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By News Reporter
While every webOS device comes with some kind of speaker, the TouchPad is the only one whose speaker is adequate to fill a (smallish) room. On the phones, even the rear speaker struggles to put out enough volume to allow sharing of music or other audio in a space with moderate or higher background noise. Given that webOS phones all support both standard 3.5mm headphone/speaker jacks (the Veer admittedly needing an adapter) and Bluetooth speakers, there are numerous options for boosting the sound so others can enjoy it too. Unfortunately, most of those external speakers are far less portable than the phone itself. There are, though, some speakers that offer both powered amplification and portability. One of these is the Naztech N15 3.55 Mini Boom Speaker, which additionally operates as a standalone MP3/WMA player (it accepts microSD cards as removable storage, and has minimal controls for music playback and track navigation). While the Naztech's design and standalone player capabilities are pluses, however, its minimal amplification power makes it a poor choice for webOS devices.
Naztech has done a nice job with the design of the N15. It folds to the size and shape of a flattened golf ball, with a recess for storing the non-removable (and very short at 2-3 inches) 3.5mm audio cable. Along the periphery of the speaker are the standalone music player controls, a miniUSB (not microUSB, unfortunately, meaning it cannot share charger cables with a webOS device) port, and the microSD slot. The play/pause button doubles as the power button for the speaker, and a blue LED lights up when the unit is powered on. Note that although the track forward and reverse buttons double as volume controls for standalone play, they do not affect volume when the N15 is connected to an external sound source. According to Naztech, the N15 provides 2 watts of speaker output, and its 3.7 volt lithium ion battery charges (via a powered USB port or charger) in 4 hours. Naztech does not provide any play time details, and our testing did not extend to battery life.
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By News Reporter
The email app on your webOS smartphone does not offer you a lot of options on how to customize it to your liking, with your only options available are to set your notification sound,
link hidden, please login to view or , adjust your , or choose your . However, thanks to the webOS homebrew community you now have some additional ways to adjust your email app experience. Homebrew developers Momouton and anseld1986 have released the Email Mega Mix as a Tweaks-enabled patch that took many of the best email-related patches available and then improved on it even further. While there are a variety of enhancements available in this patch, one section that you may find useful is the "Compose View Options." In this section, you can adjust six different tweaks for when you are writing or replying to an email. Three of the tweaks allow you to display or remove buttons on your email, while the other three will give you a pop-up confirmation screen depending on the action you want to perform. To activate any of these, just install the Email mega Mix patch (available in Preware or webOS Quick install) and then open up the Tweaks app on your device. Navigate to the Email section and find the "COMPOSE VIEW OPTIONS." Choose any or all of the following:
Display Priority Button: Add a "!" button to toggle the importance level of the email, thereby marking it as "urgent" to the message receiver Display Discard Draft Button: Add a "trash can" button to quickly discard the current email, instead of having to needing to Display Save Draft Button: Add a save button (it looks like an old school floppy disk) to save the current email draft. This just saves the current progress while still leaving the email up for editing Require Send Confirmation: Add a confirmation pop-up after you hit the "send" button to confirm that you would really like to send the email Require Save Confirmation: Used in conjunction with the "Display Save Draft Button" above, you can add a confirmation pop-up asking if you would like to save the draft. Require Discard Confirmation: Used in conjunction with the "Display Discard Draft Button" above, you can add a confirmation pop-up asking if you would like to discard the email when you tap the trash button. Once you toggle any of these tweaks, you will need to close and then re-open the Email app for them to take effect. There is no need to the whole phone.
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By News Reporter
As webOS users we are definitely no stranger to
link hidden, please login to view. Even before former HP CEO developers were already abandoning the platform by the boatload for "greener pastures". Fast forward to today where there is no webOS hardware to look forward to, a customer base that is shrinking by the day, and an uncertain future in the open source world and we are truly lucky to have any new app development at all. One has to be a true die hard webOS lover to continue to develop apps for the various webOS devices that we hold so dear. With that said, a "die hard" webOS developer leaving the platform kind of stings a bit. So when we heard the news that developer extraordinaire Syntactix announced that they would be dropping support for two of the most popular webOS apps we were a bit taken back. As of October 16 Syntactix developer Greg Hrebek announced that they will be dropping support for both YouView and Pack 'n' Track. These two apps were prime examples of webOS apps done right and really showed what was possible on the platform. As a matter of fact YouView (a YouMail visual voicemail client) by a sizable margin earning Syntactix a cool $100k. Their other app Pack 'n' Track also . Last but certainly not least we had a nice in depth (Syntactix President) a little over a year ago in our Developer Spotlight series. So to say that both Syntactix and their apps played a very big role in webOS history would be a huge understatement.
So why if they are so loved and well respected in this community is Syntactix dropping support for their webOS apps? Well both apps are facing ongoing API changes which the now aged legacy webOS hardware simply does not support. Add that to the anemic webOS userbase and you're left with two projects that unfortunately do not justify further development. As much as it pains us to hear that it is the harsh reality of the situation.
In closing Greg did say that Syntactix is interested in Enyo 2 and have been monitoring the framework's progress closely. So it wouldn't be too far fetched to imagine more of their great work in the future using the framework which is something we look forward too. In the meantime we here at webOS Nation would like to collectively wish Syntactix the best of luck in the future and thank them for all their hardwork and dedication over the years.
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By News Reporter
August 17, 2011 was a weird day. The day prior the
link hidden, please login to view with nary an announcement to herald its arrival. The 17th saw the surprise release of the , again with no announcement, not even a press release. If was a confusing day, but a pretty good one once HP figured out what was going on in Europe. The next day was devastating for the webOS community: HP CEO Leo Apotheker announced , one focused on enterprise services and the other on less-profitable consumer hardware, and that just 49 days after the HP TouchPad had launched .
Unsurprisingly, the webOS community took the news poorly. Our favorite mobile operating system, one that had been , was in effect snuffed out with a press release by the company that was supposed to save webOS from oblivion, the company that was supposed to enhance webOS and spread it across a multitude of platforms. , and a year later that day is still referred to as the Leopocalypse.
The move was a punch in the gut to not just the webOS community, but the mobile community at large. While Android and iOS kept chugging along, the fact that a deep-pocketed technology behemoth like HP was unable or unwilling to put up with the costs of developing and maintaining its own mobile operating system and hardware sent chills through the community. If HP couldn't do it, what chance did any other upstart operating system have?
We knew at the time that HP's decision to kill webOS hardware was incredibly shortsighted and driven by risk-averse corporate leadership. It was, to put it bluntly, one of the greatest blunders in the short history of mobile technology. HP squandered an opportunity to secure the future of their business, and now, even under the leadership of , HP continues to pay the price on both the stock market and in retail for the disastrous leadership of Apotheker.
As for webOS, it took another four months for a plan to be announced. After exploring the possibility of selling the assets of webOS for upwards of a billion dollars, HP found nobody willing to buy at their desired price, and . It's taken several months to get to this point, with .
A year after webOS took a bullet to the head at the hands of Apotheker, the operating system is still facing a murky future. Open webOS will be fully open source and available to all to install, but at this point . It's unknown what HP intends to do with the spin-off of the webOS Global Business Unit as a . And it's unknown if HP, or anybody else, .
A year later, . We've all seen it on the webOS Nation forums and across the web and social networks - people are leaving webOS and talking about it less and less every day. Only a dedicated corps of users are the type willing to buy a device with the sole intent of installing an unsupported operating system on it, and that's not a big enough group to sustain webOS as a legitimate contender in the mobile space. Developers likewise have moved away from webOS, with fewer new apps joining the App Catalog and existing apps being left to languish on the vine.
It's been one hell of a year for webOS and we're leaving this year with more questions than we entered. We don't know what's coming up, and with the way things have been so far we're hesitant to even hazard a guess. The one thing we can be sure of is that the webOS community will still endure. We hear it all the time from those that have moved on to other devices - they still miss webOS and wish they could install it on their iPhone or Galaxy or Lumia device. webOS continues to be a unique gem in the mobile operating space. It's still forward-thinking in many ways and still has, in our not that humble opinion, the best multitasking and notifications interfaces on the market, 1317 days after it was first revealed with the Palm Pre and 365 days after the entire webOS world was turned upside down.
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