Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20 and Brian X Chen has a great tick-tock detailing the initial fall – and continuing fall – of webOS. The interviews are quite telling, including a quote from Paul Mercer:

The most important line there is “the technology wasn’t there yet.” Considering a number of other OSes, including, most notably, WinPho 7, are able to do what webOS was supposed to do including social network contact control, status updates, and web-technologies-based UIs, I find this as a bit of a cop out.

The Pre came out in 2009 to much fanfare and was in a face-off against iOS and Android for most of its life cycle. The primary problems outlined in the article – lack of developer support, a speedy, nine-month build time, and general failures to secure key talent – sound like good excuses in retrospect but I think the lesson learned here is that Palm tried to play by start-up rules in an established game. Nine month programming jags to produce shipping code is fine when you’re doing a social network for goat lovers. It’s not so fine when you’re selling phones to a mass market.

I don’t miss webOS. Palm overshot and failed to convince a jaded public that it was worth switching. Palm died because the core audience – the “anything but iPhone crowd” – never received a clear, compelling reason to switch. Then HP bought it and, well, we all know what happened there.

In the end, Palm couldn’t build momentum or a product that worked. There are, oddly enough, still Pre fanboys out there who point to a great webOS open source renaissance but that’s about as likely as the average user caring enough about their Android phone to install Cyanogenmod: there is some impetus there, to be sure, but most people just want to check email, make calls, and buy a phone that will work for, at minimum, two years until the next big thing comes along.

[Image: jocic/Shutterstock]

The HP Pre3 launched in Europe today, and oddly enough, HP had very little to say about it. With the TouchPad price falling like a rock, you’d expect that its intended complementary device — and HP’s flagship phone — would launch with more fanfare. But instead HP let the device land in its EuroStore and gave a short response to PreCentral, the first publication to notice its availability. Either way, the most important thing is that the carrier-free smartphone is ready to roll.

For US$490, the Pre3 can be all yours sans contract, which is a beautiful thing. Specs on this beast include a single-core 1.4GHz processor from Qualcomm, a 5-megapixel camera with auto focus and LED flash capable of video capture in 720p, and a forward-facing VGA camera for video chat. It comes with either 8GB or 16GB of storage and sports a 3.58-inch 480×800 capacitive touchscreen along with a slide-out QWERTY keyboard.

Speaking of keyboards, HP says this is the largest QWERTY keyboard on any Palm phone to date, so if messaging is your thing then this may be what you’re looking for. The Palm EuroStore listing doesn’t clarify whether the GSM Pre3 will run webOS 2.2 or 2.3, but if you’d rather hold out to make sure you get the latest and greatest, the FCC filing for the device promises webOS 2.3 upon the U.S. launch.

HP stated from the start that it planned on putting webOS in more than just smartphones and tablets. It foresaw a time when webOS would run printers, netbooks, and the world! Well, the time has come. HP is looking to grow the webOS base and expand into the world of major appliances and automotive.

HP invested $1.2 billion into Palm last year and from an outsider’s standpoint, it’s hard to view that as a wise investment even when considering the 1,500 patents that were part of the deal. The chief product, the webOS TouchPad, is floundering in the marketplace. Spotting a webOS smartphones in the wild is akin to seeing MG using a Xoom. WebOS is a fine operating system, but consumers just haven’t latched on for various reasons. HP is now looking outside the traditional CE realm for help.

Part of the OS’s downfall is that the products do not have any dev or 3rd party support. Smartphones must have a solid set of native apps, which webOS has, but it then must have an even more robust ecosystem of 3rd party apps. That’s what makes iOS so popular: Apple handles the mundane tasks normally associated with a phone while it outsources all the fun and innovative stuff to App Store devs. Without this sort of support, backed with word-of-mouth marketing, an awesome OS such as webOS doesn’t have a chance.

And so HP is looking to put webOS in unconventional products. WSJ states it’s looking to the automotive and appliance sectors for a bit help. The thought, which is smart, is to licence their webOS system to companies without their own touch interface. The hope, which is wrong, that one day your washing machine, stove, or even car infotainment system will run on webOS. Of course Android is there, lurking in the corner, but recent patent litigation and licensing battles makes it look like the dirty alternative.

Unfortunately for HP, as the WSJ lays out, the appliance world won’t likely adopt a touchscreen interface. Washing machines and such have a lot longer life cycle than a smartphone. What’s hot today, won’t be hot in ten years, let alone five. Appliances are built for reliability, not apps.

HP might have a little more luck in the automotive sector. Microsoft is currently a big player with Microsoft Auto the backbone for many automotive systems like Ford Sync. In-car infotainment systems are ripe for disruption. Only a few are actually worth their cost.

This is the right path for HP and webOS, though. The company needs to grow the webOS brand and exploring other spaces might be a rough, but a smart course. You can bet that HP is not going to let the $1 billion investment die without a fight. The TouchPad is just the beginning. WebOS is here to stay — even if no one is buying the products.

I’d been hoping I wouldn’t have to say this a second time, but here we go again: WebOS is reaching a critical failure point and I doubt the technology will make it through the next two years. Why? Because WebOS just can’t grab the mindshare it needs to flourish.

According to Woot, the deal site sold 612 TouchPads during its impressive $100-off sale. During a similar sale in July, the Motorola Xoom, sold2,288. This, in microcosm, is where the TouchPad and WebOS is headed.

Before you argue that this sample size is far too small for a full assessment, think about the current price drops – over $100 in a few months – and also consider the last time you saw a TouchPad in the wild? The numbers may be skimpy but they’re all we have so far.

This sudden decline in HP TouchPad pricing isn’t unusual. Given that HP is now in charge of this product, it’s obvious that the pricing, discounts, and giveaways are part of HP’s sales plan and, thanks to HP’s extensive experience in PC sales, they’re attempting to clear the channel for upgraded devices.

While this pricing reduction is obviously part of HP’s traditional M.O. – you don’t sell millions of desktops and laptops by selling at full price all the time – I think this M.O. coupled with the general lack of consumer interest is what will sink the TouchPad and the Pre, leaving them to flounder and fail like so many devices before them.

Consider, for example, the iPaq. Originally hailed as a solid competitor to the original Palm Pilot, Compaq sold itself to HP in 2002 and slowly sputtered out as HP gave less and less attention to these devices. HP attempted – and failed – to sell the the PDA concept to newly-minted smartphone consumers and even when the iPaq line began incorporating smartphone features it was too late: the world had moved on.

Here’s the bottom line: HP is where good ideas go to die. The company isn’t set up to think like a scrappy start-up. WebOS will be rolled into laptops, the WebOS tablet product will be overtaken by Windows 8 tablets, and the long, twisted tale of Palm will end with a whimper. I don’t want this to come to pass. I love the TouchPad and the Pre 3 is a good phone. But there is just no room for a third (or fourth (or fifth)) player in the smartphone market right now with Android and iOS battling it out and Windows Phone creeping up behind. HP can’t pivot out of this and, in the end, they’ll pull the plug. Maybe not this year, maybe not this CES, but by 2013 we’ll be writing WebOS’ obituary.

Maybe I’ll be proven wrong, but probably not. WebOS’ time has passed and we’re just watching the funeral.

[Sort of via SplatF but seriously go read Dan Fromer's new thing]

Features:

• 9-inch touchscreen
• Runs Flash 10.1 (sort of)
• Qualcomm Snapdragon dual-CPU APQ8060 1.2GHz 1024×768 pixel display
• Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, No Cellular Connectivity
• MSRP: 16GB/$499 32GB/$599

Pros:

• Beautiful OS
• Strong PIM and media functions
• Works well with Pre phones

Cons:

• App store is barren
• Performance falters with use
• Temperamental battery life

 
Short Version: Like Duckie from Sixteen Candles, Palm has been the perennial third choice. Even in its late heyday, when the Treo still ruled the airwaves and the iPhone was a faint glimmer in Apple’s eye, they got the short end of it with consumers and critics. But there was – and is – a zealous minority who see Palm as the Third Way, a way out of Apple/Android/Microsoft hegemony and who see WebOS as a viable alternative. And they will be abundantly pleased by this device.

Palm is back, albeit in a form that speaks more to HP’s cost-cutting measures than to the heavy duty devices you remember. WebOS and the Palm TouchPad are nearly perfect, an excellent amalgamation of everything that was ever right about Palm. But is even perfection, in this market, enough? Without a strong app base and some work on performance issues, the TouchPad may be the most beautiful dead end we have seen yet. But there is hope.

Long Version: To be a Palm fan has long been an exercise in frustration. First Palm was gone, then resurrected. Then it was gone again, swallowed by a market giddy for Android and iPhone. Then HP brought it back and promised WebOS would appear on printers and PCs, a neutering that would surely destroy the once-great company. Then, praise to the great god Quatzequatel, they made the TouchPad, a device that would bring WebOS back into the game.

And it has, with a few caveats. Let’s begin.

The Device
The TouchPad is not a slim device. It is clad in bulbous black plastic that takes fingerprints like a crime scene and has a large, 9-inch touchscreen. There is one button at the bottom the screen and volume controls on the side. On the opposite side are two large speaker grills; audio playback is strong and loud and the TouchPad, when paired with a phone, makes a good speakerphone.

High gloss

The TouchPad has the same screen pixel density as the iPad 2 but makes more of all of that real estate thanks to the clever WebOS interface.

When docked in its TouchStone inductive charger, the TouchPad doubles as a clock, mail reader, and photo viewer. The dock is quite cool but if you place the TouchPad on it and the inductive connection is not solid the device will buzz slightly, which is disconcerting.

The screen is covered in plastic and I noticed that when stuck into a tight laptop bag the outside screen would stick to the LCD, a problem that made it appear that the LCD had cracked. It had not.

In all, the TouchPad is about the same size as almost any other major name tablet except the iPad 2. It is as thick as the Xoom and the original iPad but the bulbous shape makes it feel a bit bigger. It isn’t very heavy – 1.6 pounds compared to 1.3 pounds for the iPad 2 and 1.6 for the Xoom – but it “feels” heavier and heftier. I would worry that a case, which it sorely needs out of the box, would make it even heavier, although I did actually see a TouchPad with a Smart Cover-esque folding case that looked quite promising.

A word about the plastic: the unit I was testing is already scratched on its back from a bit of regular use. This will definitely disturb those who keep their devices in pristine condition and combined with the patina of smudges this device collects over time it will eventually make your TouchPad look like the counter at a turnpike diner. I wouldn’t harp on this if it weren’t true: almost immediately the TouchPad, like many Pre devices, begins looking greasy.

A goofy little FCC ID tag pops out from the lower right side of the device. There is no SD card slot or SIM card slot.

The device has a 1.3 megapixel front camera and no rear camera. There is no camera application (that I could find) although you can make video calls through Skype. Photography is clearly not a priority with this device.

The TouchPad can be charged via micro USB or induction. It charges very slowly when connected to a PC – but it charges – and you can enable it as a storage device to drag over files, music, photos, and movies.

“The Dock and the Keyboard,” the new Decemberists album

Connectivity
The TouchPad has 802.11b/g/n networking, Bluetooth, and a special Bluetooth variant that it uses to connect to Palm Pre devices. It does not support cellular networks (yet) and the only way to get online is to connect to a hotspot.

A-GPS is available in mobile versions only and this device seems to grab location via the current hotspot. It definitely didn’t find my exact house but it did find Bay Ridge and point to a corner of the neighborhood where I might reside.

The TouchPad interacts with the Palm Pre, specifically the Pre 3. Pre interaction is quite cool but quite limited. In the current case, you can place the phone close to the TouchPad and send the current website you’re browsing to the phone. A clever “water drop” animation shows you when the transfer has been made and then the website appears on the phone. Unfortunately, lots of other weird stuff happens on the TouchPad, with cards opening and closing wildly without explanation.

The TouchPad also supports a Bluetooth keyboard with special WebOS buttons that allows for a far more comfortable typing experience for those accustomed to hard buttons. The onscreen keyboard tend to disappear when the Bluetooth keyboard is paired, which could cause some consternation.

We Are Family

Battery
Battery life was difficult to assess on this device during the time I had. I saw about 18 hours between charges with low use although the device would run down to nearly zero and stay there for a good five hours in standby, hanging onto its last electrons for dear life. Heavy use run-down is also variable depending on the number of apps you open, close and use and we saw it run down from 24% to 10% in a few minutes with plenty of slipping, sliding, and tapping.

Video playback and reading brought battery life down to about six hours although there are settings to reduce screen brightness and autolocks that could increase that number with some tweaking.

In short, battery life is on par if better than almost any tablet you can name although the variability I saw could put a damper on longer media playback. However, I saw nothing alarming or particularly notable when it came to battery life, at least in the limited testing I was able to do.

If your battery is run down it is very difficult to charge it with the TouchStone charger. A direct USB charge is best in situations where the device has run down to red.
WebOS

WebOS is the real star of this show. The OS offers true multi-tasking and uses a system of “cards” and “stacks” to display active applications. The OS also uses a system called Synergy to sync with services in the cloud and to save logins and accounts that can be moved from one device to another.

When you activate an application, it moves onto a smaller “card” and then expands into fullscreen when completely loaded. Swiping up from the bottom of the screen (or pressing the home button) brings all of the cards back up and you can tap and hold a card to move to to another stack. For example, you can stack similar tasks together (“Emails to send today,” “Web pages to read,” “Images of cats to coo at”). You can also flick apps up and away, shutting them down or closing their windows.

The second major metaphor is the “leaf.” This is draggable corner of many windows that exposes or hides more information. For example, you can open and close leaves in many applications including the Facebook app, adding layers of data to many apps.

Finally, there is the notifications system. This system is far superior to any other I’ve seen. There are lock screen notifications that can be acted upon and mail notifications, for example, are actually stacked, allowing you to flick through recently received mails right from the notifications bar. This is an excellent solution and alone could be considered worth the price of admission.

Synergy also allows a great deal of Facebook interaction. For example, in the Photo and Movies app (where your videos eventually end up, for some odd reason).

“Just Type” is a search function that searches the device, the Web, and then connects to any search APIs you have added during your search sessions. For example, TechCrunch supports this search API and you can search TechCrunch in addition to the other sources you’ve chosen. Just Type appears on almost every screen or is at least available with a single button press.

The device plays back MPEG-4, H.263, and H.264 video and (this is straight from the product page) “DRM-free MP3, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, AMR, QCELP, and WAV.” Video playback is more than acceptable and a special desktop app allows for music syncing with iTunes libraries. Oddly, videos and photos appear in the same app, which makes things confusing. Synergy will also bring in your Facebook photo albums although these are often at sub par resolution.

There are a few other native apps. Email and Calendar work as expected and the Email client has a unified inbox that brings in all of your new messages. IM and SMS support works well and the TouchPad will mirror SMSes received on your Pre.

A YouTube app brings up the YouTube website, which was kind of a letdown.

The browser is quite capable and rendered almost every website without issues. It supports Flash 10.1 and can display complex animations but Flash games are a different story. The browser usually defaults to the full version

The Apps

Here’s where things start the break down.

The TouchPad App Catalog, as its called, is very limited. A service called Pivot – essentially an online magazine – allows developers to showcase their apps and stories related to various activities – gaming, entertainment, vacations – call out various apps available in the store.

As it stands, however, there are very few native TouchPad apps and non-native apps appear half sized on the TouchPad’s ample screen with no opportunity to resize them. The Rosetta Stone of apps, Angry Birds, is available to those still enamored by these damn avian/porcine wars but once you get past that app it’s pretty slim pickings. There are no Instagram or Reddit apps but there are Facebook and Twitter apps, the former being one of the best I’ve seen. Generally, however, we’re talking about a relative wasteland.

Will this change? Absolutely. I worry that i won’t change fast enough but that’s not for me to assess. I look forward to having a robust WebOS app store and I think developers will deign to develop for this platform with enough market penetration.

Now, on to the bottom line:

The Bad

• The TouchPad exhibits poor performance under pressure. I hate to say it, but far too many times the TouchPad bogged down while performing standard tasks. The biggest, most frustrating problems appeared when browsing photos. The UI would slow down and register taps a few seconds later. Photo viewing performance is key for devices like these simply because the average user is watching movies, surfing the web, and looking at pictures.
• Flash is slow. Why doesn’t Apple like Flash? Because it’s a resource hog, it doesn’t react well to touch input, and it doesn’t work. The Dreamworks page shown here loaded just fine but trying to play the Kung Fu Panda game advertised on that same page was a waste of CPU cycles. But it works, so there’s that.
• Fingerprints and scratches galore. Get a case when you get the TouchPad. It needs one.
• Apps will make or break this thing. Applications will make this a winner or loser in the court of popular opinion. WebOS is amazing, but I worry its features aren’t being done justice with the paucity of apps.

The Good

• WebOS is great. It’s a breath of fresh air. It’s impressively powerful and, judging from some of the apps already written, fairly easy to write and publish for. It’s exciting that it exists.
• Generally it’s an excellent start. If a smaller, 7-inch unit comes soon and, more important, HP begins supporting WebOS on other hardware, it could give this OS legs. If HP relegates this to just a multimedia shell and doesn’t support this as a real mobile/laptop OS, similar to Chrome OS, I’d be concerned with the lifetime of this product.
• It’s a handsome package. There are lots of tablets out there, this is one of the best. The same can’t be said of many of the Android me-to tablets and craplets coming out.
• It’s priced about right. It’s powerful enough to deserve a $500 price tag, placing it firmly in the ranks of mid- to high-level tablets.

The Bottom Line
WebOS is a capable third (or fourth) entrant into the mobile OS race. As with Duckie, however, I worry that the average Molly Ringwald will go with the popular Blaine rather than the loyal and arguably better school nerd. I don’t agree that the TouchPad will knock WebOS out of the park but HP had to do something with its intellectual property and there’s no reason they won’t support this going forward.

I’m rooting for Duckie. I want him to win. Do I think it’s possible in the milieu in which we’re currently operating, with countless Android tablets flooding the market with product and a major player “flummoxing” all comers? I don’t know. I really don’t. I called the death of Palm as a standalone entity early when they announced the Pre and it was clear the mobile market couldn’t support an also-ran. I hope that HP’s might and Palm’s current experience will pull them through this renaissance and I think they’ve produced a strong tablet with a strong OS for a market that has drastically changed since they last failed.

This is an early build, but PreCentral got their hands on a WebOS 3.0 beta emulator and they’re reporting that this build, while strong, is still lacking some features.

However, what we are seeing here is a robust, tablet-based OS that may make some of HP’s upcoming devices considerably more compelling. While find it dubious that WebOS will survive this decade, it’s still an important part of the mobile ecosystem and folks who don’t want iOS or Android will probably love it for the brief time it is here with us on Earth.

Earlier today HP introduced a new line of products based on the newly acquired Palm WebOS, including its iPad clone, the TouchPad. Capping off a segment of the presentation where he presented press accolades, former Palm CEO Jon Rubenstein presented the above slide from Laptop Magazine’s OS Bowl boasting, “Yesterday, Laptop Magazine voted us the champion of the OS Bowl.”

According to Laptop Magazine, Palm WebOS beat Windows Phone 7 in the “Which is best?” category by 590 votes. Now I am by no means a gadget person, but I can smell a bowl of BS when I see it, or more specifically poll gaming.

From what we hear these polls are some of the highest trafficking content on Laptop Magazine, but far from an accurate assessment of what consumers actually want. As Kevin Marks commented, “so in this tournament smallest market share wins?”

The image above is sort of like the opposite of the Steve Jobs reality distortion field, where the person onstage is the only one convinced. It’s no surprise that Rubenstein’s “Voted us the champion of the Super Bowl” quote has now gone mysteriously missing from the YouTube video of the “Think Beyond” event.

The blog Three Guys And A Podcast has made its own version of the now infamous slide, below.

Now that’s a little more like it.

Thanks: @alexia_tsotsis

Greg brings us his own hands-on of the HP Touchpad, HP’s latest slate.

Check out our full HP/Palm coverage right here.

It’s official. Palm’s new WebOS device is called the Touchpad. It has a 9.7-inch screen, front 1.3-megapixel camera, and comes in 16 or 32GB models. It runs a 1.2GHz Snapdragon Processor processor and the screen resolution is 1024×768.

Designed by the “hundreds of talented programmers” on the WebOS team, the TouchPad is HP’s second slate of the new decade, the first being the HP Slate 500.

UPDATE – The Product Page for the TouchPad is now live.

The TouchPad is Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein’s baby. WebOS suffered from a massive downturn when the company was sold a mere nine months ago and all of the hard work the Palm team put into it seemed for naught. However, the TouchPad points to a new direction for Palm and the WebOS’ unique “card” interface seems perfectly suited for a slate form factor.

The device supports multi-tasking and Flash. It comes with Quickoffice and supports Google Docs, Dropbox, and Box.net for cloud file storage as well as HP Wireless Printer support. It also uses Skype for video calls.

A brief spec list:

• Dual core, 1.2 Ghz Snapdragon processor
• 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR,
• Gyro/Accelerometer, Compass
• 9.7, 1024×768 display, 1.3 megapixel webcam, supports video calling
• 1.6 pounds, 13.7 mm thick

Note that is is almost exactly the same size as the current iPad, for comparison’s sake. The device runs all of the standard WebOS PIM applications including Palm’s excellent mail app. It also supports Flash out of the box, so all of your favorite websites (that use Flash) will work seamlessly.

Product Page

It’s official: HP/Palm is releasing a new tablet called the Touchpad. Precentral has some hot news about this new 10-inch Palm slate. It is a touchscreen device running WebOS. It weighs 1.5 pounds and 13mm thick and has a front webcam as well as up to 64GB of storage.

Robert Scoble, of all people, also leaked something about the “littlest phone” he’s ever seen, a new Palm Phone that is as big as a pebble.

Quoth Scoble:

But recently I got a look at the smartphone that HP will be announcing in an hour and a half. More on that later today.

What is it? The smallest little phone I’ve ever seen. It’s like a large pebble in your hand. Smooth and really nice to hold.

We’re live at the event today, so we’ll keep you posted. Greg is headed over there now and he has a fun surprise for you over at MC in preparation for the big unveil.

I don’t want to spoil their day by just re-posting everything they got, so head over there to check out the rest of the items. There are no actual screenshots, but a lot of it shows basic ideas that probably were eventually fleshed out. I like the idea of many different gestures, and the keyboard looks nice, if lacking in symbols.

They better get this thing out right quick, though. The market’s going to be pretty crowded come Spring.

Oh yeah, and then there is the whole spec sheet.

A week and a half ago, we were invited to join HP on the morning of February 9 for an “exciting announcement”. But it appears that they’re now also reaching out to others about another event later that day.

This new invite reads: “HP webOS. The future revealed.” Below that, it lists the same February 9 date, but lists the time as being from 7 PM to 9:30 PM. And it will be in the same venues: Fort Mason Center, Herbst Pavillion in San Francisco.

So what’s this all about? The next line is key: “Please join Jon Rubinstein and the HP webOS Engineering and Developer Relations teams for a special presentation and developer community reception.” In other words, it’s a developer event being held the night after they reveal what they’re doing to reveal at their press event. Makes sense. It looks like HP wants to get to work ASAP.

So what’s actually being announced? Speculation has been that webOS 2.0 would be more formally unveiled at that time. But we also now know that tablets will definitely be a part of the day. How? Because HP EVP Todd Bradley told CNBC as much yesterday. When he was asked a questiona about tablets, Bradley responded that “you and I will talk about that on the 9th.“

So, webOS 2.0, tablets, and probably some new phones in the morning to woo the press. Then a developers, developers, developers event at night with Rubinstein to get everyone who will actually have to support the new stuff excited about the future of the HP webOS platform.

[thanks Joseph]

We know damn well that the Palm’s got some new devices up their sleeves — and come February 9th, we’ll probably know all there is to know about’em. We can take educated guesses as to what those devices will be — but right now, just about the only thing we know for sure is that they’re working on a webOS tablet.

This morning, a few eagle-eyed rumormill lurkers have spotted the tiniest hint of a new, non-tablet device: a 4G/LTE device built for Verizon.

After a few minutes of digging around on a mostly unknown Verizon test subdomain, a couple of gadget lovers stumbled across two entries in that subdomain’s device list that didn’t show up on the primary site:

• Palm Voice Test
• Palm LTE Voice

The bad news: Outside of that passing mention of “LTE” in the second item, there wasn’t much of anything to glean, detail-wise. The listings were essentially clones of the Palm Pre Plus listing, down to the prices. But don’t write it off just yet, folks: the listings both had brand new ID numbers associated with them, indicating that these were added to the system intentionally.

A handful of folks have taken to call this new mystery device the “Palm Voice”, given the appearance of that word in both listings. Based on a quick chat with an old Verizon source, however, I don’t believe that to be the name.

Here’s what likely happened, according to our source: Right now, Verizon’s busy testing as many devices on their new LTE network as they can. Before testing a device, they add it to the database (or, as in this case, copy a similar device’s database profile to act as a placeholder) so that it shows up in the intranet, allowing them to more easily record and share tests. There are two checkboxes to click when adding a new device: one that keeps it off the customer-facing-site, and one that keeps it off any sub-domains (that way they’re able to fine tune the device’s page on the hidden sub-domains before pushing it public.) Verizon tester clones a few Palm device profiles to act as a shell for this new device, botches a few checkboxes, and bam — it’s on the subdomain.

Now, as for the name: based on what our source is telling us, it seems unlikely that the device’s name is the “Palm Voice”. Rather, the testers involved were primarily testing this new device’s voice (read: calling) performance over 3G (“Palm Voice Test”) and over LTE (“Palm LTE Voice”).

Regardless of what it’s called, however, the idea of a webOS-powered device on Verizon’s 4G network gets me a bit hot around the collar.

[Via PreCentral]

We’ve just been invited to an HP event on February 9 in San Francisco. The topic? webOS, according to the invitation.

The invite’s main header reads: “Think big. Think small. Think beyond.” Could this mean an expansion of webOS to many types of devices? At the very least, we should get the skinny on the full webOS 2.0 release, which is only available in a very limited way thus far.

The timing is interesting since webOS originally launched at CES ’09. That conference starts today and ends a month before HP’s event, I guess HP will be using their muscle to do things a bit differently than Palm did.

But that timing also means that HP will be facing even more competition from devices just launched at the Vegas convention, many of which will be powered by the rival Android platform.

It also has to be noted that HP is likely to be up against at least one Apple event, which is expected to take place in January. That could mean either the iPad 2, the Verizon iPhone — or both. I don’t think it’s a stretch to think that HP should be talking about both tablets and phones at their event…

We’ll be there to find out more on February 9.

Former Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein was elected to join Amazon’s board, the company announced today via an SEC filing. Rubisntein is currently a senior VP and general manager at Hewlett-Packard, following HP’s $1.2 billion acquisition of Palm earlier this year.

Before joining Palm, Rubinstein was in charge of Apple’s iPod division and was the company’s senior hardware executive. At Palm, he tried to take on his former employer by developing WebOS smartphones which compete with the iPhone. Going after Apple took him off Steve Jobs’ Christmas list.

Amazon also competes directly with Apple on various fronts, including music and movie downloads and digital books. Rubinstein’s experience at Apple with the iPod and how the iTunes Store operated, although a bit dated now, could prove useful to Amazon as it tries to move from selling physical to digital media.

Rubinstein will become only the fifth member of Amazon’s unusually small board. He will join Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Madrona VC Tom Alberg, Kleiner Perkins VC Bing Gordon, and academic John Seely Brown.

It’s not with any carriers right now (it’s expected to eventually head to Verizon), but that just means the eager can purchase it unlocked.

How much will it cost you? The merest of $450, good sir!

Where can you get it from? Right here!

For those not in the know, it rocks a 1GHz processor, 512MB RAM, 16GB internal storage, a 3.1″ 320 x 480 touchscreen, 5MP camera with LED Flash, Bluetooth, WiFi b/g, and GPS, all backed up by the spankin’ new HP webOS 2.0.

[via Slashgear]

That’s how Palm head (now a part of HP) Jon Rubinstein described Apple when he joined the company in the 1990s after they acquired NeXT. That was about six months before Steve Jobs came back, Rubinstein said. “Basically, the company was going out of business. It had lost its way, its focus,” he continued.

Rubinstein sat down to discuss Palm and HP with John Battelle today at the Web 2.0 Summit. But Battelle decided to focus on Rubinstein’s work with Apple first.

Rubinstein recalled leading hardware engineering for Apple. That included when the iMac launched and the iPod. He said that while Apple was work on iTunes, they took a look at the MP3 devices out there. “They were awful,” he said.

So Jobs tasked Rubinstein with going out and figuring out how to make one of these devices “in the Apple way”. Rubinstein credited the combination of Firewire, small hard drives, cost and quality of displays, and battery technology as all coming together to let the iPod happen. “We created something that we all wanted to have,” he said.

Then, about five years ago, Rubinstein retired from Apple. He was still retired when Palm called to ask him to join. Battelle noted that at the time, there were already plenty of rumors about an “iPod phone”. To that end, he asked if Jobs was mad that one of his top former lieutenants would join a competitor?

“I’m definitely off the Christmas list,” Rubinstein quipped.

But Rubinstein noted that Palm in many ways created the space. And like Apple when he joined, they were a company that lost its way. In terms of it being a Palm versus Apple thing, “I’ve never really looked at it that way.“

Industry sources at Foxconn Technology and Compal Communications are stating that they are currently manufacturing multiple WebOS devices including the so-called PalmPad.

Accordingly, Palm`s new smartphones manufactured by Foxconn and Compal Communications will all adopt the brand`s Linux-based mobile operating system, WebOS, which will more or less allow the two suppliers to gain manufacturing familiarity with Palm`s Pre Plus and Pixi Plus phones.

In related news, it’s cute to watch how the guys at PreCentral treat the information that this will be a Palm branded phone rather than an HP one with relief (“It’s a comforting notion that these would be Palm handsets (or tablets (or toasters) and not HP branded, calming our fears of the Palm brand fading away anytime soon.”) They’re like the kids in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome waiting for Walker to come back.

via CENS via Precentral

Today, the company has announced a version for Palm’s webOS, a niche platform if there ever was one. Although with HP’s acquisition of Palm, that will hopefully change. It’s also a particularly US-centric brand, so that could be telling in itself. On that note, it’s curious that RIM’s BlackBerry is still missing in action. Any theories on why? Jump in on the comments.

As with all of Spotify’s mobile apps, users will need a premium subscription to use the service on the go. The app itself can be downloaded from the webOS app store and provides the following functionality:

* Search, browse & play millions of tracks
* Offline playlists – listen to music with no mobile connection
* Wirelessly sync your local files to your phone
* View your friends’ top lists and see what playlists they’ve created
* Send & receive music from friends via the inbox
* Share music via Facebook, email and messaging
* Create, sync and edit playlists
* LastFM scrobbling

As both have confirmed on their personal blogs today, as well as the HP/Palm Dev Center blog, they’re leaving the company as well. This is a big blow to the Palm platform as the two lead the important developer relations team for the company. It was their jobs to get people excited and developing for webOS. Now that task falls to HP.

The two lasted barely a year at Palm. When they were hired last September, it was considered a big coup, as the two are hugely respected in the web development community thanks to their work with Mozilla, and well-known thanks to their involvement with the blog Ajaxian. And the company wasted little time getting them out there on the talking circuit to ramp up interest in webOS.

So why are they leaving? Almaer compares working for a big company to a wedding, and a small company as a first date. As he writes today, “I am not looking to dance down the aisle just yet, no matter how pretty the bride is “. As such, he and Galbraith are starting their own new company. They aren’t sharing too much just yet beyond the fact that they’re interested in mobile, HTML5, JavaScript, and the idea of “open”.

Here’s a key blurb from Almaer’s post:

If you look at our history with mainframes, PCs, and gaming consoles, they have all be closed proprietary systems. As developers we have been beholden to the vendors. When we are both aligned, things can work out, but as soon as the company has a change in strategy and we misalign, developers are often left by the wayside. This mirrors the world of dictatorships. If you could guarantee your dictator is fully aligned with you there is a good chance that the system will be far more efficient than a democracy. History has taught us though that 99.9% of the time this isn’t the case. The Open Web gives us an escape valve. It has its own problems and complexities (just as democracy), but that is all critically worth it.

So who is left of the key Palm team? Pretty much none of the execs beyond CEO Jon Rubinstein. And a bunch of other key people have trickled out over the past few months as well.

Almaer and Galbraith will be consulting for HP as the works continues on webOS. But it’s pretty much a child being raised in a foster home at this point. Sometimes that works out, sometimes it doesn’t. Let’s hope it’s the former in this case.