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Mar. 2, 2010

Yesterday, Verizon and Sprint released Palm's upgraded the 1.4 version of its Linux-based OS for the Palm Pre and the Pixi smartphones.

Featuring the much-anticipated video capture and editing functionality plus improved messaging features, WebOS 1.4 arrives just a few weeks after Palm announced lowered investment guidance due to disappointing smartphone sales.

Overall, Palm's new WebOS ver. 1.4 OS fills in a much-requested wish-list item by enabling video capture. The new version offers a video editing feature, as well as the ability to quickly upload videos to YouTube or Facebook, or send them via email or SMS.

The new video editor offers some basic but popular features, such as the ability to edit out the beginning or ending of a video clip. This comes in real handy according to some that have already tried it.

Palm's new WebOS version 1.4 follows the arrival of WebOS 1.3.5 in mid-December, which offered a variety of updates as well, some improvements and a few bug fixes to the Linux-based mobile OS, including improvements to App Catalog downloads.

Since then, the Palm Pre Plus and newly WiFi-enabled Palm Pixi Plus models arrived on Verizon Wireless.

Additionally, Palm also announced a WebOS plugin development kit and said that its WebOS developer program is now open to all mobile apps developers.

Overall, some enhancements have also been made to the Calendar, Phone, Messaging and Email apps, with an emphasis towards improving performance and simplifying common tasks. New features include the ability to dial from a calendar entry, as well as sort email by date, sender and subject.

The call log now offer more connection options that weren't there before, such as SMS, Palm says. In addition, short-cuts have been added for moving quickly, for example, from chat to phone-call modes and back to chat.

The Pre's notification LED now lights up and pulses to indicate notifications, even when the screen is turned off, Palm claims. At the same time, notification sounds can be customized to differentiate email on an account-by-account basis, other messaging and other calendar events as well.

On average, overall performance has been greatly improved as well throughout in both app loading and gesture response, Palm says.

The handset maker also added that some improvements to battery life have been made, helping to diminish one of the major drawbacks against WebOS and the Pre Smartphone.

Palm's new WebOS 1.4 OS enhancements are welcome news indeed for mobile apps developers and users concerned about the sustainability of both the WebOS platform itself, as well as the company behind it.

On Feb. 25, Palm said it now expects to post much lower than projected 2010 revenues for the third quarter of between $285 million and $310 million on a GAAP basis ($300 million to $320 million on a non-GAAP basis).

By comparison, wireless industry analysts had called for revenue of about $424 million in the quarter.

Total revenues for this year are now expected to drop well below the previously forecasted range of $1.6 billion to $1.8 billion, Palm noted.

Overall revenues have been lowered due to "much slower than expected consumer adoption of the company's products that has resulted in lower than expected order volumes from wireless carriers and the deferral of orders to future periods," Palm said in a news release last week.

Nevertheless, in just 7 months, Palm's WebOS grew from almost nothing to represent about 0.7 percent today of the worldwide smartphone market last year, according to a recent numbers estimate report by Gartner.

But according to several other sources, the Palm Pre Plus and Palm Pixi Plus have sold poorly on Verizon Wireless, where they started on Jan. 12.

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Source: The Mobile Giving Foundation.