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?

Leaked Palm Treo 850 Specs: Hurray for Wi-Fi

Fresh off those leaked spy shots of Palm's Treo 850 is some more espionage in the form of meaty specs. This source is unproven (and the info comes from a "friend who works at Palm") so don't take these as hard rumors, yet. The big whoop is Wi-Fi for the first time, while the other stuff is more run o' the mill: HSDPA, 320x320 touchscreen, 2MP cam, microSD, 256MB onboard memory plus 32MB SDRAM, miniUSB and WinMo 6.1. The RAM spec conflicts with what BGR said, 100MB. Again, this source is not battle-tested, but here's hoping they're right about the Wi-Fi at least. [TamsPPC]

[Via: Gizmodo, The Gadget Blog ]
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PDAmill is giving away all of its PalmOS games for free

Over the last few years we've seen the Palm OS platform stagnate while Microsoft, Apple, and Symbian continue to develop their mobile operating systems. Oh sure, there will be a new version of the Palm operating system at some point, but at this point we're not sure there will be any manufacturers willing to run Palm software on their devices.

But here's one good reason to pull your old Palm PDA out of the junk drawer, or even pick up a used one on eBay: Game-maker PDAmill is offering its Palm OS games for free. All of them.

The game developer recently announced that they would stop developing for Palm. And while the company could have continued charging a small fee for some of its excellent video games, they instead decided to give them away.

The games included Arvale, an RPG, several games in the GameBox series which include classics like Solitaire, Mahjohng, Snakes, Blocks, and Cannons, and Snails, which is a turn-based action game similar to Worms.


[Via: Palm InfoCenter ]
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