First off I want to say that the Palm Pre is a huge leap in smartphone tech.  The interface is clean and crisp and the synergy functions of WebOS make it a great phone to organize and update contacts, calendars, notes and tasks across a range of services and social networking sites.  The integration with google is only shadowed by Android obviously.  The services that Sprint offer in their plans arent to shabby either.  The price plans are by far the best bang for your buck in term of what you get.  The fact that you can have navigation, unlimited sms, mms, im and data is awesome.  Even the unlimited everything plan is only 99 bucks compared to Verizon or ATT which would run well over that.  The app store is starting to grow which is another welcomed addition.  Overall the Palm Pre WebOS is what i would classify as a good starting point for Palm to regain some ground but there is more work to do.

I went and purchased a Palm Pre exactly 42 days ago expecting to upgrade my wireless capabilities to a new level and now I am chewing on blood pressure medication like they are tic tacs.  I grabbed the Palm Pre with the expectations of being able to replace a few of my daily gadgets with an all in one device.  My TomTom, iPod, Phone and PDA could all be in one handy little device.  For the most part I acheived my goal except there is that “for the most part” issue.  The Palm Pre is an expensive smartphone at the price of 200 bucks with a 2 year contract on Sprint  and now there are issues with the Pre.

First off, I had no problems for 30 days except the OS lacked some basic functionality that PALM really dropped the ball on.  Things like selecting text for cut, copy and paste is a pain and in calendar event view i can’t scroll to see the entire entry for an event location.  The Blue-tooth capabilities are seriously flawed and don’t work with most blue-tooth car kits or aftermarket devices. Now I am running into hardware issues.  The contact in the 3.5mm headphone jack sticks and disables the audio to the phone’s earpiece making the phone app unusable.  To fix this you have to exercise the headphone jack a few times to unstick the contact.  This is unacceptable for a piece of hardware i spent 200 bucks on. There are other issues that I have read about in other posts such as the slider breaking (mine is getting kinda loose) , screen pixel issues ( 1 is stuck and I’m sure more to follow) and wifi problems that I am sure i will have the privilege of experiencing in the near future.  Those issues are not the worst part though.

Sprint is the 3rd biggest cell provider in the country and their policies and customer service reflect that.  My experience with Sprint customer service is once you bought it and got past the 30 day period YOUR SCREWED!  I am 12 days over my 30 day return period and they are completely unwilling to work with me to resolve the issues.  The Sprint repair center I visited today said they could replace the phone under warranty ONLY if they were to receive a non functioning phone.  Well of course when i got to the store the contact in the 3.5 mm jack became unstuck and the phone worked again so they wouldn’t do anything.  But lets say it didn’t work for them either, they still would only replace it with another Palm Pre that would have had the same known hardware issue.  What am I paying the insurance for if they are gonna give me another phone that has a 99.9% chance of breaking too!  That’s like a Ford recall for exploding gas tanks only to replace it with a gas tank that could EXPLODE!  I can understand not taking a return on a phone that is 2 or 3 months past the return time but 12 days, Really?

Sprint is really on the ball with their plan options and included services but their customer service as the 3rd in the market needs some attention.  My love affair with the Palm Pre was was fiery at the start but is quickly over much like the ability to use the headphone jack for fear it might break my phone.  It was a nice try and a good start to rebuild the Palm name but the bar has been set pretty high by things like the iPhone and the Android OS.  Palm needs to hit those marks before i will buy a Palm device again.  Maybe the HTC Hero can save me?

BOLT  is a web browser developed for mobile users with even the simplest phones.  BOLT provides mobile users with the ability to view PC style web-pages via their mobile device.  Features include streaming content, RSS feed support and 25 to 50 percent faster load times than most mobile browsers.  From Bitstreams website “Built on Bitstream’s ThunderHawk browsing technology, BOLT is the result of 5+ years experience developing mobile browsers that optimize usability, speed and performance on resource-constrained systems with limited memory, processing power and screen space.”  The Beta 2 version is available as a free download.  I have been using this on my Blackberry Curve 8330 for a few weeks now and am very pleased with its performance.

BOLT Browser Website

Flock

Last night the folks at Boxee announced the release of a new Boxee alpha.  The top additions to this new alpha are the support for Pandora music streaming, PBS streams, RadioTime, a new API and the video playback is built on the XUL framework.  The XUL framework is the same that Firefox is built on.  Yes, HULU does work.  Good Luck blocking it now.  I just downloaded the alpha release from Boxee.tv and must say it delivers.  Go get it.

http://boxee.tv

Here is a short how to in order to use the new plugins:

Start Boxee and in the left navigation pane scroll down to “Apps Box”.  Along the top of your screen there are four selections, choose the repositories tab and add a new repository.  Type the following in the text field minus the quotes ” dir.boxeehq.com” and select done.  You will now be able to back out and select “New Applications”.  This is where you can add all sorts of new feeds to your Media Player.  Have Fun!

The remote application accesses your Boxee media center PC via Wifi and requires no server side application (other than Boxee obviously).  The iPhone/iPod  has two user interfaces for control.  The first is a gesture method that displays a Boxee logo in the middle of your device screen.  Place your finger on the icon and slide up down or side to side to simulate using the arrow keys on your keyboard.  Tap on the logo after you’ve highlighted your selection to accept, much like a mouse click.  The second user interface is called “Buttons” and its just what you think.  Select the buttons mode and a set of direction arrows, OK button and a back button appear on your device.  A volume slider bar across the bottom of the iPhone/iPod screen will adjust the audio of the computer being controlled.

The iPod/iPhone will also display thumbnails of the current video playing on Boxee and a Now Playing button will display Artist and Title of any music playing.

Boxee Remote Control will work with Boxee Media Center running on PC, MAC and Linux.  Go get it today!

Apple Itunes Store – Boxee Remote

Boxee Media Center

Just 2 days after the announcement by Seesmic of a standalone Facebook application that is built on Adobe Air just like TweetDeck,  Facebook now is integrated into TweetDeck.  You can post updates to Twitter and Facebook at the same time and retweet information in both directions.  The app is limited to posting updates only so you cant comment or reply to friends and have them show up on the other service, but is that really needed or wanted.  Other functions include the ability to see which friends are currently online and even includes the IM function in Facebook.

Installation is the standard 3 clicks and go, so no issues there.

This is now available for download but is still in Beta so there may be more functionality to come.  Really nice addition to Tweetdeck and makes my online social agenda so much easier.

The Debian package was a quick one click install with no hassle. Set-up of the software was the same.  Simply enter the name of your HAVA box, enter your password, and click on the connect button and away it goes. Be careful as the IT wants to make the first character a capital by default. Video on the LAN is superb. It’s leaps and bounds better than the equivalent slingbox mobile and desktop players.  The best part of this is that it’s portable. You can take your IT (Internet Tablet) wherever you want to go, you can even watch an episode of House in the bathroom if you want.

The video and audio on the LAN is very good and remote viewing over the Internet isn’t to shabby either. This will obviously depend on the quality of your Internet connection. I have a pretty poor connection at home (Stay away from housing developments that use Hcontrol) and I can still view a show with decent quality. The video does have a tendency to get out of sync with the audio from time to time but, this is a slight offset and should be improved before the final release to the general public. The HAVA unit is also capable of streaming HD content from an external HD Tuner. I played with this a little yesterday and it does work but, there’s nothing to exciting about it. The quality was the same as standard definition content but, I guess if you want to see your local broadcasters HD2 weather channel, then it’s a plus.

The user interface is simple to navigate and provides quite a bit of control. The software includes four generic remote control surfaces that include a standard number pad with channel up/down, a favorites pad with 12 programmable favorite buttons, an STS remote with standard sat receiver controls, and a generic PVR control for playing recorded shows. The last function is not implemented yet. The only way to view recorded shows at this time is to record and then transfer them to your Nokia N800/810.

Overall, I have to take my hat off to the folks at Monsoon, good work.  This is an application that a lot of people have been wanting for a long time and the people at Sling refused to provide. Thank You.

I received the Hava Platinum HD in the mail a couple weeks ago and quickly ripped it out of the package (Christmas Morning Style).  The contents included the Hava Platinum HD, Ethernet cable, 2 Component HD cables, 2 AV cables, powers supply and CD.  The Component and AV cables are standard RCA connectors on one end and 1/8th inch 4 contact phono connectors to interface with the Hava box.  The Hava Box is capable of streaming HD channels across your network and has HD pass through so you can place your Hava Box in-between your cable box and TV, hence the two HD cables.  Audio is only standard stereo unfortunately and is handled by the AV cables minus the video plug.  Hell, if you wanted 5.1 surround, go sit in front of your 72 inch plasma with your 3000 dollar surround system with your 18 speakers.  That’s what you bought it for.

Heres the rundown:

Hava Platinum HD- HD and Standard Definition, IR blasters for cable or Sat box control,wired Ethernet only, recording or time shift capabilty to a PC and NO built in tuner.

Hava Wireless HD – HD and standard Definition, Standard Definition tuner built in, IR blasters for cable or Sat box control, wireless bridge built in, recording or time shift capability to a PC.

Hava Titanium HD – HD and  standard definition, IR blasters for cable or sat box control, wireless USB dongle with future support for N networks, recording or time shift capability to a PC.  This unit also has an internal hard drive or 2 USB ports to plug in an external drive for recording.  This function is in beta now. No built in tuner.

As of today, Hava only supports Windows based software for the player.  The software has a nice interface and is easy to set-up and use but the real advantage these units have over the Slingbox is that they are developing the client for the N800 and Linux support.  Thanks for showing the penguin a little respect.  More on this later when I get my copy of the Internet Tablet software.

The user interface appears to work just fine but, there are some issues with video and audio coding.  Check out the thread on Internettablettalk.

Read The Thread

Here’s the simple nuts and bolts to make this work with your system.  The Software is simply an application for your N800 or 810 and a server application to be installed on your mythfrontend. 

Mythetomer N800/810 app: 

To install the Internet tablet program, navigate to this page from your Tablet and click the download link below.  Follow the prompts.  Easy.

Download Mythetomer app

Server App:

On your frontend machine open a terminal window and type in

sudo wget http://netti.nic.fi/~icewood/mythetomer/file.php?file=mythetomer_0.2-1_i386.deb

After the file downloads to your machine type in a terminal window

sudo dpkg -i mythetomer_0.2-1_i386.deb

Done!

You will now need to shutdown your frontend if you haven’t already and start the mythetomer server.  To do this simply open a terminal window and type “mythetomer” and press enter.  Add a & sign at the end to run it in the background otherwise don’t close the terminal window or the server will stop.

I set mine up last night using the WLAN in my home and it works great.  The software gives you a remote control surface on you IT with number pad, direction arrows, menu and esc buttons, volume and channel up/down, and player controls such as play, pause, skip forward and back.  I have not tried the bluetooth connection as of yet cause I really have no need too but I might play with it a little later to see what happens.  The performance of the software is top notch, easy interface , no lag on button push and pretty steady connection.  I did have an issue once where the server croaked and the N800 lost its connection.  This required me to shutdown the frontend and restart the mythetomer server which to say the least very frustrating.  I am currently working on a Cron job to monitor the status of the mythetomer server. 

Overall its a good piece of tech gadgetry available for download.  I like it and it works much better than my Lirc based machine remote.  Give it a whirl.

Mythetomer Website