GVoice Getting Rebranded As SyngerGV, To Integrate With Messaging

If you're a Google Voice user on webOS, we hope you've at least looked at GVoice. The app, a fine Enyo app originally built to bring Google Voice to the TouchPad and since shrunken down to phone-appropriate dimensions was just updated to version 1.1.0. The update brings a larger font for the blind among us and adds right and left justification to message conversations. Version 1.1.0 also has expanded Text-to-Speech capabilities for users of webOS smartphones.

But what we're really interested in is the upcoming version 1.2.0. The app will be rebranded as SynerGV, and if the synergistic name is dropping any hints, well, it ought be. SynerGV 1.2.0 will offer integration via Synergy Connectors with the webOS 3.0 TouchPad Messaging app. The plan is for the SynerGV Synergy Connector to be offered by the end of July as an in-app purchase, with a secondary companion app to manage things like placing phone calls, setting your Google Voice status, listening to voicemails, and the like. If you're downloading GVoice 1.1.0 onto your TouchPad, you'll have the option to pre-purchase SynerGV at a reduced price of $1.49. When SynerGV launches, it'll cost $4.99.

As for our webOS smartphones, where you're more likely to be making active use of Google Voice, the developer says that "if and when" he makes a smartphone version, the same offer to pre-purchase at a discount will be made. We're a little disappointed by the "if and when" part, but we know that webOS smartphones are a small market and as a lone developer there's only so much time in the day to commit to an increasingly niche app market. Regardless, we're hopeful that the "if" does become a "when", and we wouldn't be above suggesting you comment on this article to demonstrate how much demand for the app there just might be.

HP webOS application download link

HP Looking To Hire More webOS Team Members

HP is looking for several new faces for webOS, ranging from software engineers to visual designers to user experience experts according to job listings on HP's Taleo job site. While we are hesitant to take this as signs of things drastically changing for the better on the inside we can't help but feel good knowing that HP is looking to hire some people into the organization after all of the drastic staff cuts in recent months. The job openings come after a hiring freeze was put in place in August immediately following the decision to stop the manufacturing of webOS hardware.

HP has exactly twelve job postings live at this time. Four of them are internships, one for the Enyo team, one product management internship, and two user experience design internships. There are also eight other job openings that include two senior interaction designers, two senior visual designers, one network engineer, one senior product manager, one in quality assurance, and one senior cloud services architecture role. A couple of these openings appear to be for the Enyo team, specifically the interaction designers, as they are based out of the San Francisco office where the fine Enyo folks work.

We hope the listings continue to expand, especially given the vast number of employees who were laid off. The more employees they have on the team the faster they should be able to get Open webOS out, and the better it should be when it becomes available in September. We do know one of those listings will be coming down fairly soon given that the Enyo team has already hired one of the smartest minds in webOS homebrew, Jason Robitaille, as an intern, unless the Enyo team is actually hiring multiple interns which could certainly help the framework grow to be even bigger and better.

webOSroundup Calls It Quit After Three Amazing Years

A post from webOSrounup founder David Baxter

When I started this site in November 2009 I never expected the amazing ride it would turn into. What started out as a simple app review site grew into the second largest webOS fan site on the planet with over 300,000 visitors a month, a live podcast, two trips to CES, a lot of contests and more fun than one group of guys should be allowed to have.

It is with great sorrow then to say that it is time for webOSroundup to sign off. It has been obvious for a little while now that WOR has not been able to keep up with the stories and news like we used to and rather than just languish and put up an occasional story from time to time we wanted to go out on our own terms and say thank you to each and every one of our fans…so in standard WOR fashion, we are going to do it with one final podcast.

Next Tuesday (April 10th) at 9pm(Eastern) all of the WOR miscreants from the past and present will be around to talk about the wonderful ride running this site has been. We will be doing it live so we want everyone who can join us to do so.

On tap to join us is: Dan Ramirez, myself, Jesse Mendoza, Ryan St. Andrie, and (hopefully) Roy Sutton. It should be a grand time where we can reminiscent about all the antics, webOS as a platform, and some behind the scenes stuff that you probably wouldn’t otherwise hear. Also, if you have questions, we will answer those as well.

We hope you can join us and add your webOS and WOR stories into the mix as well. If you have any questions or stories, feel free to email me at david@webosroundup.com and we will do our best to get to each and every one of them.

Novacom USB Communication Toolset Released To Open Source

Today saw yet another release along the Open webOS roadmap, with Novacom and Novacomd finding their way onto GitHub. The two pieces comprise a generic communication toolset used to communicate between a host (your computer) and embedded device (your webOS device) over USB. It's what allows the webOS SDK and programs like WebOS Quick Install to access the device over a USB connection without having to put the device into USB Mode. Plus there's the fact that USB mode doesn't allow access to the file system.

Novacom has been distributed as part of the webOS SDK and webOS Doctors since what seems like the beginning of time, and was released as a separate downloadable executable a while back as well. The separate release, while not open source, enabled WebOS Quick Install to get by without downloading the entire webOS Doctor just to be able to extract Novacom to install a single app or patch.

There are two parts to the release, Novacom and Novacomd. The latter is the service that runs on both the host and the target device, while Novacom is the command line user interface that provides a human-accessible way to access that service. With both now out in open source, the webOS developer community (and the developer community at large) is free to enhance, fix, and repurpose the two as they see fit.

The release of Novacom nearly closes out the Open webOS release commitments for March, with just LevelDB and MojoDB/DB8 left for the month. Major releases for March have included the Nyx hardware abstraction layer and the Linux Standard Kernel 3.3, both of which will go a long way towards opening up Open webOS to installation on a wide range of devices. There's still a lot to go on the roadmap, but despite what feels like near constant drama, Open webOS is still making progress.

Sam Greenblatt Out As webOS CTO

Today we've learned that webOS CTO Sam Greenblatt is transitioning away from his leadership position within webOS. We contacted HP and they confirmed that Greenblatt will no longer be in charge of webOS, though they offered no hints as to who might be taking the lead:

"Sam Greenblatt is moving from webOS to a new role at HP and will continue to assist the team during the transition. The Open webOS project is on schedule and HP remains committed to the roadmap announced in January."

Sources indicate to us that developers within HP were frustrated by the pace of the roadmap, and that there has been considerable head-butting since Greenblatt took the lead of webOS just a few short months ago. For what it's worth, HP has delivered on Enyo 2.0, QtWebKit, the Linux Standard Kernel, and the Nyx hardware abstraction layer.

Before coming to webOS, Greenblatt had been "VP of Strategic Program, Strategy & Corporate Development", a job title that tells us pretty much nothing, but still sounds like something that would mesh well with leading a group like webOS. Additionally, at least according to his LinkedIn profile, Greenblatt also currently holds the CTO of Enterprise Global Distribution position at HP, so he'll still have something to do once the transition to whoever is new is complete. Of course, the last webOS leader that transitioned to another position within HP eventually transitioned to a hammock in Mexico.

HP Chief Strategy Office Bill Veghte is still in place, guiding the webOS effort from above, as are the remnants of the Open webOS staff after the most recent round of dismissals. Drama like this is never good for any group, and it's especially not good right now after all of the hits webOS has taken in the past five months.

webOS 1.4.5 Update Finally Comes To The Telcel Palm Pre

There are some things that we never expect to see happen. We're talking tortoise riding a unicorn type stuff here. That's the level of make-believe upon which we had stashed the thought of webOS 1.4.5 ever getting released for the Palm Pre on Telcel. Like the Sprint Pre, the Telcel webOS phone was all but abandoned as far as updates were concerned, but it was abandoned at webOS 1.4.1.

HP Was Supposed To Leave Palm Alone For Three Years

 

Phil McKinney left his position as HP CTO and chief big thinker at the end of this past October. Since then he published a new book, Beyond the Obvious: Killer Questions That Spark Game-Changing Innovation [hardcover, Kindle, iBooks] that explores his experience as an innovator. In promoting Beyond the Obvious, McKinney sat down for an interview with "strategic marketing expert" and fellow author Rick Mathieson. Most of the interview touches on what's in McKinney's book, but in part four of the interview he steers the discussion towards what went down with webOS and McKinney's last few months at HP. We'll let McKinney do the talking here: 

"[The Palm acquisition] was going to be a long term effort. Palm was struggling and HP was stepping in, doing the acquisition, and we were basically going to take three years hands-off. Palm was basically going to get cash infusions, resources, and expertise. But Palm was going to be given three years to basically get itself positioned to be a market leader in its space. Now, fast forward to July of 2011 and, one, you had a swap out of the CEOs - Leo comes in as the new CEO - and HP, for whatever reason - I was not a part of this decision - made the decision to kill it, one year into the three year program. This is an example of not committing long term to the resources and not having patience for innovation."

McKinney notes that he was part of the team that drove the acquisition of Palm and that there are always challenges to overcome with trying to get a large organization like HP to be innovative. As the existence of a three-year plan for Palm implies, the challenge is sticking to a long-term plan that ignores the quarterly financial reports in favor of the long view.

It's equal parts hard and frustrating to imagine where Palm and webOS would be today had HP not pulled the plug on hardware development and essentially killed (and since attempted to revived) the OS. It's been seven months since former HP CEO Leo Apotheker made the decision to kill webOS hardware, and during that time we expect that we would have at the very least seen the release of the HP Pre3 and TouchPad Go, plus whatever else HP might have been working up.

For his part, McKinney still uses a webOS smartphone and a TouchPad.

The Story of Where Palm Went Wrong

      

This is the story of where Palm went wrong.

Earlier this week an article was published by The New York Times that served as a sort of post-mortem of webOS now that it’s going open source. The title: “H.P.’s TouchPad, Some Say, Was Built on Flawed Software”. Ignoring the annoying abbreviation of “H.P.” (even HP does it without the periods) and capitalization of webOS, the article talks to a few unnamed former Palm employees and Paul Mercer, formerly the Senior Director of Software at Palm, who characterizes webOS as “ahead of its time” for using web technology as the basis for the OS, even though the base of “WebKit remains not ready for prime time.” The gist of the article is that Palm, the Pre, HP, and the TouchPad all failed because of the software.

I’m not normally one to be so blunt and pointed on this blog, but as you can imagine I (along with plenty still working at HP and on webOS development) take issue with that claim. So, Mr. Mercer and Brian X. Chen of The New York Times, after taking a few days to mull this over and consider the points laid forth in your piece, I must throw down this gauntlet: You are wrong.

I concede that out of the gate the Pre and webOS did not live up to expectations. The idea of an iPhone killer wasn’t such a quaint notion back in early 2009 as it is today, so expectations for the Pre were fairly high. There was nothing Palm could do to contain the hype. In fact, they somewhat set themselves up with the stunning reveal at CES 2009, winning the coveted Best of Show. It didn’t help that everybody wanted Palm to succeed – America loves a good comeback story.

But when the Pre finally hit Sprint stores in June 2009, it was underwhelming. The software, while improved from January, was still slow and buggy. The App Catalog had a paltry few dozen apps available, all free. The Pre itself was poorly built and prone to hardware failures (I myself went through four units in two months before finally getting one that lasted well over a year and lives on today as part of my Sprint FrankenPre 2).

But that’s to be expected. It’s a first generation product, they’re never perfect. They never have all of the features and they never ship bug free. That’s the nature of the beast – you can either spend all eternity tweaking and fixing before releasing and the company goes belly up in the meantime because you didn’t sell anything, or you can release it and hope that customers are willing to put up with the software flaws for the short time it hopefully takes you to fix them.

So, yes, webOS as it existed on June 6, 2009, was flawed. So were iOS and Android when they launched. iPhone OS (as it was known back then) didn’t support third party apps; Android looked like crap for the first three or four versions. It takes time to work these things out, and by-and-large they can be solved, the company can work past them, and put out quality product.

Plam Pre 2 webOS 2.2.4 OTA is now available

Recently, a few lucky Palm Pre 2 owners got an OTA update to webOS 2.2.4, and then we got the webOS doctor link from WebOS-Internals emerged a few days ago. While all this has been going on, we have been wondering, “Where is the OTA update for all the other users?”

Today, not only did the webOS 2.2.4 update go live for the HP Pre3, but it also went live for the Palm Pre2.

HP reportedly tried selling Palm assets for $1.2 billion

Hewlett-Packard has made some wild decisions regarding Palm and webOS following the acquisition in 2010. HP bought Palm for $1.2 billion in April of last year, killed webOS hardware, and then reportedly tried to sell Palm and the dead operating system for $1.2 billion, VentureBeat said Wednesday. Among the companies approached by HP? Facebook. According to the report, HP tried to offload webOS to the social network but the company was “practically laughed out of the room” by Facebook executives. HP eventually cut its losses and announced that it would contribute webOS to the open source community. Then, earlier this month, HP stunned the industry again when it said new webOS hardware, including a possible new tablet, is in development.