The Connected Circuit

Palm has officially announced the second device to be outfitted with its webOS mobile platform. Previously leaked as the Eos and now officially known as the Pixi. The Pixi loses the slide out keyboard for a candy bar form factor, yet still keeping a full qwerty keyboard. It slims down to a mere 0.67″ thin (by comparison the iPhone 3GS is 0.48″), but doesn’t lose the capacitive touchscreen or the number of pixels.

What’s does this have:

Palm’s also introducing what they’re calling the “Artist Series”, which includes backplates not unlike those for the myTouch on T-Mobile, adding some flare to those Pixi’s out there. The back plates are also fully compatible with the touchstone wireless charging accessory and right now comes in five different variations.

It looks like Palm’s been hard at work not only with getting a new device out the door, but adding some much needed software additions and tweak,s as well. Palm has added LinkedIn and Yahoo to your synergy contacts, Yahoo to the messeging application, and rouding it out with an official Facebook application.

What it doesn’t have:

It loses the shiny metal click button at the bottom right below the gesture area, WiFi and gets a slower processor (a Qualcomm MSM7627 as opposed to the pre’s TI OMAP 3). It still does not have a microSD card slot, but keeps the 8 GB internal storage. Since this phone is coming to Sprint, expect it to be a CDMA only device, so those expecting this to be that first GSM webOS device, you’ll need to wait a wee bit longer.

Be sure to keep an eye out for this soon on Sprint, for an unknown price point. As this will surely be aimed at the Centro crowd, Sprint will most likely shoot for a price of around $99-$150, which is after a two-year agreement, of course. Read more about the Pixi here on Palm’s site and the full specs here.

--written by Peter To--

The iPhone has made many strides to bringing the true desktop web experience on mobile devices, but there has been one glaring omission to its arsenal, Flash. For those who don’t know what Adobe Flash is, it’s essential the backbone  of that media experience that you find so dear on the interwebs nowadays. From streaming video sites like Youtube to all those addicting games, whether you like it or not, the whole web community has embraced Flash to the point where it has become an integral part of any browsing experience. However, there isn’t a mobile device or platform out yet that has taken course and attempted to port these experiences to the ever growing mobile web world. Enter Adobe, who has   finally taken strides to bring Flash to a plethora of smartphones, with two glaring exceptions, Apple and RIM.

Adobe’s Open Screen Project is seeking to fill the void. With an alliance of companies, Palm, Nokia, Google and Microsoft are working to port Flash 10 to their various mobile platforms. So what does it mean to you the user? Well it means that before, where there was no hope of bringing those web applications without significant reduced functionality to your phone, now with the concerted effort of almost all the big guns working together, we’ll most certainly be able to view native youtube, hulu and many of the other applications that run entirely in Flash, mirroring that desktop browsing experience almost 100%. As a word of caution though, bringing Flash to mobile devices almost means bringing those Flash ads you see to mobile devices as well, but I for one would gladly take that punch in the gut to be able to watch my favorite show on hulu on the go.

Read more here and here. Watch Adobe’s press conference here.

--written by Peter To--

It’s official, the hot item that is the Palm Pre will launch on June 6th, for an on contract price of $200 (after $100 mail-in-rebate that is). What’s so exciting about the launch of this particular device that’s different, than your ordinary smartphone or even the latest Blackberry? Plenty, both Palm and Sprint have a lot riding on this device. Both companies have had extremely rough times over the past few years, just last quarter Sprint lost 1.3 million subscibers, most jumped ship for the likes of Apple’s iPhone on the god-awful network that is AT&T. Palm has been stuck on a dated OS on their mobile phones for the latter half of this decade and with fledging modern mobile OS’s such as Apple’s mobile OS X or Google’s Android platform taking center stage, Palm’s Garnet OS has been left in the dust. The last time a mobile phone got the Palm Garnet treatment was Palm’s own Centro, which has surprisingly been a smash and has been keeping them afloat. Since then even Palm has jumped shipped and has even agreed to have Microsoft’s Windows Mobile OS on some of it’s devices in 2006. We all know Palm can make great hardware, the Treo was a breakthrough in mobile computing with its dual input, full sized qwerty and touchscreen inputs, but each iteration has been too minimal for anyone to care. Everyone that I knew that carried a Treo has moved on to either a Blackberry, an iPhone or one of those HTC devices.

However, early indications that the device is the first true “iPhone-killer” was evident in it’s unveil at this year’s CES, generating a mass amount of buzz amongst, not only the tech community, but in the mainstream media as well.Their stock price jumped from a anemic $1.40 to nearly $11, which is quite an amazing feat, in this economy. Since then, Palm has been coying giving out more demos of the device and bits of details, as well as giving some developers an early preview of the webOS SDK, all building to the impending release of the device that will, hopefully, bring Palm back from the brink of death. So far, Palm has enjoyed some fantastic news and it seems they are actually listening to their end users.

Now with rumors of device shortages on launch day, you can’t help but think, that if Palm and Sprint don’t get this one right, it’ll surely be the last time you’ll hear of either company. I, for one, hope that those rumors are, in fact, rumors and I might be seeing myself switch from my loved/hated Blackberry on the crudiness that is AT&T’s network back to the network that broke my cellphone virginity, Sprint.

*image source from Gizmodo

--written by Peter To--

So CES is over and after looking at what came out there are some pretty strong themes at this year’s CES. For those who don’t realize, but CES is pretty much the precursor of this year’s trends in products and tech. What happens at CES usually, though not all the time, comes to full fruition in the upcoming year.

Let’s start with the what stole the entire show away, Palm. Palm’s press event was by and the large the runaway hit of the show. Weeks ago, Palm queitly invited some of the top tech heads to a conference they were holding at CES with a teaser ad for the “newness” of Palm. Not many people knew what it was going to be, but many people expected that this was going to be the make or break for Palm; if they didn’t do something amazing here, they would never have the chance to do it again EVER. There was much speculation of what they were going to do, but it was for sure that this was going to be their big reveal of their five year in the making redo of their dated Garnet OS. Low and behold, Palm pulled it off. They not only pulled it off by stunning people with a marvelously slick OS, but an equally slick device to complement the very polished, though still in alpha, OS. I am definitely looking forward to the Palm pre come June and may jump away from crappy AT&T and back into the arms of Sprint.

It seems as if companies are finally embracing the cloud with Apple putting their iLife suite into the cloud, Microsoft realizing that having all your information in a common place does matter to people and Palm having their entire platform revolve around premonition and the notion that your information does not only live on your phone. The year 2009 will definitely be the year of the cloud.

What was decidedly absent at the show was the number of android phones. Although CES was never known for great phone releases, I was surprised to not see even one phone from any manufacturer. The lone android phone that was supposed to be roaming the show floor, the Kogan Agora. Apparently Google went to the man behind the effort to push this phone out and asked him to not release the phone as there were features that the phone lacked that would gimp compatibility of applications. We did see one android device, the Giinii Movit, which is essentially the Nokia N800 with android instead of Maemo. From what I saw, it seems like a sweet little MID that I would gladly trade my N800 for. Hopefully, now that Google released the full source code of android to the masses, we’ll start seeing more android devices start to trickle down.

--written by Peter To--