Tag Archives: Pre

[Pre] Epic Games Porting Unreal Engine to WebOS

Jon Zilber of Palm today announced in their blog that besides Electronic Arts also Epic Games support the webOS platform. Epic Games is in the middle of porting their Unreal Engine 3 onto Palm’s webOS. Epic’s Unreal Engine is well known from games like Unreal Tournament.

Epic is going to offer licenses for developers to create new and astonishing games for the Palm webOS platform.

Together with Palm’s Plug-in Development Kit (PDK) it will soon become very easy for developers to port visually appealing games to the webOS platform.

» Palm: Palm webOS games get Unreal
» Palm: Plug-in Development Kit

» Epic: Free Download Unreal Engine 3

[Update] Engadget got a vid:

[Pre] Palm’s PDK Makes Porting iPhone Games Easy

John Paczkowski of AllThingsDigital mentioned that sources close to Palm told him, Palm’s Plugin-Development Kit will allow easy porting of Apple iPhone games to WebOS. That could also explain how fast Electronic Arts ported “Need for Speed” to WebOS.

» PreCentral.net: Palm to demo porting iPhone games to webOS ‘in a matter of days’ at GDC
» AllThingsD.com: Palm’s PDK to Allow Easy Porting of iPhone Apps

[Pre] WebOS 1.4 With Free Need 4 Speed, Sims, and Monopoly

It seems Palm has eventually understood that Germany might be an important market for their Pre. The Pre is the most sold smartphone on the carrier O2 Germany. O2 Germany yesterday started to distribute webOS 1.4. The update we’ve all been waiting for desperately.

Free commercial Games for german customers

Sadly Electronic Arts’ free download offer for:

  • Need for Speed
  • The Sims
  • Monopoly

is for german customers only. Sorry guys from whereever you are.

New features

WebOS comes with some minor ;-) feature additions:

  • Video recording and editing
  • Video uploading to Facebook and Youtube
  • Better performance when starting apps
  • Telephone app performs a lot faster
  • Longer battery runtime
  • Messaging software allows calling numbers directly
  • SMS/MMS can be forwarded via e-mail
  • Videos can be attached to MMS’
  • phone numbers can be called from the calendar
  • E-mails can be sorted by date, sender, and subject
  • Middle button blinks as notification
  • Wi-Fi can be deactivated again if in sleep (prolonged battery life about 30% in first test)
  • Adobe Flash 10.1 support (will be added to the App Catalog soon)

Find a lot more about the Pre’s latest update in this article on Golem.de (click here for autotranslated version).

[Pre] Eight Keyboard Shortcuts For WebOS

1. Soft Reboot

  • Hold these keys at once Orange Key + Sym Key + R

2. Make Screenshot

  • Hold these keys at once Orange Key + Sym Key + P

3. Num Lock

  • double click Orange Key

4. Caps Lock

  • double click Shift Key

5. Highlight Text

  • Hold Shift Key and mark text on screen
  • Highlighted text becomes yellow backgrounded

6. Copy Text to Clipboard

  • Highlight text as described above
  • Hold finger to the gesture area (right or left of the middle button)
  • The middle button begins to glow
  • Press C Keyon keyboard to copy

7. Cut Text to Clipboard

  • Highlight text as described above
  • Hold finger to the gesture area (right or left of the middle button)
  • The middle button begins to glow
  • Press X Key on keyboard to cut

8. Paste Text from Clipboard

  • put cursor to the place where you want text pasted
  • Hold finger to the gesture area (right or left of the middle button)
  • The middle button begins to glow
  • Press V Key on keyboard to paste

[Pre] Recommended Apps: Reboot Scheduler

Many of us know the phenomenon. The longer we use the iPhone or the Palm Pre the slower it goes. Rebooting the system always helped on either device.

For the Palm Pre there is now a solution that is called Reboot Scheduler by Zinge, which allows to automize the reboot process and to schedule it to a certain time.

We feel this is a nice tool for people running homebrew apps on their Pre anyway. You find it via the PreCentral repository.

That’s what we really like about the Palm Pre WebOS platform: it embraces the homebrew developers. No jailbreaking, no hassle.

Kudos fly out to Zinge and the PreCentral team.

Links

» PreCentral.net: Palm Pre Reboot Scheduler

Screenshot is courtesy of PreCentral.net

[Pre] Enable Developer Mode

Enabling the Developer Mode gives access to a thousand of homebrew apps and apps which are currently under beta testing.

There are now two ways known to enable the Pre’s dev mode.

1. Simply enter the Konami cheat code:

upupdowndownleftrightleftrightbastart

2. or enter this:

webos20090606

in either way, you’ll see a “secret” menu switch that allows you to enable the developer mode. After that reboot the device.

[Pre] WebOS 1.3.5.2 Released in Europe

Telefonica (O2/MoviStar) has approved Palm’s latest update. We expect they found some bugs that are on the american 1.3.5.1.  The update will be installed automatically over the air. The 15 MB update brings Tethering via Bluetooth and 3D graphics acceleration to European Palm Pre’s, thus allowing us eventually to play Doom, Quake and Need For Speed.

The update features:

  • installation of apps to the media partition, thus allowing to use up to 7GB for applications
  • simultaneous installation of apps from the AppCatalog
  • Downloads can be paused and resumed
  • speed improvements
  • improved support for prepaid SIMs
  • improved battery runtime
  • support for animated GIFs

We are still waiting for a full changelog from Palm for this update.

Warning

Before updating: don’t forget to use the “Emergency Patch Recovery” (EPR) tool, if you installed patches via PreWare. The EPR tool can be found in PreWare under Available Packages -> Linux Applications -> All -> Emergency Patch Recovery

[e-Biz] The Slate Tablets Are Coming

Tablet PCs seem to be the next big thing. After Apple’s smartphone revolution with their iPhone, it seems the next big market revolution might be the Tablet PCs.

Steve Ballmer of Microsoft introduced one of the Tablet PCs – a prototype of the HP Slate – last week on the CES 2010. In his presentation the HP Slate is of course running Windows 7, what else, but there are rumors it might also be shipped with Google’s Android. We suppose Amazon’s Steve Bezos will not really like it, because Steve Ballmer showed the HP Slate running the PC Kindle application.

Dell seems also be ready to enter the Touch PCs’ market with the Dell Slate. Gizmodo.de got photos of a prototype of Dell’s Slate. Dell’s Slate has a 5-inch screen, most likely an OLED, a SIM slot and a 5 megapixel camera.

If Apple was a typical tech company they would also have showed something to the public on the CES, but Apple isn’t. Anyway there are enuff rumors floating around about Apple’s Touch-Mac – rumored to be named Apple iSlate. According to Reuters Apple might be launching the iSlate in Q2/2010. It is expected to have a 10 or 11-inch display and a aluminium case. TheStreet.com reports that Apple’s Slate will be shipped with a P A Semi CPU, instead of Intel based Atom CPUs. This could be also the reason, why Atom CPU has been removed from Mac OS X Snow Leopard’s latest update 10.6.2. It is widely expected that Apple will announce the iSlate on Januar 27th, 2010.

Kara Swisher of AllThingsD interviewed Mr. Podfather Prefather Jon Rubinstein of Palm at the CES. Although he seems to have been highly involved in the development of Apple’s iPhone back in the days when he was Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering, he said he never used an iPhone. Well… All in all he wasn’t telling too much, but when Kara asked him, if Palm will do a Tablet aswell, Rubinstein answered: “(..) we designed webOS to scale and it could be used in different form factors.”

[e-Biz] Palm’s Presentation on the CES 2010

I. Summary

Quite a bunch of news for the Palm community has been presented by Palm’s CEO John Podfather Prefather Rubinstein. Find the whole video presentation at the end of the summary.

II. WebOS Update 1.4

WebOS 1.4 will be released in February, 2010 (in the US at least, we Europeans are still waiting for 1.3.5). WebOS 1.4 will feature:

  • Video Recording
  • Adobe Flash 10.1
  • better Battery Life and
  • improved performance

III. WebOS Plug In Development Kit

For developing native 3D games Palm secretely extended their development tools with a plug in kit, that allows to write code in C or C++.

IV. Native 3D Games

Moreover Palm showed they are in the know what their customers will like and how to explore more markets besides the Linux community. As of today some 3D games have been released to the U.S. American AppCatalog:

  • Need for Speed Undercover
  • The Sims 3
  • Monopoly
  • Asphalt 5: Elite Racing
  • Let’s Golf!
  • Glyder 2, and
  • X-Plane

IV. Palm Pre Plus coming to Verizon

A special version of the Palm Pre is coming to Verizon Wireless, only 7 months after the initial release of the Palm Pre to the Spring network. Verizon’s Palm Pre Plus is coming with 16GB Ram, a reworked slider mechanics and a tethering plan. Verizon is said to have one of the best 3G coverage in North America. We suspect the Palm Pre Plus to be SIM locked.

V. The whole video presentation on the CES 2010

Enjoy Mr. Podfather Prefather John Rubinstein…