Lots of news regarding Palm’s webOS the past few days. Not only did Palm release webOS 1.3.5, the company has also laid out a number of hints on what’s to come at CES coming January: OpenGL is here.
webOS 1.3.5
Let’s start with the release of webOS 1.3.5 first. This new release brings much-needed battery life improvements, lots of bugfixes, and also some performance improvements. One of the biggest changes is that Palm has fixed/removed the application limit, a much-hated ceiling you’d run into when installing applications.
The application limit was caused by the way the partitions in a webOS image were laid out. You have the root partition / (webOS itself and Palm’s applications), the /media partition (6.7GB of user storage space), and lastly /var, where your applications are stored. The problem was that this last partition was only 253MB in size, meaning you’d fill it up quite quickly.
Several homegrown solutions to this problem existed, but Palm’s own solution is relatively elegant: applications have been moved to a folder on the /media partition. This folder is encrypted when the phone is connected over USB to prevent people from copying the applications around.
The new version is available for both the Pre and the Pixi. The Mojo SDK has been bumped to version 1.3.5 as well.
CES: Gaming
With the Consumer Electronics Show just around the corner, it comes as no surprise that Palm is preparing some announcements to be made during the gadget show – lest we forget, the Palm Pre was first unveiled at CES 2009. The main theme for CES appears to be gaming.
It was pretty obvious that Palm has been working on providing developers access to the 3D chip inside the Pre so that they could create more immersive games. The webOS 1.3.5 update includes packages dealing with OpenGL ES, which should mean develpers can soon tap into the 3D chip. OpenGL ES is “a royalty-free, cross-platform API for full-function 2D and 3D graphics on embedded systems. It consists of well-defined subsets of desktop OpenGL, creating a flexible and powerful low-level interface between software and graphics acceleration.” It seems like this video, uploaded a month ago, is real after all.
In addition, it seems Palm has also been working on improving other aspects of the webOS that could aid in creating decent games for the young platform. For instance, accelerometer polling has been improved in 1.3.5, allowing developers to poll the meter 30 times per second, instead of just 4 times (it’s short of the iPhone’s 100 times per second, though), which should allow for more accurate controls. Also, a 3D demo using nothing but JavaScript and the HTML5 Canvas tag works on webOS 1.3.5, while it didn’t work on previous versions.
It’s easy to imagine that if you pull all these things together that Palm is hard at work to allow for more immersive and powerful applications and games, where you can also (finally!) tap into the power provided by the 3D chip. This should make it possible to create games similar to those on other platforms (geoDefense!).
Palm is slowly but surely increasing the capabilities of its new platform, and CES is sure to bring some interesting announcements from Palm.
Impressive update, especially with the battery life improvement. Looking forward to test results.
for all your hard work on WebGL.
and Mozilla, Google, and Opera who contribute to WebGL and the Khronos Group which they are a part of in consortium. Actually, Mozilla *started* WebGL. (The above information was from Wikipedia)
Though there is the possibility that Palm did adapt the desktop WebKit WebGL implementation that is sponsored by Apple to Palm’s implementation of the WebKit Mobile browser. This is quite likely, but let’s not give all the credit to Apple for WebGL…
Giving Apple any credit on these forums is a flaming offense.
I am no Apple fanboy, or Apple anti-fanboy. I just posted earlier this week that OS X was more user-friendly than Linux (I have experience with both, and have used Linux since 1991 as well as OS X on a Mac mini and… other hardware 🙂 ), and got an earful for that too, on the other side of the coin.
Apparently people have made some sort of emotional or religious investment one way or another on Apple. I try to be objective.
Well, to be fare… Saying anything is more user friendly than linux is like saying pizza tastes better than dog crap.
Im comparing linux to dog crap or saying its bad, but it has its issues in the usability area and this really doesn’t need to be said.
Edited 2010-01-01 22:29 UTC
I seem to have made a typo above and the edit button has disappeared. “Im comparing linux” should be “Im NOT comparing linux”.
Don’t expect major improvements in battery life; the optimizations are largely suited to people living in poor signal coverage areas only. I still need to plug my phone in 1-2x per day (even with disabling wifi when not in use, among other ‘tricks’)… webOS 1.3.5 does *NOT* help me.
My phone also still takes almost two full minutes just to boot up (and that’s WITHOUT add-ons/hacks/services). While a marginal improvement over the 1.3.1 version (2+mins), it’s hard to get excited with the bar already as low as it is in that department.
Don’t get me wrong. I love the Pre; it’s sleek, elegant, well integrated, and has a great touchscreen. When watching the new DROID commercials, Palm Pre owners can say “yes” to every ‘Does your phone do…’ questions…and more. But the sour points of the Pre are and have *always* squarely been: 1) PERFORMANCE and 2) BATTERY LIFE.
I can live w/ the tiny keyboard… but I’m only giving Palm 3 more months to release a WebOS version that resolves to a respectable degree the aforementioned limitations. After that, I’m ditching my Pre for good. I’m sick of over-hyped updates that don’t deliver on their promises.
I think you’ll be very happy with performance once, like iPhone 3GS, it has OpenGL acceleration on it’s Cortex-8 processor. That improvement is probably what is in WebOS 2.0.
As for the battery life, all smartphones need to be charged once a day nowadays. Its battery life, although among the shortest, is only an hour or two shorter than the battery life of most Android phones, for example. Get a touchstone kit so you can keep the battery topped off without having to plug and unplug the phone, that’s probably the best solution available to this problem. PreCentral.net and Amazon have them for nearly half off the list price if that’s a concern.
Edited 2009-12-30 23:12 UTC
You can try disabling “Always On Mobile Data” if there is a setting for it, disable polling programs such as RSS feeds which are mostly found in widgets, disable Wi-fi and turn it only when you need it. Decrease the brightness of the screen, and disable blue-tooth and use it when you need it only.
Edited 2010-01-01 08:27 UTC
Shouldn’t it be smart enough to put Wifi and Bluetooth to sleep on its own when they’re not in use? Most modern smartphones already do that.
I am not sure, how it works. That’s why should try
I only turn mine when I need them. I get about a day and a half to two days when I use the Hero more than regular such as web browsing, music etc but if you go crazy it can last a day only.
May be there is some type polling timer that checks for incoming connections every 10 seconds and that consumes power, similar for Wi-fi. Just an idea.
Edited 2010-01-02 09:16 UTC
One word. Droid. I just dumped sprint/pre and went with droid and honestly I wont be looking back.
I have to say, after being a palm OS 5 user (centro), I was really disappointed with what palm released. They lost any respect or credibility they may have had in my eyes. Especially when they charged me the same price as the iphone/droid for a phone that doesnt feel like its worth more than $50.
When you look at battery, performance, how well built the case is, app selection among many other things: the pre is just pathetic. Its a well marketed and polished turd. Thats about all. Not even multitasking makes up for its severe deficiencies.
Edited 2010-01-01 22:40 UTC
Verizon is a lot more expensive than Sprint, and the Pre is available for $99 or so from several online retailers rather than the list price (if you’re Canadian, for $0, with a 3 year contract. 🙂 ) When you consider that you’ll pay hundreds of dollars more over 2 years time for Verizon’s perfect network, maybe it’s a lot less expensive than the droid – and has a better interface to boot.
You’re right though that the hardware is a bit plasticy, I think if I dropped it it wouldn’t be too good for it, but that’s true of many smartphones. I haven’t experienced some of the “oreo” hardware problems some others have, or the wearing out of the touchscreen. I’ve heard that these problems are largely fixed in production since October, before then Palm was having more problems making a reliable Pre. (Luckily, Palm has a one-year warranty, so it’s possible to get your Pre replaced if you got a lemon, and since it’s been out for less than a year, nobody is unable to do so. 🙂 It really is admittedly inexcusable the amount of QC problems Palm had early-on, I admit. Samsung, HTC, and Motorolla make much sturdier hardware for their Android phones.)
However, the amount of WebOS apps is only 1,000 now, but wait until they release the OpenGL acceleration. Then more apps will come, though Android does have a lot more at present. I don’t think it’ll ever catch up to iPhone; or even to PalmOS’s 50,000 apps (30,000 of which it can run via Classic.) When the GPU, the same one as in the iPhone 3GS, is made available to apps though, that will be a shot in the arm for the App Catalog, much as games sold the iPhone, I suspect they will improve the app catalog’s inventory. Even if it won’t catch up to the iPhone or Android, I suspect WebOS will have “enough” applications once the hardware is unleashed.
I forgot some tips, besides “buy a touchstone”.
Set the instant messaging of the messenging app offline (this won’t affect SMS of course), set wifi on if a network is available, otherwise off. (WebOS is very efficient with wifi so ironically this *increases* battery life if a wifi network is available.) Set your email to poll every 30 minutes rather than “as available”, which keeps it using the network constantly using IMAP IDLE. All of these things put together will save a few hours worth of battery life, enough for you to reach your touchstone without a dead phone after work. 🙂
Local reviews haven’t been so impressive, but I’m still curious about the device. Will the 1.3.5 update come out for the GSM version anytime soon?
EDIT: Hmm, something’s borked about my accented E in the title…
Edited 2009-12-31 16:55 UTC
The problems experienced by webOS users are similar to problems I have run into on my Android phone. Android though doesn’t have the performance issues. I think that must be a pain to deal with flakey performance plus battery issues. Seems like a mismatch of hardware to software requirements, i.e., underpowered. This is the really funny part with the so-called ‘smart’ phones: if you turn off RSS polling, wifi, bluetooth, GPS you are left with just a regular phone. The irony makes me chuckled a little about technological progress.