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This tip is only for those using a TouchPad and the official HP TouchPad Wireless Keyboard While you can use just about any Bluetooth keyboard with your TouchPad, there are a lot of benefits of using the official HP TouchPad Wireless Keyboard that was released alongside the tablet. In addition to some unique webOS keys on the device that will improve your webOS experience, the process of actually pairing the device is incredibly easy and will take only a matter of seconds to complete. To pair your keyboard with your TouchPad: Ensure that your Bluetooth keyboard is turned off before you start (with the keyboard laying face down, the power button on the back should be pushed to the left) This is important since the keyboard will only try to pair to a device for 1 minute after it's turned on Swipe down from the top-right corner of the TouchPad's screen to bring up the Device menu and choose Bluetooth, then Bluetooth Preferences If Bluetooth is not already turned on, toggle the ON/OFF switch to turn it on Press the "+ Add Device" and then select "Keyboard" from the "TYPE" dropdown list Turn your Bluetooth keyboard on (with the keyboard laying face down, the power button on the back should be pushed to the right) The TouchPad should search for the device and find it within a few seconds Tap "HP TouchPad Wireless Keyboard" under the FOUND DEVICES section and you are done Congrats, your keyboard has now been paired to the TouchPad for you to use. Note that after a short period of inactivity, the keyboard will power down and disconnect from the TouchPad. However, you just need to tap any key on the keyboard and it should automatically reconnect, as long as the TouchPad's Bluetooth is turned on View the full article

At long last, webOS finally has an app that can identify songs via audio fingerprint. That app is the oh-so-aptly-named Song ID from SSGLabs (their first webOS app). $5.00 brings the basics of a Shazam- or Midomi-like service to webOS. And by basics, we mean you open the app, hit the big green Listen button, and wait while it gets a sample, sends it up to the servers of an unnamed audio fingerprinting service, and spits back a result consisting of the track name and album info. We've been playing with Song ID for a little while now, testing it out on Derek's weirdly varied music library. The majority of the tunes Song ID was subjected to it was able to easily identify, be it Frank Sinatra, Tenacious D, the Vince Guaraldi Trio, John Williams' Jurassic Park soundtrack, or the funky offbeat tunes from Dr. Horrible's Sing-A-Long Blog. More obscure stuff, like the Dallas Wind Symphony under the direction of Frederick Fennell or the intense ambient tones of The Dark Knight Soundtrack spat back negative results. Song ID also had some problems with Weird Al Yankovic, but that's more a testament to Weird Al's weird abilities than anything else. Over Wi-Fi Song ID usually returned a match in five-to-ten seconds, while working over 3G took up to 30 seconds. Song ID is pretty basic in that it gives you just the results, no links to a music store to buy the album or YouTube to watch some videos. There's also no way to cancel an identification attempt without just closing the app, which was annoying the handful of times Song ID froze up on "Searching…" It's not Shazam, it's not fancy, and at $5.00 it's certainly not cheap as far as mobile apps go. But with Song ID webOS users finally get something they've been longing for for so many years. View the full article

We all know that choice is good. Choice gives us freedom. We celebrate our ability to make the choices we want, such as Pepsi or Coke. Mac or PC. If you've ever felt the need for choice in your Touchpad mapping options then WebOSM by Maël Lavault may be the app you've been waiting for. WebOSM utilizes the OpenStreetMap database, offering the user a choice between it and the built-ine Maps application that uses Microsoft's Bing maps. Lavault goes a step beyond that, offering up webOSM through the webOS Nation Homebrew Gallery for free or from the App Catalog for what amounts to a $0.99 donation. OpenStreetMap is the community-built free and open source road maps database that powers WebOSM. Anybody can make edits to OpenStreetMap, in essence it's like the Wikipedia of road maps. Using OpenStreetMap comes with some advantages and disadvantages. OpenStreetMap tends to be more detailed on the micro level than Bing or Google, often having extended paths and driveways for apartment complexes and university campuses, and has denoted many more local landmarks such as churches and schools. It also sometimes lacks some political boundaries and topographic data, as well as detailed aerial imagery (or roadmaps overlain on the available satellite imagery). Thanks to the crowd-sourced details in OpenStreetMap, urban areas are often highly detailed, while rural stretches might be as lacking in side roads and goat paths as they are people in real life. read more View the full article

There are some things that we never expect to see happen. We're talking tortoise riding a unicorn type stuff here. That's the level of make-believe upon which we had stashed the thought of webOS 1.4.5 ever getting released for the Palm Pre on Telcel. Like the Sprint Pre, the Telcel webOS phone was all but abandoned as far as updates were concerned, but it was abandoned at webOS 1.4.1. Unlike Apple, which has managed to somehow wrest control of updates away from the carriers, Palm still had to depend on carrier testing before their updates could get released. Somewhere along the line the ball was dropped when it came to the version of webOS 1.4.5 intended to be released onto Telcel's Pre. We had written if off long before HP wrote off getting webOS 2.0 onto older devices. And this week, that's changed. webOS Nation reader Alberto wrote to let us know that his Palm Pre on Telcel had received and successfully installed an update to webOS 1.4.5. So, what do the remaining Telcel Pre users get for their nearly two-year wait for the 1.4.5 update? We're assuming it's the same set of changes as were included in webOS 1.4.5 from 1.4.1 back in June 2010, so we're talking about improved PDK support, browser text field focusing, fixed podcast downloads, and some security patches. Hope it was worth the wait. All things considered, that the Telcel Pre got the update at all is a miracle, though we're throughly perplexed as to why it took so long. We contacted HP for more info about the update - mostly to confirm it and make sure we weren't dealing with a randomly distributed test update or something of the like - and they were just as confused as we were. So we'll just enjoy the hilarity of it all - at least webOS phones aren't still being sold with outdated software like our Android compatriots have to deal with. Granted, they still have phones being sold at all, so they've got that over us. View the full article

There are two things that really make Gmail Gmail: threaded conversations and labels. For the uninitiated, Gmail's labels are the result of a rethink of folders, instead of filing a message away in one folder, you can attach multiple labels (tags) to an email and have it appear under each of those labels, while still hanging out in your inbox or archive or even the trash. While some might loath threaded emails, it's hard to hate on labels. Except that nobody seems to have been able to pull off a good implementation of Gmail labels in any mobile email client. Amusingly, Google even has separate apps for Android for regular email and Gmail, as if they couldn't figure out how to make emails that support folders and emails that support labels happily coexist. Nobody else seemed to have taken the plunge into full and proper Gmail support, to the point where we just started to assume that Google was holding back the secret sauce for themselves. It turns out we were wrong. Google's sauce isn't so secret and there is in fact a Gmail Labels API. It was just recently implemented on a new iPhone email client called Sparrow (which while looking like a very nice suffers from the fundamental flaw of not being able to run in the background - Apple's Palm OS-style multitasking bites again!). With webOS going all open source, why not stop treating Gmail like it's just some other mail service and give it the special treatment it deserves. For those that use Gmail as more than just another mail provider, labels are fundamental. The IMAP implementation of Gmail tries to mimic labels as folders, and it's just not good. It works, but it's not good. With an available API, splicing labels support into the webOS email app is actually a possibility. Of course, how that's displayed is another question - we'd argue for just adding a labels button to the row at the bottom of the message view and maybe putting small colored label tags in the list view. But that's it - the rest of the "treat it like folders" implementation would still work just fine. Yeah, we're Gmail junkies here. We've gotta have our labels, man! Have your own thoughts on this webOS Wish List entry? Of course you do - the comments await. Without a doubt you have your own ideas as to what ought be on the webOS wish list, and so we've created a forum thread just for that - and an awesome discussion it has proven to be. View the full article

Every other week or so a new thread pops up in the webOS Nation Forums about the possibility of building our own webOS smartphones or tablets. It always seems to garner a bit of attention, especially when the poster comes in with a set of state-of-the-art (or beyond) specs for their phone that they may as well have lifted out of the latest and greatest Android handset. While this kind of thinking can be fun, I'm here today to dump a bucket of cold water all over it. Today's smartphones are incredibly complex devices. They're designed by teams that include dozens of electrical and computer engineers and have to be durable, stable, fast, thin, receptive, attractive, unique, and affordable. They're financed by huge companies with far reaching supplier, contractor, and partner relationships. They're created with the support of carriers and the interest of customers. While conceptually a smartphone is a computer, building a smartphone is nothing like building a desktop computer. Go down to your local computer parts store and tell me how many cell phone processors, radios, and motherboards you see on the shelves. That's right, none. And these are products that are produced by the tens of millions. Consider for a moment the parts that make up a smartphone, say… an HP Pre3. There's a processor and graphics chip, RAM, storage chip, accelerometer, compass, two cameras, radio chip (incorporating GPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and cellular), USB controller chip, Micro-USB port, LCD panel, capacitive touchscreen, battery, slider, keyboard, case, Touchstone coil, three switches (power, volume, and ringer), two speakers, two microphones, LED flash, multiple antennae, mirror, front glass, SIM slot, no fewer than screws, and numerous other components, plus AC adapters for the US, Europe, and Asia, USB cable, manuals, and packaging - all sourced from dozens of different suppliers, the vast majority of whom are located in China. Chances are, you are not located in China. read more View the full article

If you have a webOS phone or TouchPad with a Skype account added to it, you can adjust the settings on how calls can be received and how video calls are handled. There are actually 4 settings that can be adjusted for the device: Allow Skype Calls from anyone or just those people on your contact list Note that if this selection is grayed out on your webOS phone, you may not be able to change this setting Allow Skype video calls Auto-accept video calls or prompt you to accept it Show your Skype Contacts that video calling is enabled on your device In order to adjust these setting, you just need to: Go into your Phone app (on phones) or the Phone & Video Calls app (on the TouchPad) Swipe-down from the top left to bring down the Phone Application drop-down menu and choose Preferences & Accounts Find the ACCOUNTS section and tap on your Skype account Adjust the settings as necessary Swipe back (on phones) or press the "Done" button (on TouchPad) to return to the phone settings View the full article

HP CEO Meg Whitman's crusade to right the plundered ship Packard is poised to really shake things up at the Silicon Valley giant: according to a report today from AllThingsD, the Imaging and Printing Group is set to be merged into the Personal Systems Group. That'll put HP's still-profitable-but-not-as-much-as-before printers group under EVP Todd Bradley and his computers-and-tablets division. The move would address cost-cutting and simplification to an extreme degree, especially on the marketing front. If you stop and think about it, both the IPG and PSG largely target the same set of customers: businesses and consumers, often shopping for both printer and computer at the same time. There would also be significant cost savings from combining the redundant human resources and finance operations under each group, plus having one fewer division to manage up top. It also gives Bradley some more to do, perhaps as compensation for having been passed over for the CEO job twice in less than a year, despite his extensive executive experience (once even serving as the CEO of Palm). Ironically, this consolidation comes just seven months after former HP CEO Leo Apotheker announced plans to split the Personal Systems Group off as a separate company and refocus HP proper on enterprise services and printers. Just half a year later we've seen HP's printing division start to falter as businesses and consumers alike dramatically cut back on their printing (and thus purchases of high-margin ink cartridges). That said, the Personal Systems Group has faltered recently as well, though that can be chalked up to the damage done by the uncertainty of the spin-off and what that would mean for the future of whatever company(s) resulted. Amusingly, this also puts together two divisions that HP desperately wanted to work together right after their purchase of Palm. You'll recall that the Palm Global Business Unit was slotted in under the Personal Systems Group and Bradley, with the goal of making webOS smartphones and tablets, as well as getting the operating system onto desktop computers and printers - of which HP expected to sell several million. Even then when HP was trying (unsuccessfully) to sell webOS to the highest bidder, they were still running into the sticking point of webOS on printers. Fast forward to today and HP's now in the process of open sourcing webOS with little public thought being paid towards the webOS printer. Maybe in 2013. Update: HP has announced their plans to merge the Printing and Imaging Group into the Personal Systems Group, giving birth to the Printing and Personal Systems Group, headed by Todd Bradley. Press release is after the break. read more View the full article

Folks, it happened: Astraware's TouchPad Totalizer tracker of TouchPad game sales finally topped 5,000 sales, the top level for Astraware's we'll-make-these-if-you-buy-enough-of-those deal. Granted, 5,000 isn't a huge number for Astraware; they likely sell more than that in a day on iOS or Android - when you're on a platform that sells three million units in a weekend, five thousand is a drop in the bucket for a firm like Astraware. The progress up the Totalizer totem pole has seen the release of Astraware Mahjong HD to test the waters, with Sudoku HD and Astraware Solitaire following as further sales targets fell. But things hit a hitch around the 3500 mark, where one would find the popular Astraware game OddBlob. Sudoku and Solitaire saw releases shortly after hitting the sales targets, but OddBlob has not hit the TouchPad App Catalog yet despite it having been quite some time since the sales target was hit. Asked about this seeming oversight on the Twitters, Astraware admitted that the process of transferring OddBlob to the TouchPad "has taken longer than expected", so you should expect Astraware Casino to hit first. That said, OddBlob and Casino are both popular games and we wouldn't be surprised to see them sell a few thousand copies on the TouchPad eventually. It's a testament to Astraware that they're willing to put the work into using the webOS PDK to bring their apps to the TouchPad. As the delay with OddBlob has shown, it's not always super easy to make the transfer happen, but we're happen to see Astraware making the effort even for just the few thousand sales that the TouchPad user community can bring. Sometimes it's not about the money, though we doubt Astraware would be doing this if they weren't at least breaking even - that's why they set up the Totalizer in the first place, so that we could see ourselves what it would take to make it worthwhile in Astraware's eyes. View the full article

The march towards a fully open source webOS continues, with today seeing the release of the Nyx hardware abstraction layer. As described on the nyx-lib GitHub repository, "Nyx is the webOS portability layer used to isolate the remainder of webOS from dependencies on the hardware and core OS upon which it is running." Essentially what that means is that Nyx picks up where the Linux Standard Kernel drops off. So while open source kernel integrates a number of Android drivers and the like, Nyx takes it a step further for Open webOS, enabling the OS to run successfully on an even greater variety of hardware. And since Nyx is open source like the rest of Open webOS eventually will be, it's conceivable that it could be adapted in conjunction with the Linux Standard Kernel to enable other operating systems to run on other hardware. Not that we'd want that - we want webOS, of course. How exactly Nyx works, well, that's over our heads here. Dammit Jim, we're bloggers, not programmers! All we know is that we're glad to see it released and excited by its potential. There's a wide world of excellent hardware out there running less than optimal operating systems, and we want them to run webOS. That's our hope, now that we've been reduced to dreaming about a day where webOS hardware is produced again. Today also saw the launch of a new website for Open webOS: openwebosproject.org. The new site is styled very much after the old Palm.com and the current webOS Developer Center, and right now serves more as an introduction for the uninitiated and a portal to content on other sites. But eventually it could be more. Not that we'd recommend you go somewhere else to get the latest on Open webOS. You're already reading this, so clearly you're smart enough to know where to look. Nyx, for the record, is yet another Greek goddess (joining Ares, Enyo, and Isis). She's the goddess of the night, and is only seen in the shadows and just a glimpse at that. An appropriate name, we suppose, for a hardware abstraction layer that's supposed to do it's job without being seen or heard. View the full article

Unsurprisingly, our call for people to lay out their vision for branding for Open webOS drew a lot of awesome entries. Surprisingly, HP liked it enough that wanted to get involved, pitching in a TouchPad and a meeting with the HP design team for the winning design. And thus, a competition was born. With so much awesomeness competing for so much awesomeness, it was difficult for us to pick just a few to stand up to compete for this prize. But, we did, and you voted, and now it's time to unveil the final results… after the break. Yeah, we're such a tease. read more View the full article

When HP pulled access to their previously-open-to-all App Catalog feeds, we were understandably disappointed. But HP had promised something new and innovative in the way of app discovery. That turned out to be Pivot, which while new and innovative to say the least, was lacking in a pretty important area: it existed only on the TouchPad (and doesn't exist at all anymore), leaving those of us looking to do some app browsing and comparison online in a lurch. While we're still longing for the return of the app feeds or an appropriate replacement so we can resurrect the App Gallery in full, we'd also like to see HP go official with their own web-based App Catalog browser. And with open source Enyo 2.0 it'd be even easier than before to just put the app itself online, accessing all the same content in the exact same way. Plus, having a web presence there when somebody searches Google for App Catalog would be a incredibly good thing. Right now a search for App Catalog brings up results that are practically worthless to the intended purpose of the search. Also, it should be a source of great embarrassment to HP that Apple, Google, Microsoft, and even Research in Motion all have desktop-browsable application stores. Seriously, BlackBerry beat webOS to the punch. On the web. That's not good. Have your own thoughts on this webOS Wish List entry? Of course you do - the comments await. Without a doubt you have your own ideas as to what ought be on the webOS wish list, and so we've created a forum thread just for that - and an awesome discussion it has proven to be. View the full article

Mobile Nations Podcast Feed Mobile Nations on iTunes Mobile Nations YouTube Samsung Galaxy S III' pictured, May 22 London unveiling rumored Early ICS build leaks for the Verizon HTC Rezound CyanogenMod 9 makes root access an option, not the default T-Mobile BlackBerry Bold 9900 and Torch 9810 OS 7.1 updates now available LTE and HSPA+ models of the BlackBerry Playbook stroll through the FCC A closer look at the awesome QNX CAR 2 application platform Open sourcing Open webOS branding competition finalists HP was supposed to leave Palm alone for three years, lacked the "patience for innovation" HP to open source chunks of webOS 3.0.5 as a "Community Edition" The new iPad has landed! Here’s everything you need to know! iMore hits NBC, ABC, and CNN as media hype soars on new iPad launch day! iPad help and discussion forum: Add your review, show off your speed tests, share your Retina wallpapers! New rumor: AT&T launching Lumia 900 on April 8th? FCC certifies Samsung SGH i667 "Mandel" 4G LTE Windows Phone Nokia working on Windows 8 tablet says Design Chief View the full article

As the owner of a TouchPad, Pre3, and iPhone, I can tell you there's one thing that's needed in spades with a virtual keyboard over the hardware variety: strong and aggressive autocorrect. There are things that both the iPhone and webOS do right, and things they do wrong. For instance, I like that webOS gives me a little chirp when it corrects something so I know to look back and see what it was, and I love that if I don't like it, undoing the autocorrection is as easy as a backspace. The iPhone, however, excels at predicting what it is I'm trying to type, and gives me the option to just hit the space key to use that word. It's a time saver, and its necessary given the inherent drop in accuracy that comes with a virtual keyboard. webOS, through all its iterations, has never had the joy of predictive text. Well, that's not entirely true - when we looked at the Beta 1 emulator for webOS 3.0, text prediction was present, although in rudimentary and buggy form. The bones for the feature exist in webOS, and using the same sort of interface as the copy/paste/you-spelled-something-weirdly dialogs would enable even faster typing on the TouchPad's already excellent virtual keyboard. And let's not forget about the webOS smartphones - physical keyboard typing is fast enough as it is (at least in our practiced agile hands), imagine how much faster it could be if the phone was correctly guessing what you were trying to write. Have your own thoughts on this webOS Wish List entry? Of course you do - the comments await. Without a doubt you have your own ideas as to what ought be on the webOS wish list, and so we've created a forum thread just for that - and an awesome discussion it has proven to be. View the full article

iPad SchmiPad. We know what we're waiting for. View the full article

You may have noticed that some app can be found using Universal Search / Just Type by using certain keywords, instead of the actual App name. For example, search for “pref” and you will see all the stock preferences apps such as Backup, Bluetooth, Date & Time, Device Info, etc. Application authors have the ability to specify those additional keywords for their apps, but using a little homebrew magic, you can easily update or add those keywords, too, similar to they way that you are able to to hide app icons from both the App Launcher and Just Type The easiest way to do this is to have Internalz Pro from Jason Robitaille (available in Preware or webOS Quick Install) installed on your device and follow the following steps On your device, open Internalz Pro If you want to update the keyword for one of the stock webOS apps: Swipe down from the top-left corner to bring down the Internalz Pro Application dropdown menu and select "Preferences". Scroll to the bottom of Preferences and ensure that "Master mode" is turned on. If you need to turn it on, be sure to select "YES" to the warning prompt. On phones, back-swipe or on the TouchPad, swipe down from the top-left corner to bring down the Internalz Pro Application dropdown menu and select "Close" to return to Internalz Pro Locate the directory for the app whose keywords you with to edit. Some system apps like Phone, Email, PDF Viewer are usually in the /usr/palm/applications folder, while installed apps are in /media/cryptofs/apps/usr/palm/applications/. However, with the latest webOS 3.0.5 update for the TouchPad, many of those stock system apps may also be found in /media/cryptofs/apps/usr/palm/applications/ Open the app folder and find the appinfo.json file. Tap on the file and select "Open" Look for a line of text that starts with "keywords" (it will look like "keywords": ["keyword1", "keyword2"], ). If the line aready exists, all you need to do is add another keyword to the list. If there is no keyword line, you will need to add it. If this is not the last line of code in the file, be sure that you have that comma at the end of the line! If necessary, access the Internalz Pro preferences again and turn off Master Mode After he next time you reboot your device, the app will now be searchable using the new keywords that you just added Note that if the app gets an update, these changes will need to be recreated after that update is complete One quick note about search keyword. While a Universal Search/Just Type search will search for an app using just one letter of the actually app name, keywords require at least 3 letters before it will find the application. So, if you add "awesome" as a keyword to Preware, it won't be found until you type in at least "awe". The only exception to this is if you add a keyword with only one or two letters. So, add "Z" to the keywords, and the app will show up in a search just by typing "Z" View the full article

Nearly five months ago HP VP of webOS Developer Relations Richard Kerris vacated his post for a new job at Nokia, just eight months after he was trotted out before the world at Think Beyond. Granted, a lot went down in those eight months at HP, so we can't blame him for looking to the greener pastures of Nokia's Sunnyvale office. But it's been nearly half a year since Kerris left, with nobody stepping in to fill the void. Until now - today the HP webOS Developer Center made the stealth announcement of Palm veteran Fred Patton as the new head of Developer Relations. Patton came to Palm in early 2010, tasked with running the developer website - yes, we're now to the point where two years qualifies one as a veteran at webOS. With all of the departures and layoffs that have hit the Developer Relations team in the past few months, two years later he's now "managing day-to-day operations" of the department, as he put it in the "about me" blog post that went up this evening. An impressive resume is part of what Patton brings to the table here, having developed command and control software for Air Force and NASA satellites and been the Director of Engineering and Quality at Innovative Robotics (where he wrote user and developer documentation and optimized customer setups - good skills for leading a software developer relations team). So congratulations on the new gig, Fred, and good luck. We'll be watching. And waiting (save us some cake). View the full article

It's that time of year. The squeak of sneakers and screams of crowds fill the air and the hopes of 67 squads from across the United States are crushed with a ferocity that only basketball can bring. That's right, March Madness is underway. While there are plenty of sports apps in the webOS App Catalog, only one really stands out as worth your money for keeping tabs on all the games upon which the success of your bracket. That one app is Sports Live! Well, it's Sports Live and it's derivatives. On the TouchPad, we wouldn't talk anybody out of buying Sports Live HD, and for this happy go lucky season of basketball insanity, you wouldn't be wrong to buy College Basketball Live for your webOS smartphone either. Both apps let you passively keep tabs on your favorite/necessary teams through the joy of webOS notifications. Should you be feeling more antsy, you can also open the app itself and check out the scores in real time for all games. Both apps are made by More Solutions and available now in the App Catalog - Sports Live! HD for the TouchPad is currently on sale for $2.49, while College Basketball Live! and Women's College Basketball Live! are available for $1.99 and Sports Live! for webOS smartphones is $7.99 Also, go Bearcats! View the full article

In a new posting by webOS CTO Sam Greenblatt on the HP webOS Developer Blog, HP has announced it plans on publishing additional components of webOS version 3.0.5 for the TouchPad to open source, calling it the “Community Edition”. It will be posted at opensource.palm.com and is to be completed by June. The publishing of the code will provide the community the ability to “work with legacy devices using the current platform.” In a separate announcement, the Linux 3.3. kernel has produced a seventh release candidate containing patches for networking, drivers, management, and memory. The release should be ready by the end of this month. You can see the post in its entirety here. Source: HP webOS Developer Blog View the full article

Although the HP Pre3 was only officially released throughout Europe for just a few days before HP pulled the plug on webOS hardware, a lot more AT&T (and a few Verizon) Pre3s made their way to eBay and other "unofficial" channels. Unfortunately, since HP will not support the device or make any additional accessories for it, it appeared as if spare or extended Pre3 batteries would never see the light of day, even if you simply needed a replacement for a defective battery. Luckily for us Pre3 owners, Mugen Power Batteries decided to produce two sizes of extended batteries, the 1400 mAh "SL" extended battery for $46.95 and a 2800 mAh "XL" extended battery for $98.95. As compared to the stock Pre3 battery that clocks in at 1230 mAh, these batteries will give you an additional 14% or 128% of battery life, respectively, before your phone needs to be plugged back in. The 1400 mAh SL battery--which we previously reviewed--is only slightly bigger than the stock battery, essentially making it more of a spare battery than an extended battery. With no other source of spare batteries for the Pre3, having this option for a spare or replacement battery is great. In addition, since Mugen's SL battery is the same physical size as the stock Pre3 battery you can continue to use your existing touchstone-enabled back cover for the Pre3 with no issues However, if you are looking for some more heavy-duty battery life for your Pre3, you may instead want to consider the 2800 mAh XL battery from Mugen. After putting our review battery through its paces, our overall reaction was quite favorable. While the battery's capacity is twice the size as the SL extended battery, it is also physically bigger, weighing 1.7 ounces (48 grams) as compared to .85 oz (24 grams) of either the stock or SL extended battery. As a result of the larger size, it also requires a larger back cover for the phone which is included with your purchase. For this review, we will focus on both the affects on battery life but also the affects of the larger back cover. read more View the full article

In a new posting to the HP webOS Developer Blog, webOS CTO Sam Greenblatt announced that HP intends to publish additional components from the already-released webOS 3.0.5 to open source, branding the components as "the Community Edition." The work will be hosted at opensource.palm.com and is expect to take through June, and is not directly related to the Open webOS project. The idea behind open sourcing parts of the legacy code is to allow the homebrew community to do even more with devices currently running webOS 3.0.5 - that is, the HP TouchPad. Greenblatt wrote that the hope is "that this additional release will help [the homebrew community] better understand the platform and create a constructive environment for moving forward as Open webOS itself is released." What exactly we can expect to see from this release is still up in the air, and being a side-project like this is, we wouldn't expect to see a roadmap like we did for Open webOS. The name "Community Edition" doesn't refer to the entirety of webOS 3.0.5 (since it contains plenty of proprietary third-party bits that HP can't open source), but do the portions that HP will be open sourcing. It's a thank you to the homebrew community that helped webOS keep on keeping on. Greenblatt also laid out some housekeeping notes for March's Open webOS release commitments. Delays in the final release of the Linux Standard Kernel 3.3 have pushed that back to the end of the month, while we can expect to see the Nyx abstraction layer and components released in the next few days ahead of the kernel. View the full article

This tip is only for devices running webOS 2.x The order of the email accounts listed in the email app is determined by the order that you add them to the app. While you have been able to reorder those email accounts since the original days of webOS 1.0.1, that functionality seems to have been broken in webOS 2.0. Fortunately, that is not the case, but rather it just requires one additional step, added below as step #5 In this example, you can see a Yahoo account and a Gmail account. Let’s say we want to swap the order of how those two accounts show up, so Gmail shows first. read more View the full article

Phil McKinney left his position as HP CTO and chief big thinker at the end of this past October. Since then he published a new book, Beyond the Obvious: Killer Questions That Spark Game-Changing Innovation [hardcover, Kindle, iBooks] that explores his experience as an innovator. In promoting Beyond the Obvious, McKinney sat down for an interview with "strategic marketing expert" and fellow author Rick Mathieson. Most of the interview touches on what's in McKinney's book, but in part four of the interview he steers the discussion towards what went down with webOS and McKinney's last few months at HP. We'll let McKinney do the talking here: "[The Palm acquisition] was going to be a long term effort. Palm was struggling and HP was stepping in, doing the acquisition, and we were basically going to take three years hands-off. Palm was basically going to get cash infusions, resources, and expertise. But Palm was going to be given three years to basically get itself positioned to be a market leader in its space. Now, fast forward to July of 2011 and, one, you had a swap out of the CEOs - Leo comes in as the new CEO - and HP, for whatever reason - I was not a part of this decision - made the decision to kill it, one year into the three year program. This is an example of not committing long term to the resources and not having patience for innovation." McKinney notes that he was part of the team that drove the acquisition of Palm and that there are always challenges to overcome with trying to get a large organization like HP to be innovative. As the existence of a three-year plan for Palm implies, the challenge is sticking to a long-term plan that ignores the quarterly financial reports in favor of the long view. It's equal parts hard and frustrating to imagine where Palm and webOS would be today had HP not pulled the plug on hardware development and essentially killed (and since attempted to revived) the OS. It's been seven months since former HP CEO Leo Apotheker made the decision to kill webOS hardware, and during that time we expect that we would have at the very least seen the release of the HP Pre3 and TouchPad Go, plus whatever else HP might have been working up. For his part, McKinney still uses a webOS smartphone and a TouchPad. View the full article

We've seen all sorts of interesting things done with webOS notifications, from persistent weather and stock information to pop-up mini news readers. But they were always basic and focused apps. But Science Apps, the webOS developers behind Starter and Lithium News, recently kicked things up a notch with the app-in-a-notification system with Pop!Later. This new app is a Read It Later client that lives in a notification on your webOS smartphone or TouchPad. Not only can you use it to submit a copied URL, you can actually browse, read, and manage your saved articles all from within the notification. You might be asking yourself, "Why would I want this?" Essentially this lets you have two apps running at once on the same screen - Pop!Later providing the Read It Later view while whatever else you want - a movie, for example - takes up the rest of the screen. View the full article

Oh, Best Buy, you didn't tell us you had a brand new TouchPad in stock. We left our number and everything. Did we do something wrong? Why don't you ever call anymore? In all seriousness, we're not surprised that the Best Buy in Santee, California, found a brand-new 32GB HP TouchPad to sell. How it got on their shelves isn't likely to be a harrowing tale of dragons and sword fights and multitasking cards. Like tipster nfrisbie1, we're more interested in how this Best Buy location thinks they can get away with asking full list price - $599.99 - for a long-discontinued product that sells for close to a third of that on eBay, which is itself notably higher than the fire sale pricing that Best Buy previously honored. You so silly. View the full article