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?

New iPhone Firmware Beta Has a 3G On/Off Switch: I Wish It Was Automatic

The iPhone's recently released firmware 2.0 Beta 5 has a 3G on off switch for users. Underneath, there's a warning that 3G browsing will kill your battery faster. While that's more proof of the upgraded hardware we already expect, what I find most interesting is the manual control. It's not too late to change it, but I was hoping that Apple would approach the 3G/2G power consumption and speed tradeoffs by having an automatic toggle for 2G and 3G: It could have a smart mode that would turn 3G off to save battery for background email downloading, weather checking and standby; and then turn it on for YouTube, maps, web browsing and iTunes music store downloading. Wouldn't that make a lot of sense? P.S. Apple, you can have this idea for free in trade for some copy and paste action in the next beta.
[Via: Gizmodo, The Gadget Blog ]
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