Palm's webOS over-the-air firmware update process explained

For most Pre owners, updates to the operating system happen silently and with little drama -- just the way Palm and the average user likes it. For the more inquisitive of us, though, Palm is offering a detailed breakdown of how the updates get pushed down to the phone and under what circumstances. For starters, you've got to be on EV-DO or WiFi, because 1xRTT (in addition to being ridiculously slow) would block incoming calls when active. Furthermore, you've got to be rocking at least 30 percent of your battery juice. Unless you update manually, the phone will check all by itself every 7 days, and if it finds something, it'll grab it within 2 days during periods when you're not using your data connection (wouldn't want it ruining the user experience, after all). The download typically gets dropped into non-user accessible storage, but apparently, Palm has a contingency plan in place if an update is truly massive -- if that happens, it can steal some user storage with your permission. As we've mentioned, once you have the download, the phone requires that you install it within 7 days; if you don't, it'll auto-install the next chance it gets. Quite a process, isn't it?

Motorola's i856 iDEN slider takes a mind-bending journey through the FCC

Remember that Motorola i856 we told you about way back in March? It's now lost its FCC innocence, garnering external photos and a user's manual for our excited perusal. As phones go, it's nothing much to look at -- but this is iDEN we're talking about, where sliders and multimedia features are still awfully hard to come by . Indeed, the i856 has a dedicated music button right on its face, a far cry from the ultra-rugged workabout Nextels of yore. Probably not a fit for construction site types, but for your average Boost Mobile customer, this'll definitely be a win. No word on a release date or a full list of carrier partners just yet.