Mobile News and Mobile Info

No, that’s not a Blurrycam shot of a rumored Palm Pre follow-up with a rotating screen. It’s actually one of the more extreme cases of the Palm Pre “twisting” right out of its shell, which, as far as we can tell, still seems to be a fairly rare occurrence. This particular Pre belongs to one Royer, who was apparently able to get it replaced without too much hassle, but other folks are also reporting some slight screen wobble, and even a few cracks appearing here and there. Somewhat interestingly, Royer says that the Sprint repair center he went to said they’re not allowed to try to fix the Palm Pre, and are instead instructed to simply exchange it for a new one. So, has your Palm Pre learned any new moves it shouldn’t have? Let us know in comments.

It was a long time coming, but we’ve finally gotten our hands on the Palm Pre from Sprint! You know what that means… unboxing pics! Just in case you haven’t yet had your fill of Palm Pre box-shots and in-hand photos, take a gander at our unboxing gallery.

For the rock-dwellers out there, the Palm Pre is the first Palm smartphone to run Palm’s all-new WebOS operating system. The finger-friendly WebOS features true multi-tasking support and works well with the capacitance (non-squishy) touchscreen on the Palm Pre. Swipe-gestures are used to navigate around the device, while a slide-out physical QWERTY keyboard handles all your text input needs. The 3-megapixel auto-focus camera (with flash) and 8GB of on-board storage sweeten the deal even more.

Web surfing is pretty enjoyable, but definitely slower than the iPhone 3GS. Multi-touch integration is already proving to be handy. And, the tic-tac-sized keys are getting easier to use (although, still a bit awkward). The Touchstone wireless charging dock is awesome. It’s not exactly going to free you of having to use USB cables, but it’s a darn good first step in the right direction!

Syncing with iTunes is pretty easy (I haven’t updated my iTunes yet – that would kill the Pre sync capability. Missing Sync (available in the App Catalog) makes the rest of my info-syncing convenient.

The grass. It’s always greener on the other side of that proverbial fence. Take, for example, the hundreds of thousands of Palm Pre owners in the US. A new study from Strategy Analytics indicates that a good portion of Palm Pre users would like to see a virtual, on-screen keyboard on their Palm Pre. The slide-out QWERTY keyboard might be great for tapping out extended emails or editing documents and whatnot. But, for quick text entry tasks (like entering an airline’s 2-character code), it can be a little troublesome having to fully slide-out the keyboard.

The green grass that is the Palm Pre’s QWERTY keyboard is starting to lose its appeal. The greener grass, it would seem, is a physical keyboard paired with a virtual keyboard. Even those Palm Pre owners that chose the Pre for its keyboard long for a convenient virtual keyboard.

Strategy Analytics’ Senior Analyst Paul Brown says that, although “users liked having a physical QWERTY keyboard, they did not want to have to slide it out every time they wanted to type something.”

So, the big question here is whether or not Palm will build a virtual on-screen keyboard into a future WebOS update. Google answered customer pleas for an on-screen keyboard on the Android OS with the Android 1.5 “Cupcake” update, Palm could very well do the same. How long that will take is anyone’s guess.

NFL fans, get ready for some live NFL action on the Palm Pre! Latest news via a Sprint support page seems to detail that NFL Mobile Live will come to the Pre on August 1st as an OTA update. Also, other rumblings have this new app coming as a part of webOS 1.1… that would make sense, as I’ve heard the NFL app could be coming pre-loaded on all new Palm Pre devices starting August 1st as well.

The details will sort themselves out shortly, one thing is for certain… NFL Mobile Live is coming to the Pre one way or another. Get ready for live audio, live video (of certain games), live NFL Network video, and a whole lot more.

There it is, the first official press shot (see that HSDPA icon?) of the GSM version of the Palm Pre. The “more information” link isn’t working at the moment but it’s clear that Movistar has exclusive rights to the Pre in Spain. Of course, Movistar, like O2 in the UK, is owned by Telefonic which so far seems to have clinched exclusivity throughout Europe. We’re still waiting for all this to get officially official sometime this week, if not today.

We heard that the GSM Pre was set for a UK launch, and now it sounds like things are coming together: The Guardian says the Palm’s baby will launch on O2. That makes perfect sense, O2 owner Telefonica reportedly  back in March. Of course, this is all yet to be official, but with floating around out there and an announcement expected next week, we’re guessing we don’t have too much longer to wait.

Do you understand your smartphone… really understand it? Know its moods, its wants, its desires? A survey hosted by shows that half of people don’t, with 47 percent saying the things confuse the heck out of them, while 60 percent of those aged 35 – 49 feel that people with smartphones spend too much time working and not enough time. Those feelings of confusion and ire doesn’t stop a “sizable segment” of the rest of the 1,000 people surveyed from wanting a handset with brains, with most desiring access to the sort of apps you can’t get on dumbphones, and 14 percent of women saying that playing games was “very important” — only nine percent of men said the same. Sadly, there was no figure indicating how many people enjoy paying too much for text messages and signing their lives away on lengthy contracts.