Common Paradox Tech Blog

If you’re still waiting to jump on the webOS bandwagon, we’ve got good news for Sprint lovers: if you head over to RadioShack in the next two weeks, you can pick up a Palm Pre or Palm Pixi on contract for the low price of nothing. While the Pixi has been free for a while (depending on where you’re looking), it’s rare to see the Pre available for free.

The RadioShack sale runs through March 27th, and is, of course, open only to new Sprint subscribers. If you’re already on Sprint, well, you’ll be paying money upfront for your Pre or Pixi. Of course, these phones require at least a $69.99/month Everything Data plan with a two-year contract, so a free phone is a difference of $50 or $100 on a nearly $1800 commitment.

Thanks to everybody who sent this in and to Derek for the photo!

Falling in line with the pricing available for other smartphones on other European networks, you can now get a Palm Pre for free on contract with O2 in the United Kingdom. In fact, so long as you’re willing to sign up for an 18 month contract for at least £30.00 a month, you can get a Palm Pre for free – and that £30.00 a month comes with unlimited data and texts (but just 100 minutes). Amusingly, O2 is also touting that the package comes with 3 free EA games, otherwise known as the games that are being given away for free in Europe anyway.

Unreal Engine 3? The graphics engine that powers many, many games (Gears of War, Mass Effect, Arkham Asylum) on consoles today? Ported on to Palm’s webOS? Neat, but not as neat as you’d think. More »

Most quality clip-on phone cases come in solid colors and maybe a few transparent varieties, but the Mobi Products Protector line of cases for the Palm Pre actually come in more than a dozen different designs and textures. For my time with the Protector Cases I sampled three distinct product lines, the standard Protector case, in a metallic red, the Skull Wing graphic Customer Protector, and a Dragon-emblazed soft-touch Lizzo Protector case. While I had little doubts about the protective abilities of these cases (good for a fall here or there, but not running over with a car), the finish on two of the three left something to be desired.

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Have a Palm Pre or Pixi on Sprint and wishing that you’d signed up for the $7 a month Total Equipment Protection plan during the first 30 days of your contract when you still had a chance? Sprint’s giving you a second chance: for the entire month of March Sprint has opened up TEP to all subscribers. If you’re not feeling like pushing your luck any further, you can sign up until the end of the month. For those unfamiliar, TEP has two components: hardware failures are completely covered and accidental damage or loss replacement comes with just a $100 deductible. Having replaced his own Pre three times – taking advantage of TEP each time – this blogger knows all too well how useful of a tool TEP is. 

[via: Palm News Daily]

Adobe’s been teasing us with Flash 10.1 on webOS for what seems like ages now. In fact, the first news about webOS and Flash came from Palm and Adobe more than a year ago. It’s been five months since we first saw Flash demoed on a Palm Pre and in the intervening months we’ve seen it shown off on all manner of Android devices as well. What we haven’t seen is Flash 10.1 on more lowly hardware, such as the Palm Pixi or HTC Hero. Now we might know why.

An Adobe employee, after revealing that they were not working on getting Flash 10.1 to work on Windows Mobile 6.5 (little surprise) recently declared that Adobe was only working to get Flash for Android working on ARMv7 processors. Processors that fall into that category include the Qualcomm Snapdragon powering devices like the Google Nexus One (and HTC Desire) and the TI OMAP3430 inside the Palm Pre, Pre Plus, and Motorola Droid/Milestone.

What doesn’t have an ARMv7 could be a problem for some webOS users: the Palm Pixi and Pixi Plus run off the Qualcomm MSM7627 processor, which is an ARMv6 chip. The MSM7627 is a beastly little chip, with two processing cores (600 MHz for processing, 400 MHz for the modem) and a 300 MHz graphics-core with Open GL 2.0 support – all packed into a tiny thumbnail-sized package. Has Adobe come out and said that they’re no working on Flash for the Pixi? Nope, but they haven’t said that they are. Even our man Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein, when showing off Flash 10.1 at CES 2010, was careful to say that Flash 10.1 would be coming to “all Pre phones.” Note the lack of Pixi in there.

[via: Engadget [via: Gizmodo]]

Thanks to Shadow-360 in the forums for the heads up!

“This is cool, is it new?” No, oh Hannah (Kristin Kreuk), that is not new. It’s the Palm Pre (with some fancy skinning). You call yourself a Nerd Herder? Okay, so maybe this season’s episodes of Chuck were filmed several months ago (they were) when the Pre was still new, but that’s no excuse for a hot little geekette like yourself to not recognize a hot little smartphone like the Pre on sight. Unless you were commenting on the theme job, in which case, yes, that is new. Now put down the cool assassin smartphone and move along. After the break: the fancy pants ‘I’m an assassin’s smartphone’ theme.

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Ouch and Yea!… That’s the way the last week was for Palm. Ouch was the pummeling the PALM stock took as guidance was lowered and analysts speculated on what the true meaning was behind the numbers. Things got especially ugly when CNBC’s Jim Goldman reported that Palm management was not truthful about the reason why work was suspended at a Chinese manufacturing partner.

"Palm’s got a credibility problem, and it’s the kind of thing that seems so insidious, and so systemic, that it might pose a deep threat to the company’s ability to keep going. That’s because the number of people who believe what this company is saying seems to be dwindling."

Things are not looking good. At the end of the trading day on Friday, PALM was down to $6.09, which is perilously close to the company’s 52-week low ($5.85 on March 9, 2009).  Not a pretty picture.

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Everybody who can get their webOS 1.4.0 jollies on can now also ‘doctor’ their way back to a fresh OS install. Palm has released the webOS 1.4.0 doctors for the Palm Pre and Pixi on Sprint and O2 as well as the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus on Verizon. If you’re not familiar with what the Doctor does, here’s a quick brief: the webOS Doctor is a Java-based computer application (works on PC or Mac) that overwrites corrupted or altered OS files with a fresh install of webOS. The Doctor is essentially the last best hope to restore a bricked phone (because of this, webOS phones are near impossible to brick from a software standpoint). While the webOS Doctor will perform a clean install of the OS, newer versions no longer wipe clean any files you have stored on the USB partition, so no worries about destroying those vacation pictures you forgot to backup.

The following webOS Doctors for 1.4 are available (direct download links):

• O2 Palm Pre
• Sprint Palm Pre
• Sprint Palm Pixi
• Verizon Palm Pre Plus
• Verizon Palm Pixi Plus

And to go along with all this doctoring fun, the folks at WebOS Internals have whipped up new versions of their Meta-Doctor tool for webOS 1.4 on Sprint and Verizon.

Thanks to Shadow 360 for the tip!

While there is no gainsaying the fact that the Pre did lend a fatally rudderless Palm some direction, the much anticipated forward thrust is an entirely different matter. The impetus that Palm hoped to receive from its dapper webOS products hasn’t materialized. The Sunnyvale-based company has lowered its guidance for the current fiscal. It blamed the move on lower-than-expected sales of its new webOS-based phones.

“Since the quarter has not yet closed, it is too soon to offer exact numbers, but we stated that we expect to report revenues for Q3 between $300 and $320 million. We also announced that we expect our revenue for this fiscal year to fall below the guidance we gave to Wall Street, which ranged from $1.6 to $1.8 billion,” CEO Jon Rubinstein announced in an internal email meant for employees. Its full financial results will be announced next month.

Rubinstein clarified that the the abrupt announcement was being made in order to “prevent a surprise for Wall Street when we announce quarterly earnings in March.” But this announcement did take many by surprise and sent its shares down south. Its share price dropped 13% on the news before eventually making a bit of a come back.

 The company is currently pursuing a new strategy to improve sales. “To accelerate sales, we initiated Project JumpStart nearly three weeks ago. Since then, nearly two hundred Palm Brand Ambassadors, supplemented by Palm employees from Sunnyvale, have been training Verizon sales reps across the U.S. on our products.” It clearly believes that lack of awareness and Verizon’s poor handling of its products are the two major factors hampering sales.

Image Credit: HandCellPhone