Palm Pre Basics - #3 - An introduction to Palm Pre's webOS

Butterscotch Tutorial Palm Pre Basics -- part three of twelve: An introduction to WebOS. Jay Goldman: I'm Jay Goldman, host of Mr. Mobile. Today, we're going to take a look at the some of the software that runs on Palm's new Smartphone, the Pre. The Pre runs WebOS a Linux based operating systems for Smartphones that will be appearing on some feature devices from Palm in addition to the Pre. It's taken them a couple of years to get it ready for primetime but they have done a really fantastic at producing a very good looking and very easy to use Smartphone operating system that supports multi-touch screens and JSTORS. One of its advantages over things like the iPhone is the ability to do multitasking or to run multiple applications at the same time. Clicking on the ball at the bottom of the screen takes you into card view, where you can see all of the applications that are running and jump into any of them by topic. If you'd like to quit an application, you just swipe it out the top of the screen and it will close and the rest will come together to takes it place. It includes a pretty decent browser built on WebKit, so it's very similar browsing experience to something like the iPhone. And you can do things like double tap and use adjustors to zoom in and you can also adjustors in the adjustor bar on the bottom of the screen to switch back and forth between pages. It includes a wave for doing quick launching which you access by putting your finger on the adjuster bar and swiping up, giving access to the foremost commonly used applications and a launcher for the access to the rest. The launcher is configurable before the bar along the bottom so that when you use the way if you can access the applications you want to access to most importantly. The phone includes accelerometer support for turning sideways which is accessible in all applications like the web browser, for giving you access to a wider screen. Other hardware features on the phone like the GPS and camera are available to the other application as well, so you get an experience not unlike using an iPhone with full apps. One of the more interesting features included on the Palm and not seen on many other Smartphones is the notification area at the bottom of the screen. The small row of icons appears here at the moment this phone is showing that we have a new e-mail message and tapping on the icons opens the notification bar. Any of the items that appear here which can include things like the phone is charging or the battery is low, you've received new instant messages or SMS, you have a new e-mail, it can be tapped on to go directly into that application to that location. So in this case I can tap to go directly into mail and see the new message that's come in. Notifications are a great way to navigate through the phones without having to popup alerts all the time, and a much needed feature that's missing from some of the other Smartphones. Thanks for today's episode, take a look at the rest of the series for an in-depth look at some of the other applications. Butterscotch - Tasty Tech; Delicious Downloads. Butterscotch.com, a division of Tucows Corp. Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/