on the cool new features being added to webOS Community Edition by various webOS developers across the interwebs. So far we've witnessed fast card switching gestures, tabbed card stacks, and alternate keyboard layouts (for our many friends overseas). Well the fun is far from over as developer Eric Blade of GVoice fame has delivered yet another cool addition to webOS Community Edition! It seems that Eric has tweaked our already awesome notification area to make it even better in the form of bigger notifications. This is beneficial not only to developers but also to users. You see, some apps could benefit greatly from more real estate in the notification area so that they may provide a broader spectrum of controls. As Eric shows us with the picture included in this article his app GVoice has already benefited from the extra area with the callers full name and buttons for call back and send message. We could also see that this modification to the notification area could be a huge help for a bunch of apps. Case in point, an app like Music Player Remix could accomplish some pretty amazing things like adding or removing a song from a playlist from within the notification area. Everything from games to Twitter apps could really leverage this to their advantage. In the end we are happy to see so many of our developers roll up their sleeves and add their contributions to webOS Community Edition. We can only imagine what kind of wizardry is on the horizon as it seems that some cool new feature is being added daily. HP has given our community a unique opportunity here and we'd have to say that the webOS community has capitalized on it thus far! View the full article

* Images Removed Per Request of Transparent House * We've known for some time that HP had numerous webOS devices in the works after the Pre3, Veer, and TouchPad, including but not limited to the TouchPad Go seven-inch tablet and a keyboard-less slab phone that we assumed to be the Stingray, along with other device codenames such as Windsor. HP was well under way with all manner of work to promote these upcoming devices when the surprise order to shut down webOS device production came from on high. As with almost any company, HP partnered with outside contractors to market the devices, including the Transparent House firm. We've seen their work before with HP: they produced the online promo videos for the devices introduced at Think Beyond and the Veer teaser video, and today we're getting a good look at other things Transparent House produced for HP but never got to distribute. Posted eight months ago onto Transparent House's Vimeo page was a set of eight videos. Seven of them cover the unannounced and unreleased TouchPad Go tablet (or, as the marketing materials call it by it's development codename: Opal), serving as little ten-second snippets showing the tablet in what amounts to B-roll footage. But that eighth video? That's an interesting one… it's a 19-second clip of a keyboard-less webOS phone performing a slow spin so you can see all sides. The name: WindsorNot. read more View the full article

The Fourth of July falls on a Wednesday this year (as in, tomorrow), so we're going to have some additional celebration savings on either end, for the ultimate webOS accessories sale! To save 15 percent on your orders, which includes all webOS accessories -- cases, batteries, chargers, Bluetooth, everything! -- all you need to do is use coupon code j412 at checkout. Offer ends midnight PST on Thursday, July 5. That's all there is to it. Jump over to the webOS Nation Store and let the savings begin! Take me to the webOS Nation Store so I can take advantage of the savings! View the full article

Ever find yourself watching a war movie and wondering just what those solider actors are saying when they're screaming "whiskey echo bravo oscar sierra!" into the radio? It's the phonetic alphabet, and it's meant to make communicating clear and garble-free when needed, plus it allows for some cool callsigns like Tango Seven. With Soldier Talk Play Edition by Aclass Apps you can take whatever you type into your TouchPad and translate it into the phonetic alphabet, and then have the app speak it out loud for you. Normally this app would run you close to four dollars, but this week you'll have a chance to win one of 50 copies! Contest: We have 50 copies of Soldier Talk Play Edition 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 or higher with the latest version of the App Catalog. View the full article

The WebOS Internals' homebrew app Save/Restore is great to backup your important application data in case you ever need to webOS Doctor you device, swap it out with a new device, or even transfer data between a phone and TouchPad. When Save/Restore runs, it created individual folders and files for each app it backs up and stores them in the /saverestore folder on the USB drive. However, there are two drawbacks to this type of backup. First, there is no easy way to quickly backup all those files in the cloud using a service like dropbox or box.net. And second it only saves the most recent backups so if you needed to go back more than just a day or two in backups, you can't. One way to combat this is to create a single archive of the entire /saverestore with all its subforlders. While you can now use an app like Archive Manager to ZIP up those files, there is also a little easter egg within Save/Restore that will allow you to do just that, which will then make it easy to upload a single file to a cloud storage service. All you need to do is copy the "ZIP creation" script to the Save/Restore script repository and then run the script whenever you want to create the backup archive. The easiest way to accomplish this is to use Internalz Pro, by Jason Robatille, which is available in both Preware or webOS Quick Install. Open Internalz Pro Navigate to /media/cryptofs/apps/usr/palm/applications/org.webosinternals.saverestore/contrib Tap on the "org.webosinternals.saverestore" script and select "Copy". Find "/var/svc/org.webosinternals.saverestore", highlight it and then choose "Select" to copy it. Now, you can open up the Save/Restore app, wait for the data to load and choose "Save Application Data". Scroll all the way to the bottom and you will find "ZZZ Save Restore Zip Creation". It has the "ZZZ" in the name so this will be the very last script that is run if you "save all" Once you run that script, a file called saverestore-99999999.zip will be created in your root USB directory (/media/internal/), with the 99999999 being replaced by the current date and timestamp. Depending on the size of your archive and what apps you have installed, this file can get rather large, so be aware of how many of these files are on our device and clean them up if you no longer need them Unfortunately, this zip creations script will not run automatically if you have set up Save/Restore to auto-save every day. Luckily there is a work-around for this, but you will need to wait for our next Tip of the Day for those instructions View the full article

Mobile Nations Podcast Feed Mobile Nations on iTunes Mobile Nations YouTube Google I/O 2012 Google Nexus 7 hands - on and initial review Android 4.1 - Jelly Bean BlackBerry's Painful Platform Pregnancy Press Release: Research In Motion Reports Q1 Results for Fiscal 2013 - BlackBerry 10 phones delayed until Q1 2013 Just how bad are things for RIM? App Review: Plex webOS 3.0.5 'Community Edition' released to open source Community Edition yields TouchPad gesture-based app switching The iMore show 300 -- Watch and enter to win the iOS 6 device of your dreams! Apple needs to fix App Store reviews -- for everyone Reviews: Apple’s new Podcasts app & Google’s Chrome for iOS Windows Phone Refresh (a.k.a. Tango) starts global roll out Can't wait for the Windows Phone Tango update? Download the CAB file now and do it yourself Poll results: 54% think Microsoft should re-name WP8 to Windows 8 Phone instead View the full article

On Thursday we talked about one of the first projects to come out of the webOS Community Edition. The newly-open-sourced code for major chunks of webOS 3.0.5 had within two days brought us the fast card switching gestures that we'd been pining for for far too long. But with access to parts like the LunaSysMgr, what else the homebrew community would come up with was a huge and excitingly open question. Well, here are some more answers. Coming from the mind and keyboard of Andrew Holbrook (dukiedrew) is something we're actually quite impressed by: tabbed card stacks. With this modification, a simple swipe in from the left side when in an app of the screen scoots your current view to the side a bit to load a vertical column of the thumbnails of the other app cards in that card stack. Tap on one of the thumbnails and it and your current app swap places. Swipe back to the left to dismiss the thumbnails column and get back to your app. Holbrook's work isn't limited to just card stack tabs - he's also worked up how to cycle the webOS card spread around the ends so you can keep swiping past the end of your cards and jump to the far end of your open apps. If you've got a lot open, this could be an easy way to navigate everything. Video of the infinite card view and tabbed card stacks is above. After the break is another video, this one from Måns Andersson. As a Swede, there's not a lot of support for his preferred keyboard layouts built into webOS. Again playing with LunaSysMgr, Andersson was able to add additional layouts for Dvorak, Swedish Dvorak, and Swedish QWERTY to the standard international webOS keyboard layouts, including a button on the Swedish keyboards to quickly switch between Dvorak and QWERTY. All of this work was completed thanks to the webOS Community Edition and the quick work of WebOS Internals' WebOS Ports team. It's all open source, and all done free-of-charge for you. We wouldn't discourage you from sending a donation the way of WebOS Internals - without your support they can't pay for servers and test devices and the like, and this kind of awesome stuff becomes that much more difficult to do. read more View the full article

If you're in the market for a new Verizon smartphone, want webOS, and don't feel like stalking eBay for a rare (and potentially expensive) Verizon HP Pre3, then we've got the next best option for you: a Verizon Palm Pre 2. And it's cheap, which is something with which we'll never argue. Today and today only, DailySteals.com has the Verizon Palm Pre 2 available for $69.99, plus $4.99 for shipping. That price is for the straight phone, no contract required - heck, you don't even need Verizon service if you don't want it. Being that this is DailySteals.com, this less-than-$75-shipped price is good only through the end of today, so if you've been sitting on the fence about upgrading that old beater of a Verizon Pre Plus or just want to grab a spare smartphone should your current one give up the ghost, you should act quickly. View the full article

HP's getting back into the tablet game, albeit somewhat tepidly after the debacle of the TouchPad launch and cancellation and Microsoft's recent unveiling of their own Surface tablets. The news comes today that HP's planning to move forward with at least one Windows 8 tablet, though they'll be going with their long-time processor partner Intel for the tablet instead the mobile-oriented ARM chips. We wondered earlier this month when Microsoft unveiled Surface what affect that would have on their OEM partners, and if SemiAccurate is, well, accurate, it seems that Surface might be making those OEMs nervous. HP, Microsoft's single biggest customer, apparently has decided against producing an ARM-based Windows RT tablet in protest of both Surface and the licensing charges Microsoft wants in exchange for the slightly-hamstrung version of the Windows OS. Of course, it's also worth noting that HP burned some bridges with ARM partners after their cancellation of the TouchPad and Pre3 - both ran ARM chips from Qualcomm. HP told The Verge that their plans for going with Intel chips thanks to feedback from customers: "The decision to go with x86 was influenced by input from our customers. The robust and established ecosystem of x86 applications provides the best customer experience at this time and in the immediate future." With HP being a huge enterprise provider, we're not surprised at all by the decision to go Intel-first, and ARM-later-maybe. But we also won't be surprised to see Microsoft pushing hard to get the ARM-happy Windows RT onto more devices moving forward. How does this matter to us at webOS Nation? Really, it doesn't matter what HP decides to go with for their tablets, as the Linux Standard Kernel that's going to be used in Open webOS will run on all variety of hardware, including x86- and ARM-based chipsets. When exactly we can expect to see those tablets, well, that's still up in the air. View the full article

This week marked our 2 year anniversary of writing a daily webOS Tip for our then-PreCentral.net and now-webOSNation.com readers. Despite a roller coaster of a year since our last anniversary, which saw the release of the TouchPad and TouchPad Go, the release of the Pre3 and then the subsequent cancellation of the Pre3 after former-CEO Leo Apotheker decided to shut down the webOS Hardware decision, and then all that waiting until we learned about Open webOS (due out later this year), we have continued to bring our faithful readers tips to getting the most out of their webOS experience. While we have scaled the tips back from every day to just three times a week, we have also expanded them to include some functionality in our favorite apps that the average user may not even be aware of. To mark this anniversary, we would like to bring you some of our favorite and most used tips from the last year. Continue after the break for that extensive list of tips read more View the full article

Finally. We've been waiting a long time for this one and we're glad to see it finally here: gesture-based application switching is becoming a reality thanks to the work of homebrewer Eric B (ekdikeo) and the webOS Community Edition open source release. The modification came quickly after this week's release of the Community Edition for webOS 3.0.5, and the tweaks to LunaSysMgr allows users to swipe in from the bezel on their TouchPad to switch to the next app card without having to go into card view, swipe over, and tap to bring that app to full screen. It's a simple tweak and something we've been practically begging for for over a year now. When the app switching gesture will make its way into a release that mere humans can make use of, we're not sure, but we're eagerly awaiting that day. Video after the break. read more View the full article

Sometimes you just need a quick classic game to fill some idle time in your day. In the old days you'd grab a piece of paper and set up the four lines for tic-tac-toe, or if you were feeling particularly ambitious you might lay out a grid of dots for a game of dots-and-lines. Thanks to the magic of tablets, you can make a quick game tic-tac-toe happen, or if you're in that particularly ambitious mood you can turn to Dots Lines Squares for the paper classic. read more View the full article

Many of you familiar with the Android world may have caught the news that a cavalcade of devices received RC1 treatment from the CyanogenMod team. "What the hell does that mean?" you ask. Well, in a nutshell it means that these 37 devices took one step closer to what the CyanogenMod team considers a "stable" release. Either way, many of us with dual booted TouchPads rushed to the various forums on the interwebs in hopes that we too moved to the next step in the beta process but alas we are not quite there yet. We're not left in the cold, as the newest CM9 official nightly build has a bit of functionality that has been missing for some time now. The newest build finally has mic support so we can utilize all the nifty apps and cool Android voice functions. We have found in our testing that it is hit and miss as to which apps work and which ones don't though. For example, trying to do a voice chat in Gtalk results in a force close of the app whereas voice chat in Skype works like a champ. So don't expect everything to work as intended for the time being. This functionality is yet another step forward in the progress toward a stable build for CM9 on the TouchPad. All that lacks now is a little polish on the mic service and getting the camera support up and running. These two bits have been an issue since the move from CM7 to CM9 but the CyanogenMod team are obviously hard at work to remedy both of those issues. Hopefully, one day in the near future we will have a fully stable release of CM9 to ride shotgun with Open webOS 1.0. In the meantime we will be more than happy to run the nightly next to webOS Community Edition in the very near future! View the full article

Did you know that you can give your webOS device its own name? Why would you give it a name, you ask? Well, whenever you pair your device over Bluetooth with an audio headset or another webOS device (i.e. pairing a phone and TouchPad together), or if you go to http://palm.com/profile to access your webOS Profile details, this gives you a method of uniquely identifying your devices. To change the device name, just open up the "Device Info" app on your webOS device, tap on the "NAME" section at top, and type in your desired name. Close the "Device Info" app and you are done. If you had previously paired your device with another via BlueTooth, don't worry; you will not need to re-pair it as the device name should automatically update the next time you connect them together. View the full article

In the olden days you could judge the economy on the price of a loaf of bread or a gallon of milk. Today it's the price of a gallon of gasoline. Thankfully, we have the internet, which makes navigating the confounding differences in cost between gas stations across town. In the United States, that's GasBuddy.com, which has official apps for iOS, Android, and BlackBerry - but if you happen to have a TouchPad you can grab the unofficial Gas Buddy to go TouchPad app by micro-tech for $1.43 to get access to the latest local gas prices. A buck-forty-three too much for your penny-pinching ways? Act fast, because we have a whole bunch of copies to give away. It's for the United States only (sorry, that's all the Gas Buddy system supports), but there are plenty of copies to go around. Here it goes... USA only: https://developer.palm.com/appredirect/?promocode=hqidr21292nzigj View the full article

As promised back in March, HP today released to open source some large chunks of webOS 3.0.5 as the new "Community Edition". The Community Edition of webOS is meant for, well, the homebrew community and will enable homebrew developers even deeper (and more legal) access to the webOS source code to make alterations and improvements. As a sign of how serious HP is about the community aspect of the webOS Community Edition, they actually worked hand-in-hand with the WebOS Internals homebrew group to make this happen. WebOS Internals has put together a team named WebOS Ports dedicated to working with the Community Edition, led by Tom King - though you might know him from his work as ka6sox. So just what can we expect out of the Community Edition? HP's code releases come from webOS 3.0.5 and as such are geared towards the TouchPad. Among the things the WebOS Ports team (and anybody else, it is open source after all) will be able to tinker with are notifications, the app launcher (hello custom pages), Just Type, and even card view - among other things. We're excited about the potential for the webOS Community Edition. There's a lot of low-hanging fruit in webOS could be fixed, updated, or added thanks to the newly open-sourced code and the WebOS Ports team. Yeah, we're psyched. Just imagine... a TouchPad with a zoomed-out card view, or Just Type with multi-choice actions, or built-in Twitter and Facebook sharing across all apps, or... the possibilities may not be endless, but they are many. It's worth noting that the webOS Community Edition release and Open webOS are two separate projects. Open webOS is going for the 1.0 version and is an active and ongoing project for HP, while the Community Edition is more of a code dump for the benefit of the community. Not that we're complaining; we'll take as many code dumps as we can get our paws on. View the full article

First we showed you how to install Android on your TouchPad and make it an awesome dual booting beast of a tablet. Then we showed you how to mod Android to have a more to "card like" task switcher with WebCM9. We even made up a sweet webOS Nation moboot theme for all of our dual booting readers. If Android isn't your cup of tea we also had a short tutorial on how to eradicate it from your TouchPad forever. To bring this whole set of articles full circle we felt it necessary to tell our readers that have decided to keep Android on their TouchPad about a really cool app that we are sure all of you will appreciate. So you like having Android on your TouchPad but you really only use it to scratch the occasional Netflix itch. With that said, you prefer to spend most of your time using webOS and the current moboot setup that boots to Android by default annoys you. As it stands right now when you boot up your TouchPad and get to the moboot screen you have five seconds to choose if you want to boot into webOS or Android. If you don't choose an option in that five seconds your device will default to Android. If you weren't paying attention and didn't choose webOS quick enough you will then have to reboot your system just to get back into webOS. This is a pain to say the least. This is where CyBoot from developer hiddenpremise (@grep_awesome on Twitter) comes into play. read more View the full article

Taurus, by OMA Studios, is one of those ultimate-social-networking apps that allows you to aggregate your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google (Reader, Contacts, YouTube) and Toodledo accounts all in one app. You can create multiple "dashboards", each with their own set of columns from the various social networks, even mix-and-matching aspects of different social networks within a single dashboard. Once you create a dashboard, tapping the icon will easily allow you to delete or reorder columns within a dashboard, or delete entire dashboards altogether, but there does not seem to be any way to reorder those dashboard. It turns out, all you need is a little press-and-hold action to accomplish this. When you press-and-hold on the name of a dashboard on the bottom of the screen, a little pop-up appears giving you the option to move that dashboard to the left or right by tapping on the arrows (you can also rename or delete the dashboard here as well). Be aware that it may take a few seconds for the dashboard to reorder once you tap on the arrow, so just be patient and it will eventually move. Taurus is available in the webOS App Catalog for $3.99 and is compatible with all webOS devices running webOS 3.0.4 or higher View the full article

A few weeks beack we took a look at some of the best apps to sync your webOS device with your more traditional computing devices, but we didn't touch on all of them. There's one that isn't really a syncing app, it's more of a fling-files--and-stuff-through-the-air app. It's DataJog's Send to webOS, an ingenious system that makes getting all sorts of data, be it files or raw text, back and forth thanks to the magic of the internet and webOS. read more View the full article

If you're a Google Voice user on webOS, we hope you've at least looked at GVoice. The app, a fine Enyo app originally built to bring Google Voice to the TouchPad and since shrunken down to phone-appropriate dimensions was just updated to version 1.1.0. The update brings a larger font for the blind among us and adds right and left justification to message conversations. Version 1.1.0 also has expanded Text-to-Speech capabilities for users of webOS smartphones. But what we're really interested in is the upcoming version 1.2.0. The app will be rebranded as SynerGV, and if the synergistic name is dropping any hints, well, it ought be. SynerGV 1.2.0 will offer integration via Synergy Connectors with the webOS 3.0 TouchPad Messaging app. The plan is for the SynerGV Synergy Connector to be offered by the end of July as an in-app purchase, with a secondary companion app to manage things like placing phone calls, setting your Google Voice status, listening to voicemails, and the like. If you're downloading GVoice 1.1.0 onto your TouchPad, you'll have the option to pre-purchase SynerGV at a reduced price of $1.49. When SynerGV launches, it'll cost $4.99. As for our webOS smartphones, where you're more likely to be making active use of Google Voice, the developer says that "if and when" he makes a smartphone version, the same offer to pre-purchase at a discount will be made. We're a little disappointed by the "if and when" part, but we know that webOS smartphones are a small market and as a lone developer there's only so much time in the day to commit to an increasingly niche app market. Regardless, we're hopeful that the "if" does become a "when", and we wouldn't be above suggesting you comment on this article to demonstrate how much demand for the app there just might be… View the full article

What do you think of when you think of a taskmaster? You think of someone that constantly challenges you to do a certain task. You can picture someone who cracks the whip driving you to meet results for a specific deadline. They push you and push you, and usually show no mercy. But lucky a developer by the name of Rashi has made such issues a little easier to handle. TaskMaster HD, originally made for webOS smartphones, takes list making to another level. Sure there are other task or note taking apps available for webOS, but what this does specifically, especially if you have an a Type-A personality is define those details. Right down to costs, time, and date associated with the chore. And it works. read more View the full article