WebOS

First impressions: Palm Pre

Phew! Thursday was a long, action-packed day thanks to Palm. I'm just now getting to sit down and gather my thoughts on the Palm Pre and Palm Web OS announcements, and I have to confess that I went into the press conference with some skepticism. It's no secret that Palm's been struggling to keep up with the competition and has come under heavy criticism for its lack of innovation and delays in releasing its new operating system. So can you blame me for thinking that Palm might disappoint again?

Well, I'm happy to say that I … Read more

Palm's WebOS app strategy needs more details

Palm's new WebOS passed its first test: it looks good. But will the device attract legions of developers?

Just hours after Palm showed off its new operating system running on the Palm Pre, details are still rolling in about the unit and its software. One important factor that will have to be addressed is application development and distribution. Palm has confirmed plans to administer some sort of central store for application downloads. But there still is scarce information about how that will actually work.

Palm's Stephane Maes said that Palm will not attempt to approve every single application … Read more

Photos: Palm Pre and Palm Web OS

Even before CES 2009 began, Palm created quite a buzz by announcing that it would introduce its new operating system as well as the first device of the family. On opening day of the show, the company finally introduced Palm Web OS and the Palm Pre and crowd was wowed. Check out our hands-on gallery of the smartphone.

Answers to burning Palm Pre questions

Updated 6:20 p.m. PT, to note that the Pre does have the technical ability to act as a modem for a laptop.

LAS VEGAS--As the device with the most mystery attached to it, there were plenty of questions left after Palm introduced its Pre on Thursday. I had a chance to sit down with Palm vice president Stephane Maes to get some (but not all) of the answers to my burning questions.

Palm isn't answering the big question--how much will it cost--but Maes did say "we obviously know what all the prices are of the products … Read more

Palm calls it a comeback with the Palm Pre

Palm took one giant step toward regaining its position as a relevant mobile computing company with the introduction of the Palm Pre on Thursday.

If you missed out on Ina Fried's live coverage of Palm's press conference in Las Vegas at CES, here are a few basic details about the Pre (rhymes with glee). It's a touch-screen phone with a slide-out keyboard than runs WebOS, Palm's long-awaited new operating system formerly code-named Nova.

Sprint will be the exclusive launch carrier for the Pre, which comes with Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, a 3.1-inch display, GPS, and 8GBs of … Read more

Palm announces the Pre

Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein, in a CES keynote, just unveiled the company's much anticipated new handset, the Palm Pre, which features the new Palm Web OS. The device has all the going features--Bluetooth stereo, Wi-Fi, 8GB of storage, and GPS. One thing that makes it a bit different is that in addition to a touch screen, it has a fold-out curved keyboard.

Head over to CNET News' live blog for the full story. And click on the audio link below to hear CNET News reporter Tom Krazit talk about the new smartphone.

AUDIO

Early take on Palm Pre Crave … Read more

The cloud is not a computer

My hat goes off to Preston Monroe, the developer of iCopy, an online service that adds cut and paste functionality to the iPhone's browser and e-mail apps. As you probably know, Apple's handheld computer bizarrely omits this feature.

iCopy is a clever hack that lets you select text or a link from a Web page and paste it into another page, or an e-mail. It gets around the lack of iPhone-native copy and paste by sending selected text to a temporary online repository when you "copy," and retrieving it when you "paste." In operation, … Read more

Ghost and Glide show Web OS innovation at D6

Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher put Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer up on stage first thing at the D6 conference, and by doing so, let them set the agenda for the operating system discussion here at the show.

Microsoft's duo didn't do a great job of capitalizing on that position. Rather, they left a lot of room for other companies to excite the audience with newer ideas. Two companies here are taking on that charge.

Ghost The first, Ghost, demo'd Wednesday. Its product is a "virtual computer," as the company calls it. Hosted at Amazon Web Services, … Read more

AjaxWindows: Most interesting Web OS experiment yet

I still don't fully get the whole Web operating system concept. Why run an OS inside a browser when your browser is running in an OS to begin with? But AjaxWindows, a Web OS and application suite that launched today, makes a very good case for the Web OS. It's not ready yet for adoption by the world at large, but the idea behind it, and some of the features in it, are too interesting to write off as just yet another science project.

Ajax13, the company that makes AjaxWindows, was originally started to create Web-based applications. It … Read more

Jooce: The beginnings of another Web OS

I got my hands on an early build of the Web operating system Jooce this week. I find this class of product interesting, but I've yet to see one that's really compelling. See also: Startforce (video), YouOS (review), DesktopTwo (review), Glide Effortless (review), and Goowy and YourMinis (review) .

The concept is elemental Webware: Web OSes, at least in theory, put all the heavy lifting an operating system usually does on a server somewhere on the Net, while the interface gets funneled through a browser. With a Web OS, you don't need to worry about any additional software or storage on your local computer. This means any browser-equipped machine can become your personal machine with a simple log-in. And since all of your data is stored centrally, it's also generally easier to share and collaborate with others.

The downside is speed and the availability of apps. Jooce, in its current, pre-pre-release stage, is a Web OS that appears to have done a good job solving the speed issue. But I didn't see any serious applications to work with it.

The Jooce UI is built in Flash and is nice-looking and easy to use. It's also got a clever sharing feature: Each user gets two workspaces by default: private and shared. You can easily move files between them to make them available to others, and a quick mouse-click rotates your workspace between the two spaces, much like user switching on Mac OS. (In fact, the default desktop background is a pretty blatant ripoff of the blue swoosh on the Mac desktop.)

At the moment, there are no Jooce apps to play with aside from a multi-service IM client, a file uploader, and some media players, but Jooce CEO Stefan Surzucki told me that their platform enables apps to easily talk amongst themselves, so you won't have the collection-of-separate-widgets that you get on single-page aggregators like NetVibes. But somebody's going to have to come up with good ideas to implement, and then build those apps. I can't tell yet if that will be easy, or hard, or if anyone is yet lined up to do so, especially considering the explosion of app and widget platforms that developers now have to worry about.