Within the past few months we have seen the smartphone industry flourish with new handsets and competitors purchasing out one and other such as HP and Palm. Least to say, it defiantly hasn’t been an easy ride for the American company especially trying to compete against large competitors like Apple with their iOS4 with their large market hold.
The software market for all smartphones requires a lot more compared to what it was years ago. With phones becoming more sophisticated and processors reaching over 1GHz, the smartphone market is forever changing due to demand and users wanting to listen to music whilst social networking and other resource consuming applications.
The platform Palm use in their current smartphons called “webOS” was designed primarily on SME clients allowing a synergy between multiple social networking sites, outlook and other business applications. The synergy brought all contact information together allowing updates and pictures to be stored against contacts which was very seemless, it also updated itself in a contact view of previous updates.
Let’s start with what the basics 
Palm’s basic goal with the webOS was to create a mobile smartphone that seamlessly brings information together – lets face it Palm managed to pull that one off very well.
All Palm Phones already supports multi-tasking through a ‘cards’ mode within the home screen which mean that when the Palm Pre was released it definately had the upper hand to Apple. Cards Mode means that any application which is minimised will be cached into the background allowing a copy and paste between different documents or emails.
With a LED flash already incorporated into all of Palms recent phones, dark shaded areas are okay taking photos of. This again allows Palm to excel in that area in comparison to an iPhone 3GS/ iPhone 3G.
For SME and choosing the right smartphone to integrate with a calendar such as Microsoft Outlook is defiantly something I look for first when coming to purchase any new smartphone.
The webOS address book displays all the information available for each person in a contact profile from multiple different sources.
A single person’s entry could have, for instance, phone numbers from an Exchange Server, a street address from Google, and a picture from Facebook and all of this information would be displayed to the user together, without regard to where it came from.
A brief background
The arrival of the Palm Pre in October 30th 2009, Palm subsequently released their Palm Pre+ and Palm Pixi which ironed out the issues the Pre initially had such as failing to boot up and a few software issues.
However Palm can be commended for their facility of allowing users to backup and restore their Palm phones over the air. Not only allowing backing up and restoring of data, Palm enabling firmware to be updated through ‘Update’ feature over the air. This allows the firmware, applications and more on the phone to be updated.
For business
With email facility and a document viewer installed into webOS, Palm enables all of the users to download and view attachments on an emails. With the App World and being able to download WhatsApp, it enables smartphones to speak to one and other absolutely free of charge under a data plan.
webOS also has support for Exchange ActiveSync built into it, allowing emails, calendars, address books, etc. to be synchronized over the air.
What does webOS 1.4 have
webOS 1.4 brought many new features including-
- A camcorder mode for the Palm Pre
- Once a video is shot, you can now crop it
- Emails can now be sorted by sender or subject (like the search function within the Blackberry and iPhones)
- Embedded numbers in web pages and emails can be short cut straight to a call
- Performance enhancements to aid the multi-tasking of cards
- Adobe Flash 10.1 through the App World but is only available for Pre devices not the Pixi
- Improve battery life
- A new LED messaging feature
