The hotly anticipated Palm Pre, to be released June 6th, may be still be more than a couple weeks off, but that hasn't stopped Palm from taking an early victory lap. Sprint's sponsorship of NASCAR put the webOS handset in the driver's seat earlier this week, reports Precentral, with a huge Pre sitting on top of Tony Stewart's car in victory lane. And although the Pre was plastic, an overjoyed Stewart sure wasn't. The jumbo screens were also fashioned to look like giant Pre phones, the stage complete with cheering fans, eager reporters and fireworks.
If this doesn't draw lots of attention to Palm's new smartphone, I'm not sure what will. Other recent marketing from Sprint came in the form of podcasts and TV commercials.
Also spotted was an IndyCar (above right, driven by Raphael Matos) sponsored by Palm, although the Pre logo slapped onto the engine hump was more low-key than the Nascar blowout. For more on Sprint's Nascar partnership, head over to the official site.
webOS continues to leave positive impressions
"Palm Pre is pretty impressive", states Laura Sydell of NPR (National Public Radio). Recently, NPR visited Palm headquarters and Sydell walked away impressed with the new webOS platform. "The key to the success of this device will be the software...being able to keep three windows open simultaneously is a really nice feature", she states in regards to the much-touted multitasking capabilities of webOS. However, "as pretty as the Pre happens to be it isn't likely to have the sex appeal of the iPhone.".
"We think Palm Pre is an absolutely spectacular device", states Joe Kennedy, CEO of Pandora when asked about where the device ranks among smartphones. "We were not very impressed with the first Android phone", he notes during an interview, and considers the Palm Pre a "very strong" device. He also implies during his talk that the Pre ranks right along with the iPhone and Blackberry devices. Pandora is one of the Palm Pre launch partners.
"(has) the 'holy ****, that's cool' factor of the iPhone" reads an article in the June issue of Maxim. For the guys out there, Precentral found that the latest issue devotes an entire page to the new webOS device, right alongside the usual beautiful women, including Moon Bloodgood, Megan Fox, and Katie Cassidy. And they were blown away by webOS; "It's OS seamlessly merges all your digital calendars and contacts, personal and corporate exchange e-mail, even Facebook...and has the ability to run more than one application at a time. Man, the future is awesome."
Earlier today, we reported on an official June 6 release date for the Pre. In addition to finally confirming a release date (previously rumored to be the weekend of June 5th), Sprint also disclosed pricing and availability details. As previously stated, the official price will be $199 on a two-year service agreement (on either an Everything or Business Essentials data plan). Also, because it's after a $100 mail-in rebate, you will need to pony up more up front.
The Pre will be available in Sprint stores, Best Buy, Radio Shack, select Wal-Mart stores and online. Dan Hesse , CEO of Sprint, had this to say about the fancy new webOS handset:
“The argument that you need one phone for work and another phone for play, or that you have to make compromises between business and lifestyle productivity, is over...with Pre, compromises of the past are history.”
Sprint is definitely not taking the launch lightly, and in addition to providing a training unit to each store advocate to brush up on webOS, retail stores will be closing early at 4:00pm on Friday, June 5th, reports Boy Genius. Once all the fancy displays, demo units and other goodies have been prepared, stores will open early at 8:00am the next day to dish out the Pre phones. More info after the break.
Announced early this morning on the official Palm blog -
Sprint has announced today that the Palm Pre will be available on June 6. Sprint announced that it will be available nationwide in Sprint stores, as well as at Best Buy, Radio Shack, and select Wal-Mart stores. The webOS-based phone will retail for $199.99 (after rebate and service agreement).
If you read the small print at the bottom of the announcement, an unlimited data plan will be required for use with the phone, as many people suspected. It doesn't seem as though Sprint has updated their current data plans or developed new ones exclusively for the Pre. The Pre section of the Sprint site hasn't been updated with any new information as of 10AM (EST) this morning.
So do you think it was an accident or convenient coincidence that it is being released on D-Day?
Viewers allow you to embed rich media objects within scenes. The viewer widgets included with Mojo version 1 include webView, imageView, video and audio. The latter two are based on the HTML5 spec for including video and audio objects in a webpage.
WebView
Displays a "contained web object" (like a web page) in a scene. This can be used to render local markup or an external URL.
Similar to WebView, the ImageView widget displays a full-screen image with support for zooming, panning, and "flicking" left and right between additional images.
Audio and Video
These objects are based on HTML5 media extensions. These objects should be used when you want to maintain your application's context or play content directly within your scene.
Audio and Video objects cannot be set up directly through HTML tags in your scene file; they must be set up through JavaScript in the assistant's setup method. You must then set the source and set up event handlers before you can play the media.
The video object requires coordination of the video sink through helper functions freezeVideo and activateVideo. When the application is not in the foreground, it must release the video sink so that the active application can use it to display video, if necessary.
Media objects support both file-based and streaming sources.
And with that, we've completed our tour of Mojo's widgets! Tomorrow we'll start on an entirely new topic, Data, with a look at using cookies for local storage.
This is one of many daily development-related webOS articles. Grab the RSS feed to stay in the know!
A filterList widget is used to provide a list that is navigated with a search field; particularly one in which the list is filter in real-time as the user types characters into the search field. It displays a variable length list of objects that are built by a special callback function. This was the original interaction found on Google's homepage that launched the popularity of Ajax.
The widget is composed of a text field above a list, where the list generated by running the contents of the text field through an application-specific callback function against some off-screen data source.
The text field is hidden until key input is received. On the first keystroke, and every subsequent keystroke, the framework calls the function specified by filterFunction.
Looks like webOS training has taken the next big step for Sprint employees, and a rumored June 7th release date is seeming that much closer. Several pics were apparently taken from the back of Sprint retail stores, reports Gizmodo. Another article by PreCentral provides an additional in-store photo, and reports that the device is designated for a Palm Pre Advocate, the person training to be the expert for each respective location.
IntoMobile adds that these demo units are "under strict lockdown" and come packaged in Palm Pre retail boxes, as we've seen earlier in unboxing pics and video. As such, the employees' faces have since been blurred out (after the leak, unfortunately) in an effort to protect their identities.
It's been less than a week since Chapter 6 was released, and now Chapter 7, Application Services, is out to satisfy your webOS development needs. Below is a short summary of what to expect from the latest chapter:
"Services extend the framework with access to the core applications, hardware enabled features and cloud services. In this chapter, the application services were described, including all Core applications, the Synergy applications and the Media players. Application services are mostly accessed through the Application Manager, a general command and resource handling service. System and Cloud services will be covered in the next chapter.
The service architecture is accessed through Mojo.Service.Request(), which accepts a service name and a method name to route the request; service requests are always asynchronous operations."
Topics covered:
Using Services
Core Application Services
Palm Synergy Services
Viewers & Players
Other Applications
Visit the official site for more info, or to purchase the book and keep up with the latest chapters. Thanks to shutton in the forums for the heads up!
Pickers are designed to help simplify and standardize the interface for certain types of user input. Mojo includes pickers for entering dates, times, numbers, and selecting files. The first three are "conventional" widgets, while the file picker is actually an application "wrapped with a framework interface".
Date picker
x-mojo-element="DatePicker"
Allows selection of month, day, and year values.
The model for the date picker widget includes a single property, named date by default, which should be assigned a JavaScript Date object. You can then use the standard JavaScript functions Get Month(), Get Date() or Get Year() to extract the input value.
Time Picker
x-mojo-element="TimePicker"
Similar to the date picker, but includes an optional attributes property minuteInterval, which confines the allowable minute values to the increment specified (e.g. 5 minutes).
12 or 24 hour format is automatically displayed based on the user's device preferences or locale. The JavaScript functions GetHours(), GetMinutes() and GetSeconds() can be used to extract information from the time picker's model object.
At time of writing, Palm has not yet provided an example of the attributes for the date or time picker widgets.
Looks like Sprint and Palm are hitting up all the angles in their marketing campaign for Palm's new webOS handset. So it was only a matter of time before ads came to your mailbox (rather than your inbox). After all, not everyone's mom and grandpa will check their spam folder in case any of Sprint's e-mails ended up in there.
In addition, a new Palm Pre unboxing video has surfaced, apparently flying under the radar until the recent leaked unboxing photos got people looking for more. Although we're unsure if this is the final box you will get (the video was filmed in January), the good news is that it actually contains a real, working Pre.
It's been less than a week since 
