PreCentral.net

Anyone who has used a webOS phone for any period of time knows that battery life is not one of the strongest features of those phones. While it has gotten significantly better from when the original Pre was first released in 2009, it's still a difficult task to make it through a full day with any type of moderate usage. For Pre, Pre Plus, or Pre 2 owners, the good news was that you could use spare batteries from any of those phones interchangeably or purchase spare stock or extended batteries from places such as the webOS Nation store.

With the official limited release of the HP Pre3 in Europe and the slew of AT&T (and a few Verizon) phones making their way to eBay, we found ourselves in a bit of a quandary: the only way to get a spare battery for those phones was to buy an extra Pre3. Not exactly an inexpensive (or efficient) proposition. And if you didn’t want to spend the hundreds of dollars on another Pre3 just for its battery, what would happen if/when the battery stopped working after extended usage, shorted out, or gets trashed?

Seeing a potential business opportunity, Mugen Power Batteries (who previously made extended batteries for both the Pre and Pixi) created their own a survey late last year to gague interested in extended batteries for the Pre3. Within just a few hours of opening the poll, Mugen announced that they received enough feedback to justify development of Pre3 batteries. Pre-orders were opened in December for a 1400 mAh "SL" extended battery for $46.95 and a 2800 mAh "XL" extended battery for $98.95, the latter of which comes with a larger back cover for the Pre3. As compared to the stock Pre3 battery that clocks in at 1230 mAh, these batteries should provide an extra 14% or 128% of battery life before your phone needs to be plugged back in.

This time last year, Derek, Dieter, and Riz were running around San Francisco's Fort Mason Center covering what turned out to be the biggest planned event in the history of webOS. It was the coming out party for webOS under HP, and it came to be known as "Think Beyond." One year ago, HP SVP and Palm Global Business Unit manager Jon Rubinstein got up on the stage to introduce, in order, the tiny HP Veer smartphone, the HP Pre3 - larger, thinner, and more powerful webOS smartphone that the faithful had been waiting for - and the first webOS tablet, the HP TouchPad, all slated by the end of Summer 2011

That day brought more than hardware announcements. We got our first look at webOS 3.0 on the TouchPad, met the new VP of Developer Relations Richard Kerris, found out that HP was not going to update older handsets to webOS 2.0, and said goodbye to the Palm brand. Things were looking up - even if the TouchPad wasn't a mind-blowing piece of hardware, it was the first of what we hoped would be several products to take the market by storm.

The Veer shipped to middling reviews in May and the TouchPad followed in July. And then everything went downhill from there. After just a month on the market, HP cut the TouchPad's price by $100, and ten days after that pulled the rug out from under the webOS community by canceling all webOS hardware development. Since then we've gone through a hardware fire sale, a fired CEO, the loss of Kerris, Rubinstein, and many others, questions about the future of the platform, and emerged on the other side with plans for going open source with a new Open webOS.

My, what a year it has been.

Ready to jump into the wide world of homebrew on your TouchPad, Pre, or Veer? Alright! Here's what you need:

• Your webOS tablet or smartphone
• A computer, Mac or PC, connected to the internet
• A Micro-USB cable to connect the webOS device to your computer (you can use the cable that came with the device, but any Micro-USB cable will do)
• A stiff drink (this isn't required, but you'll deserve one for being awesome enough to be doing homebrew)

Got that? Okay, time for some clarifications. webOS devices do not need to be "rooted" - they come from the factory open enough that special tools aren't needed to install apps outside of the App Catalog or gain access to the operating system. The process of getting a homebrew installer set-up is relatively straight-forward and doesn't involve anything scary or potentially warranty voiding (there are potentially warranty-voiding things you can do after that, but everything described in this how-to is perfectly acceptable).

We'll be honest - this one is more for the developers and our own lazy purposes. Right now, webOS App Catalog developers are only able to generate promo codes for their apps on a per-country basis, i.e. a promo code can only be generated for a specific country, and doing so for other countries requires a different promo code. Here's a glimpse into the headache of country-specific promo codes.

When we do our weekly app giveaways here on webOS Nation, we have to get a multi-use USA code from the developer to send out to the winners, knowing that the majority will be on the American App Catalog. But should they be an international user on, say, the German App Catalog? Then that code won't work for them and they need a German promo code. Not a problem, we'll get one from the developer. Now do that for 15-20% of the winners in our giveaways. It can escalate a migraine to a headache real fast keeping track of which winners need a code for which country.

It's even worse if you're a developer who wants to just put a promo code out there but still cover all the international bases - you have to make one for each of the ten countries that support promo codes and hope that people pick them up. Amusingly/frustratingly, even though HP supports app sales to Singapore, they never got around to adding Singapore to the promo code selection list.

The time has come to overhaul the promo code system. The first step is to institute global promo codes - one code to cover every country. We can forgive not supporting promo codes in countries where app sales aren't happening, though that's something that needs to be worked on too. The second step is to eliminate the requirement for having a payment method on file with the App Catalog in order to use a promo code. Best Buy doesn't require that I have cash on me when I use a Best Buy gift card, why should the App Catalog need a credit card to use a promo code?

And step the third: make them shorter. The current 32-digit alpha-numeric promo code system is both ridiculously hard to manually enter and overkill - it allows for 1.9 quattuordecillion (that's 1.9 billion trillion trillion trillion) possibilities. Note only would it be near impossible to guess a promo code, even with a computer doing the inputting, but HP is never ever going to run out of combinations. Our humble suggestion: cut it down to eight alpha-numeric characters. That's still 208 trillion possibilities. Go for ten (141 trillion) or twelve (9.5 quadrillion) if you're feeling antsy about hackability.

Have your own thoughts on this webOS Wish List entry? Of course you do - the comments are below. Surely you have your own ideas as to what ought be on the webOS wish list, and so we've created a forum thread just for what is sure to be an awesome discussion.

It was early December. The whirlwind year that was 2011 was coming to a close and the future of webOS was still a great unknown. But one developer stood up and proclaimed, "My name is Zhephree, and I shall build an app to catalog my media!" And so it was done.

Fast-forward to today and Geoff Gauchet's Wooden Rows app is now available for TouchPad owners. The app leverage's Amazon's vast database of books, CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays, and video games to allow the user to build a searchable library of their own personal physical collection. With that library put together you can then even keep track of when you've loaned things out to friends. Wooden Rows is not a content portal - you can't watch your movies, read your books, or listen to your music through it, nor will you likely ever be able to - it's a personal inventory tracker. If you've got a large media library, we can think of much worse ways to spend $3.99.

If you're in the mood to spend that amount twice, Zhephree has also cut their price of their other flagship app by a dollar, bringing the social network aggregator incredible! (properly lowercase and exclaimed, for the record) down to $3.99 as well. The move is a permanent price cut, and should be an easier pill to swallow for users looking to unite their Facebook, Flickr, foursquare, and Twitter existences in one cohesive stream.

Source: App Catalog (Wooden Rows, incredible!); Via: Zhephree

Hey there webOS developer, have we got a suggestion for you. Frustrated by the lack of a trial option or refunds for your webOS customers? Wish you had a way to offer a free trial that was easy to find? Have we got the answer for you - use Enyo and the web.

Thanks to the nature of webOS and Enyo, developers are proving how easy it in fact is to take an app, even a relatively complex one like Flashcards, and port it to the web browser. Practically any Enyo developer could leverage this flexibility of Enyo to offer their app to anybody with a web browser (especially once Enyo 2.0 comes around). Throw in a cookie to limit usage to a few hours or days or whatever you want and then redirect users to the App Catalog to purchase.

Putting an Enyo app online, even in time-limited fashion, offers something that Apple, Google, BlackBerry, and Microsoft haven’t been able to conjure: more than just an online description and some screenshots, it's the actual app, easily available for anybody to use. And if you're the type of Enyo developer who's porting your app to other platforms (if you aren't, you're silly), you can use the same website to provide a preview of your app for all platforms. Sure, it'll cost a bit up front to set up a website and pay for hosting charges, but you've got to spend money to make money. We can't think of many better ways to spend that money than to actually make it possible for any potential customer to try your app out on any platform.

A few months back, deep in the midst of the TouchPad fire sale, at least a few of HP's webOS tablets shipped out the door and to customers with an unexpected install: Android. While HP never figured out exactly how their internal build of Android got released into the public, they've gone ahead and released the kernel and GPL (General Public License - i.e. open source) components. It's worth noting that releasing this is not something HP had to do - while those that ship Android devices are required by the licensing terms to release the kernel to open source, HP's release was accidental and thus open sourcing was not required - this release can be chalked up to goodwill, even if resulting from being pressured into doing it.

As was noted on RootzWiki, the source code released appears to have been developer separately from webOS on the TouchPad, possibly as a precursor project to HP's acquisition of Palm. The last change in the code was in March 2011, three months before the TouchPad's July 2011 release, but well after HP announced the webOS tablet in February. The crew at RootzWiki is understandably encouraged by the release and intends to adopt various portions into the CyanogenMod 9 Android 4.0 port.

Source: RootzWiki; Via: WebOS Internals (Twitter)

Good news, webOS Nation: Theme Manager is now available! The Enyo-based app by Janne Julkunen (better known around these parts as homebrew master coder Sconix) is now available from WebOS Internals and stands ready to safely install, remove, and mix-and-match your themes.

Thanks to AUSMT, Theme Manager is 100% update safe, meaning you shouldn't have to panic about removing themes before installing an update to webOS. The app can manage both ZIP- and IPK-packaged themes, both side-loaded and downloaded. Themes are even applied in the background by Theme Manager, though a quick Luna Restart may be required afterwards for the changes to take affect.

Have multiple themes and like to switch things up? You can actually mix-and-match parts from multiple themes - a wallpaper from here, icons from there, a boot logo from that one, and system menus from the other one. You can even just pick an aspect or two from a single theme and add them to the default theme - just pick that one part of the theme you like and hit the apply button.

We're working on adapting our own themes gallery here at webOS Nation to be Theme Manager compatible, in the meantime developers interested in packaging their themes for compatibility can find instructions on how to make that happen at the source link below.

Source: WebOS Internals; Via: Janne Julkunen (@therealsconix)

So far 3D in smartphones has proven to be a bit of a gimmick. At least we don't have to wear glasses to make it work with devices like the Android-powered HTC Evo 3D, but as it turns out - you don't need a 3D device to take 3D pictures. You can do it with your webOS smartphone and Stereo Camera by AJGF Projects. The app works thanks to the magic of stereoscopy, taking two horizontally separated photos and then 'diverging' your eyes when viewing them. You know, like those Magic Eye books. Stereo Camera allows you to do that with your webOS phone in landscape and portrait, just look un-cross-eyed at the resulting image to see it in magical three dimensions. Normally Stereo Camera would cost you a dollar from the App Catalog, but this week we've got 100 copies to give away to you!

Contest: We have 100 copies of Stereo Camera to give away. Just leave a comment on this post to enter. Contest ends next Sunday at midnight US Eastern Time after which time we will select 100 random entrants to win. Please only leave one comment, multiple entries won’t count. Promo codes are only valid in countries serviced by the App Catalog, and users must be running webOS 2.1 or higher with the latest version of the App Catalog.

This weekend's post from webOS developer Dan Perlberger on dealing with app piracy has generated one of the best conversations on the issue I think I've ever seen. A lot of opposing voices have been brought into the discussion, with good points made on both sides of the issue (as always, we remain opposed to piracy here at webOS Nation). One point in particular worth noting is the availability, rather the lack of availability, for apps internationally. There are three levels of app availability: (1) the United States, where 99% of apps are available; (2) the approved international market - Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Mexico, Singapore, New Zealand, Spain, and the UK - which has a healthy majority of the US apps, plus a smattering of country-specific apps that for whatever reason haven't been made available elsewhere, but lacks a good chunk of apps that are for whatever reason only available in the US, and (3) everybody else.

Group numero uno makes out like gangbusters when it comes to app selection on webOS [insert USA chant here]. The approved countries in the second group do alright too - it's up to app developers to submit their apps for these countries. Group three - everybody in other countries that have gone out of their way to purchase webOS devices - they get the real short end of the stick.

As developers in the piracy conversation pointed out, they will gladly deal directly with outside-of-the-system international users to get the app they so desire, but that shouldn't have to be the case. A user shouldn't have to track down who the developer is, hope they'll be willing to send over an IPK, and hook up with them over PayPal.

So here's today's webOS wish list item: a truly global App Catalog. We certainly understand the pain that could come from trying to set up credit card agreements overseas, so here's a solution: allow users to pay with PayPal. Or set up a system where they can purchase credit in the store instead, certainly that'd be easier to put together (plus it would lay the infrastructure for App Catalog gift certificates).

On the developer front, simplify things there too. Instead of having a developer submitting click off each country in which they want their app to be available, give them the option to click 'global' and automatically enable app sales in any new countries added after their last update.

webOS fans are a strangely dedicated bunch. For all this platform and community has been through over the past few years, HP should definitely take the time to put together a system for international app purchases. These people deserve it for the lengths they've gone through to acquire devices, and they shouldn't feel they have to resort to piracy to get apps on them. In fact, HP, this really isn't a wish list item. Wish list means "I'd like for this to happen." No, this needs to happen.