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Part of the joy of apps is that they provide a customized experience for a specific service, quite often providing that service better on a smartphone or tablet than the website itself could. The web by-and-large is built for use with a mouse and a keyboard, not your fingers - and so often we find ourselves using webpages to accomplish things that there just aren't apps around to do. That's not a bad thing, but it can be frustrating on webOS since the browser apps have no password saving capabilities. It's a fairly simple concept (like the scrollbars we looked at earlier today), but it goes a long way towards accelerating the user experience. Cookies expire, preferences get reset. sessions time out, and users simply don't stay logged in to a site. But in a world rife with data security problems, keeping track of all your passwords can be a pain. Sure, there are apps to help with that, but for not-your-bank-account logins, there's often little reason for the browser to not remember your username and password. You can always hit that "no" button if you're really concerned about your password security. Have your own thoughts on this webOS Wish List entry? Of course you do - the comments are below. Surely 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 what has proven to be an awesome discussion. View the full article

The month may be over, but the Mobile Nations quest to use our phones and tablets, apps and accessories to get stronger, faster, and healthier continues! February was fitness month at Mobile Nations, the month we sought to keep our new year's hopes and dreams of thinner waistlines and fitter bodies alive. Week after week we picked reasonable, attainable goals and strove to keep them -- eating less and better, moving farther and more frequently, lifting more than ever before. From Android Central to CrackBerry.com, from iMore to WPCentral to webOS Nation, we checked out all the best ways to use our phones and tablets to improve our mobile lives, and all the top apps and accessories focused on our health and fitness. And you did it right along with us in our forums! So here we are, at the end of the month, having achieved tremendous successes, suffered occasional setbacks, but sticking together and seeing it through. And this is far from the end -- we're going to keep covering eHealth/iHealth and eFitness/iFitness year round. We're also going to focus on health and fitness again, and we're going to bring in some experts to help us bring you even better, more helpful coverage. But for now it's time to enjoy a well deserved break. A cheat meal. A rest between sets. Take a seat, crack open a shake, and relax. Here's your Mobile Nations fitness month round up! read more View the full article

We've all had that moment, where we want to keep that file or photo or video on our device, but we really don't want to be caught having it around (or just can't let it fall into the wrong hands). Natively, there's no way to really hide files on the TouchPad and yet still have them accessible. But with 'Ncognito by Code-Crunch.com you can do just that. The app creates a hidden folder into which you can put pictures, videos, audio files, and documents, all of which are only accessible through 'Ncognito's password-protected interface. The ability to store and hide files with 'Ncognito would normally cost you $0.99, but we just so happen to have 50 copies of it to give away! Contest: We have 50 copies of 'Ncognito to give away. Just leave a comment on this post to enter. Contest ends next Sunday at midnight US Eastern Time, after which time we will select 50 random entrants to win. Please only leave one comment, multiple entries won’t count. Promo codes are only valid in countries serviced by the App Catalog, and users must be running webOS 3.0.0 or higher with the latest version of the App Catalog. View the full article

This tip is only for devices running webOS 3.0 and higher While you can always view your Facebook photos using the web browser or within the TouchPad's Facebook app, did you know that you can also see all the comments of your pictures directly in the Photos & Videos app on the TouchPad, providing that you have Facebook photos sync enabled?. If you do not have Facebook photos sync enabled, go to the Accounts app and turn it on. Then, just open the Photos & Videos app and find the album that contains the photo and then tap on the photo itself. You will be able to tell it's a Facebook photo album because it has a icon on the album's thumbnail After loading up the photo, you should see the onscreen controls across the bottom of the screen. If you do not see the photo controls, just tap the photo once. On the bottom-right of the screen, you should see a icon that, when tapped, will show you all the comments on that picture along with when the comments was left. You can even add your own right from the app. Note that if you have added multiple Facebook accounts to your TouchPad, there will not be any indicator as to which account the album belongs to. And, if you were to add your own comment to a photo, it will automatically use the account that owns the album. View the full article

Squeaking in just under the February deadline (thank goodness for that extra day, eh?) is the promised release this month for the Enyo 2.0 user interface widgets. The release, as noted on the EnyoJS blog also brings the Enyo framework to beta 2 status, which comes with fuller cross platform support for "a wide range of desktop and mobile browsers, from IE 8 to iOS 5." The UI widgets set takes after the already-established look of webOS 3.0, maintaining the three-dimensional rounded buttons and text fields aesthetic. The only easily discerned difference is in the slider grab handles, which have morphed from virtual slots to more subtle virtual grooves. The new/old look has been dubbed Onyx by the Enyo team - while it may look practically the same, the widgets were built from the ground-up for Enyo 2. This is just the initial release for Onyx, with additional updates to come in the months ahead. If you're wanting to try it out while you're waiting for developers to deploy Enyo 2.0-based apps, they've put together an Onyx Widget sampler that shows how it all looks in your browser (and that's using Enyo 2.0 code to boot). The beta 2 release for Enyo 2 also includes a new layout library meant to help developers build flexible layouts to fit the available space of the screen. Considering that Enyo 2.0 is meant to be deployed across multiple platforms and the web, flexibility will be a key component. With new FittableColumns and FittableRows controls, developers will be able to choose a section of their app to expand and contract to fill available space while the rest maintain their sizing. This is all done with minimal JavaScript and CSS styling limitations for developers - it's highly flexible while also seriously lightweight on the processing front. Apart from layout and UI widgets, the Enyo 2 beta 2 release also includes improved event handling, unstyled base UI controls, and updates to improve performance for Enyo apps on iOS and Android. The Enyo 2.0b2 release is up on GitHub right now - go get it, developers! View the full article

When we were brewing up the idea of doing Mobile Nations Fitness Month at CES this year, I had some reservations. These weren't reservations about doing a fitness month - it seemed like a good idea then and looking back on February it still looks that way. My hesitation was personal. As some of you might be aware, I'm a member of the Ohio Army National Guard, and as part of that job I have to maintain a minimum level of physical fitness, and through the past eight years I've worked to do so. I'll admit to some struggles in that department - I suffer from bouts of lazy and "I don't wanna", but by and large I've been able to stay in relatively good shape, at least well enough to pass an annual Army Physical Fitness Test. There's just one thing: I learned how to exercise from the Army in basic training. I can count on one hand the encounters I had with technology during my nine weeks at Fort Knox during the summer of 2004: the pay phone to call my parents and girlfriend, the little CRT TV that we watched Apocalypse Now on for July 4th, the fancy but faulty nighttime rifle range simulator, and the stopwatch the Drill Sergeants used to time our runs. So I learned to exercise, to do pushups and situps and run two miles without the aid of technology. It was do push-ups until your arms turn to jelly, do sit-ups until you can get your shoulders off the ground, and run until you can't stand. There's no tech needed to do that, and no tech that can help with such a simple routine of "go until you can't go anymore, then do some more." I was seventeen-years-old then, so while I found technology cool, the extent of my collection at that point was a Gateway laptop (chunky, as you would expect for 2004) and a Palm Tungsten T3 PDA (still one of my all-time favorite bits of technology). I still had a film camera (it took me until 2007 to make the jump to digital) and didn't get a cellphone until after basic training - a smartphone took another year after that. And while there were plenty of exercise-tracking technology bits in the mid-2000's, they were almost universally bulky, inaccurate, difficult to use, and of limited usefulness. read more View the full article

One of the things we've been waiting so long for in webOS is something relatively simple, at least conceptually: scrollbars. They've marked your progress down a page in practically every graphical user interface since the dawn of the GUI with Xerox PARC back in the 1970's. But when webOS was introduced in 2009, there wasn't a progress bar in sight. Some third party apps, like the Enyo-based Paper Mache have added in their own scrollbars, and with webOS 3.0.5 the TouchPad browser also picked up its own scrollbar, but by and large webOS has been scrollbar-free. Homebrew developer Isaac Garzon (isagar2004 in our forums) decided to do something about that shortcoming, and the result is a patch oh-so-aptly titled "webOS Scrollbars". Garzon had previously built a patch to add scrollbars to the browser, but with the new patch he's managed to add the scrollbar to most of the built-in webOS apps and practically every third party app. The only exceptions to the built-in apps are five Mojo 2-based apps: Accounts, Contacts, Email, Exhibition and Photos. Everything else we tested, from Calendar to Memos to Web to Music to the other Preferences apps worked exactly as expected. Every third party app we tried out also picked up the scrollbars with no problem, including Music Player (Remix), Carbon, Preware, Feeder, JogStats, and Project Macaw. The patch adds iOS-style scrollbars to Mojo smartphone apps, in that they're round-capped narrow bars that appear as soon as you start scrolling and go away when you stop. The scrollbars also adjust their size to be relative to the ratio of what's currently displayed versus the entire scrollable space. Both vertical and horizontal scrolling are supported, with vertical on the right edge and horizontal at the bottom (but somewhat distractingly floating over bottom-aligned onscreen buttons such as the back and refresh controls in the browser). The bars themselves are colored so that they'll appear equally well in almost all apps, with a transulcent dark gray body rimmed by a one-pixel white border. webOS Scrollbars isn't currently designed to add scrollbars to Enyo apps, though Garzon plans to work on that after finishing up the Mojo implementation. Additionally there's still work to be done as far as getting the scrollbars to be supported in those remaining five apps (if you have any insights to offer, Isaac is listening). But for a work-in-progress we're still plenty impressed and looking forward to what comes next for this patch. Go ahead and check it out in the webOS Nation Forums (patches for webOS 2.1.c and 2.2.x) or in Preware and webOS Quick Install (just webOS 2.2.x) View the full article

Last week as part of Mobile Nations Fitness Month we took a look at Speedy Marks' Workout, an interval training timer app. The gist of interval training is that exercising in bursts of high-intensity instead of a continuous moderate intensity results in a more effective workout. While Workout provides a pretty basic approach to the concept of interval training, A1 Fit Interval Trainer by A1 Development takes comes at it with more customizability information presentation. Upon launch you're presented with a set-up screen asking you to specify your warm-up and cool-down times, how long you'd like each high- and low-intensity period to last, and how many cycles you'd like the app to run you through. Hit the big green start button and you're thrown to the timer screen. There are two countdown timers, with your current period timer at the top and the total time remaining at the bottom. Each is accompanied by a shrinking progress bar, with the period timer's also listing the current activity (warm-up, high intensity, et al). Smack dab in the middle is a count of how many intervals through you are in the workout. Since you're not likely to have your smartphone up by your face when you're working out, A1 Fit has taken a number of steps to help you workout from a distance. There's the large bold text for the timers and the contrast of the progress bars and a loudly repeating chime at the change of each interval. Additionally, the background color changes with each interval, becoming orange for the warmup phase, red for high intensity workouts, green for low intensity, and a cool blue for the cool down period. You can turn off both the chime and the color change if you want to keep things calm. Smartly, A1 Fit also keeps the screen turned on through your workout. It might seem like a simple concept, but proper and consistent timing is important for interval training to be effective. Apps like the $1.49 A1 Fit Interval Trainer aim to make it as easy as possible to do so. View the full article

HP has announced it has laid off close to 270 employees from its webOS division, mostly engineering positions relating to getting webOS to work with hardware that it feels it “no longer needs.” The announcement comes as it makes its transition to open source, further reducing a headcount of roughly 500 webOS employees that remain, and following the departure of Jon Rubenstein this past January. HP’s statement is below: As webOS continues the transition from making mobile devices to open source software, it no longer needs many of the engineering and other related positions that it required before. This creates a smaller and more nimble team that is well-equipped to deliver an open source webOS and sustain HP’s commitment to the software over the long term. HP is working to redeploy employees affected by these changes to other roles at the company. Source: webOS Nation View the full article

HP today announced that as part of their transition to making open source software instead of devices and hardware they are further reducing the headcount at what remains of the webOS unit. Approximately 275 of the 500 webOS employees will be affected by the don't-call-it-layoffs, almost entirely in engineering (those that make webOS work with hardware). With nearly 350,000 employees, HP surely has more than enough openings for these engineers to fill, should they so desire to keep working with the company (who knows, they might not even have to move buildings). The move leaves webOS with around 225 employees, following notable attrition and little recruiting over the past few months. The move fits with HP's plans to move the webOS group out of the old 1000-employee Palm campus and to the smaller space in Cupertino that HP acquired when they purchased ArcSight in 2010. While we can understand the need to get rid of positions that are no longer needed (even if Whitman intends for HP to eventually make webOS tablets again in the future), we can't help but be saddened to see yet another reduction in the webOS workforce. HP's statement on the matter: As webOS continues the transition from making mobile devices to open source software, it no longer needs many of the engineering and other related positions that it required before. This creates a smaller and more nimble team that is well-equipped to deliver an open source webOS and sustain HP’s commitment to the software over the long term. HP is working to redeploy employees affected by these changes to other roles at the company. View the full article

Phil, Dan, Alex, and Simon talk Mobile World Congress day one, including Nokia on both Windows Phone and Symbian (biggest. Camera. Phone. Ever.), Galaxy Note 10.1, the return of the Padphone, Huawei, and yet another plethora of Android devices. Listen in! (And send food!) Our podcast feed: Audio | Video Download directly: Audio Subscribe in iTunes: Audio | Video Subscribe in Zune read more View the full article

Mobile Nations Podcast Feed Mobile Nations on iTunes Mobile Nations YouTube Follow Ashley on Twitter, and then click here to enter to win an unlocked, Skyfall-branded GSM SGS2 from Ashley! Winner will be announced on next week’s show HTC announces HTC One lineup at MWC: One X, One S, and One V Samsung Galaxy Note review (AT&T) Samsung announces Ice Cream Sandwich-powered Galaxy Tab 2 in a 10.1 version iPad 2 vs. PlayBook 2.0: Tablet Smack Down! BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 Now Available for Download! [Full coverage] Crackberry’s 5th birthday is a chance to make YOUR BlackBerry wish come true! Win a FREE BlackBerry PlayBook! We're giving away 1 a week for 4 Weeks! Use your smartphone to help break bad habits (and form good ones) Time, Inc. officially calls it quits on TouchPad; Time, People, SI, and Fortune to go dark Settlement reached in Palm Profile data loss class action suit Apple getting ready to ditch the traditional iPhone, iPad, and iPod dock connector Why Android and Microsoft want a piece of the iPhone The App Store and the scam app invasion Nokia Lumia 800 Telstra launches March 13th? More Lumia 610 photos appear Smoked by Windows Phone goes digital View the full article

Phil, Simon, and Alex leave Dan to prepare for Nokia while they discuss the massive influx of Android Phones already announced -- before the show has even begun! We've got your LG and HTC right here. Listen in! Our podcast feed: Audio | Video Download directly: Audio Subscribe in iTunes: Audio | Video Subscribe in Zune read more View the full article

Phil, Simon, and Alex have splashed down in Barcelona and are ready to assault Mobile World Congress 2012, Mobile Nations style, and bring you back absolutely everything Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, (and even iPhone and iPad if they can find it!). Listen in! Our podcast feed: Audio | Video Download directly: Audio Subscribe in iTunes: Audio | Video Subscribe in Zune read more View the full article

30 Dollars? Gee...thanks... View the full article

There are two reasons why people watch the Super Bowl: the football and the commercials. For this year's Super Bowl XLVI, advertisers paid an average of $3.5 million for a 30-second spot during the game. If you missed any of those commercials or just want to check them out again, you can now find many of them online if you know where to look, or you can use your webOS smartphone or TouchPad. Super Ads by Aclass Apps has been in the App Catalog for webOS smartphones for a while now and lets you browse the commercials from the last few Super Bowls (although the latest Super Bowl has yet to be added), but it now has a big brother with Super Ads XL for the TouchPad. Completely rewritten in Enyo for the tablet, Super Ads XL is $1.49 and features all the commercials from the last 4 Super Bowls in one easy-to-manage place. You simply tap on the Super Bowl you want to view, find the commercial you want, and play it, all within the app. You can also "favorite" commercials for quick-access later by tapping on the big star next to the commercial Super Ads XL is missing a few features that were present in its Mojo phone-bound predecessor, such as sharing (email, SMS, Facebook, etc) and search, but we have been told that those updates are on the way. In addition, the developer has plans to add a Villo chat room and is taking the app cross-platform through the magic of open source Enyo. In fact, it's already in the Chrome App Store and has been approved for the Blackberry Playbook. View the full article

In a world where unlimited data plans are no longer available and everyone is watching their data usage, having a way to keep track of your data usage on the device has become increasingly important. While other platforms have a native way to track this, even showing you daily data usage or usage by app, webOS has no such functionality. Most cellular carriers have codes your can dial to check (e.g. *3282# for AT&T), but even that will only show your cellular data usage. Instead, you can install the homebrew app Netstat from either Preware or webOS Quick Install that will track your Wi-Fi, Cellular, and Bluetooth data separately. The app even has preferences to allow you to set cellular data Traffic Limit and specify what day of the month you want the app to reset your data. So, if you need to keep track of your cellular data usage, or are just curious how much data you use across both Wi-Fi and your cell network, check out Netstat. And for those that are worried, there has been no noticeable impact to battery life while using Netstat View the full article

There has been some exciting chatter coming out of the internet tubes and pipes involving Enyo development and the community. Thanks to our friend Ben Stern (aka @webOSdealer) and others in the community, we have ourselves a nationwide Hackathon on the horizon! This is certainly not going to be you grandma’s hackathon. You know, if your grandma had a hackathon and all. On Sunday, March 4th the New York City webOS Developer and Enthusiast meetup will be hosting a Virtual Hackathon between 12pm and 6pm. In addition to the New York meetup , Other meetups participating in the hackathon include San Diego, Indianapolis, and Dallas. There are 3 ways those who are interested will be able to participate: Attend one of the local participating webOS meetups. Gather with a few of your local devs and register as a team. Register as an individual At the start of the event there will be an Introduction to Enyo and presentation by HP webOS Developer Platform Architect Ben Combee via Ustream. Ben will also participate in a Q&A session half way through the event. Not content at offering just hackathon prizes, there will also be a raffle for a UK QWERTY Pre3 that is open to anyone in the world. There isn’t any word yet on what will be worked on, but things are shaping up to be an event not to miss. Those that are interested—honestly who wouldn’t be—should make their way over to EnyoHackathon.com to register. Enyo developers, it is time to get your game face on! Source: Enyo Hackathon View the full article

webOS has had a few hackathons in its history, but not many in the modern Enyo era. With Enyo 1.0 fully open source and Enyo 2.0 almost there, it's time to bring back the hackathon! We're pleased to report that the New York, San Diego, Indianapolis, and Dallas webOS meetups are going to all be participating in a cross-country Enyo hackathon on 4 March 2012 between 12pm and 6pm Eastern time. And you don't really even have to go to one of the events - you can participate as a virtual entity right from your living room. What exactly they'll be working on hasn't been made public yet, but the whole thing comes with the support of HP, with webOS Developer Platform Architect Ben Combee appearing via the Ustream at all four events and participating in a live Q&A session in the middle. Interested developers should head to EnyoHackathon.com to register their teams. That's right - there's going to be some competition here to make this happen. And what's competition without prizes? Yep, there are prizes too. So go and register, dear Enyo developer, and prepare to hack! View the full article

One of the biggest challenges facing us for Mobile Nations Fitness Month is just getting our behinds up off the couch and exercising. Be it doing pushups during commercial breaks of going out for a run, getting off that couch is the first step. But what's step #2? That's what Infinite Appz's so aptly-named Couch to 5K aims to answer. Couch to 5K provides a three-days-a-week for nine weeks program designed to get your from nothing to being able to run a full five kilometers (3.1 miles) nonstop. Sound impossible to do in just nine weeks? It's not as hard as you might think, and the simplicity of Couch to 5K will make it easier. The app provides a evolving routine each day, starting with twenty minutes of alternating between jogging and walking on week one, day one to twenty minutes of jogging on day three of week five, finishing with a 30 minute jog set at the end of the nine week course. You're presented with a basic and linear interface that updates with the new day's course (assuming you finish the previous one) with a big countdown time in the center with a Start/Pause/Resume button below. Hit Start and you're prompted by a disembodied male voice with a neutral American accent to begin your warm-up with a five minute countdown. Once the initial warm-up countdown concludes, Couch to 5K automatically moves to the next stage of the day's workout: "Jog Now." For the first few weeks you'll alternate between jogging and walking, with the voice offering audible prompts as you go. As you progress through the program the jog periods grow longer and the walks shorter and less frequent, until you reach the point where you're just running non-stop. Which is the goal, no? read more View the full article

If you've been looking for a way to get Netflix support onto your HP TouchPad, listen up. It takes some doing, but the homebrew CyanogenMod 9 project to port Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich to our favorite webOS tablet has seen a bump up to Alpha 2 status. So while there's still plenty of work to be done, there's also plenty of progress being made. As note on our Android-loving sister site Android Central, CM9 Alpha 2 for TouchPad brings improved video support to the table, including HTTP livestreaming for apps like Netflix. We're not likely to get a webOS Netflix app anytime soon, so if you want Netflix, here's your best option. View the full article

App: Archive Manager Developer: pcworldSoftware Price: $1.99 Archive Manager is a long-awaited app for webOS. I know many people who have been waiting on an app that will archive (and un-archive) zip and tar files especially. I love this app, and love the idea. And at $1.99, it really isn’t all that expensive for what you get. Let’s get into the review. Initial Setup The initial setup of the app is pretty straight forward. You just click the nice little button that says, “I’ve read this.. Stop annoying me”. Ahh, you have to love the humor that a developer has when creating his app. UI The UI is also pretty straight forward. If you’ve used pcworldSoftware’s FTPit!, then the scenes will look very familiar to you. As soon as you open the app, you are presented with a filepicker. From the filepicker scene, you can either enter a folder, chose a folder to be archived, chose some files to be archived, or un-archive an already archived file. The archiving scene is also very nice and well laid out. It has a very nice and easy to understand UI. I knew how to work the app the first time I picked it up. Function This app fills a big void in the webOS users life (for those of us who deal with archives on a daily basis). It has the ability to extract and create ZIP, RAR, 7z, tar, gzip, bzip2, ISO and many more archive file types while on the go. I can now send someone a zip file of 30 pictures and not have to chose each picture from a list in the email app on my phone! The developer is looking at creating a homebrew service that will allow entire device access including files and folders. Pros Supports multiple file types (e.g. ZIP, RAR, 7z, tar, gzip, bzip2, ISO and many more) Not super expensive Active developer who responds quickly Cons Didn’t come sooner Bottom Line The bottom line is, if you use archives, even just every once in a while, I would buy this app. Show your support for future development, and get a very nice tool as well. At only $1.99, it won’t break the bank purchasing it either! View the full article

We've for the past several hundred years lived and worked globally under a seven-day week system. We've even adopted a typical calendar layout of seven columns across and engrained the week concept in our minds. That layout has extended to webOS in the Calendar app's month view. But there's an instance that we use much more often across the entirety of webOS that's lacking that handy grid view: the date picker. Go ahead and open up calendar and create a new event. Now try to change the date. You can easily pick the year and month from a vertical scroller - that makes sense. But what stops making sense is the vertical scroller for picking the date. When you have between 28 and 31 days, and when the 5th can fall on a different day of the week every month, a simple list of dates is really not adequate. So let's go back to basics. Let's go back to the calendar of the classic Palm OS. Let's go back to the grid date picker. It'll show us what day of the week the 5th is. It'll make things faster. It just makes sense. Have your own thoughts on this webOS Wish List entry? Of course you do - the comments are below. Surely 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 what has proven to be an awesome discussion. View the full article

Ah, this takes us back. If you've been around webOS long enough, you might remember the brouhaha of November 2009. Yes, two years back, back when you could get a Palm Pre or a Palm Pixi, on Sprint and only Sprint, the webOS world was rocked by the news that Palm Profile backups were becoming corrupted on the server and the data was rendered inaccessible - a problem for those that had elected to store years of accumulated Contacts, Calendars, Memos, and Tasks in their Palm Profile. Some users were able to get their data restored by Palm going back to their backups of the backups, but others were just plain lost, and the users understandbly upset. Thus was born the class action lawsuit of Standiford v. Palm, Inc. and Sprint Spectrum, L.P.. The parties involved today announced that they have reached a settlement and will be going before the United States District Court for the Northern District of California for final approval on May 31 of this year (two-and-a-half years after the backup failure was uncovered). Being that this is a class action suit, you, the webOS smartphone owner, could sign on as a plaintiff. The only criteria you need meet are having created a Palm Profile on a webOS smartphone between 1 June 2009 and 26 January 2012 and having experienced permanent or temporary loss of access to your data stored in your Palm Profile account. If your claim submission is deemed valid, you could stand to receive a substantial settlement. How substantial? How does up to three Alexander Hamiltons sound? That's right, $30 could be yours. Except it's not a cash settlement, no, that would be too easy. If you suffered a permanent data loss due to a Palm Profile backup failure, you'll be able to choose from a $30 HP Online Store credit (not an App Catalog credit - this is for printer ink or a mouse pad) or a $30 Sprint bill credit. And if your data loss was temporary and you're still seething about it thirty months later, you could get $20 - again for the HP Online Store or your Sprint bill. The settlement is still pending approval at a fairness hearing, but considering that iPhone users disgruntled over their iPhone 4 antennae performance were offered a bumper case or $15, we'd guess this one's heading for approval. In the end, you get $30 and your contacts are still gone, while the lawyers make out with a briefcase full of cash. If you're interested in signing on to the class action suit, hit up the source link below. Full details in press release form can be found after the break. read more View the full article

It didn't take long for the big privacy brouhaha to turn out some results, eh? Today the State of California announced that they have brokered an agreement with Amazon, Apple, Google, HP, Microsoft, and Research In Motion regarding the disclosure of privacy policies in mobile apps. The agreement is meant to allow customers to check out an app's privacy policy before downloading an app, and if the app doesn't comply with the stated privacy policy, the developer could be prosecuted under California law. How exactly HP and the others will implement this policy is unclear at this point. While Google currently prompts an app buyer to confirm their agreement to privacy policies for individual apps (this app can access your contacts, photos, etc), the only exception that the webOS App Catalog currently calls out is for location services. The way the agreement is worded, HP, Apple, and the other companies not currently as aggressive in privacy clearance as Google would be able to provide a link to an app's privacy policy "in a consistent location" within the apps' store listing. While HP hasn't had to endure as much of a media firestorm as Apple has with unintentional location tracking and most recently overlooked contacts uploading, customers should remain always vigilant. The problem is that vigilance with regards to app privacy is that how an app works behind the scenes is not a clear and understandable thing to most users. While plenty of outrage was directed at Apple and developers over the failure to disclose contact uploading, the "why" for these apps uploading contacts wasn't fully explored, nor the security of that information once it's in the developer's hands. Either way, we're glad to see that this issue has been addressed, even if by just the state of California (as usual they've done their best to preempt the federal government while Congress dillies around with lawyer-driven hearings on the matter). View the full article