Early Adopters Reward – $50 App Credit from HP
Cringing at that $499 Touchpad purchase now that your friends are picking it up for $299 this weekend at Staples? HP has a little something to ease the your webOS pain.
HP announced yesterday on thier Palm Blog that early adopters of the Touchpad (purchased between July 1 and August 4) can expect a $50 credit for the webOS App Catalog. Watch your inbox for details sometime next week. This is on top of the $50 rebate that users who went for the 32 gig model will receive.
The credits are good through December 31, 2011. Thanks HP -- this is a nice touch! Plus, it is a win-win for the webOS eco-system. Users get to test out apps that maybe they would never have purchased. And webOS developers have a little more incentive to release some new apps to the marketplace to grab up some of this free app-credit cash.
Now, all we need are some great apps to spend our money on! Here's hoping for some document editing, remote login and a decent weather app. Oh, and maybe a Bible app with modern translations that can be used offline. We'd gladly pay for those apps -- free credits or not.
Lexicomp On-Hand Arrives on the TouchPad
Lexicomp On-Hand launched for the HP TouchPad today, saying that they offer "the most comprehensive medical application available to the healthcare market."
The app provides a comprehensive drug information database for medical professionals.
“Our webOS app for TouchPad provides clinicians a larger, tablet sized view for easily viewing our drug information resources and especially specific content areas like charts and special topics,” says Steven Kerscher, Lexicomp’s Vice President and General Manager. “The HP TouchPad also offers unique user interface features, such as multi-tasking and card stacking - which are not available on other platforms.”
[Source: PRweb]
Office WordPress App Released First on webOS & TouchPad!
How about an app that is available FIRST for webOS? Well, WordPress has released an administrative app designed for blog owners. They say it is designed to enable you to switch between creating, editing, and managing your blog content.
We've followed some blogs today that are whining that WordPress chose to release this new, beautiful (and useful) app for webOS. We're sure that WordPress saw a great opportunity to utilize the open architecture of webOS to release a compelling product just in time for today TouchPad launch.
It's just another great way to demonstrate that the TouchPad is to be USED, and not just played with. Great job WordPress!
As an aside, there is another great WordPress admin app already on the market called Poster. It is a wonderful tool for managing multiple WordPress blogs using your Palm Pre device. Check it out also!
[Source: WordPress]
GrooveShark App Now Only on WebOS? Wait…What?
Now that's not something you hear everyday -- A popular, high-profile app that is only available on the webOS platform. Well, that's now the case with GrooveShark, who has now been kicked off both iOS and the Android marketplace. WebOS is the lone holdout for this innovative, perhaps not-quite-legal, music-sharing application.
GrooveShark, which just got an slick HTML5 makeover on their website, is popular for allowing users to find, and instantly play, virtually any recorded song. Essentially, it is a cloud-based music sharing service that features 6 million tunes. Add a mobile device subscription for a few bucks monthly, and you have a virtually any song, artist or album you could possibly want to hear, right in the palm of your hand! And that's where the "grey" area exists, legally speaking. Music labels have pressured Google and Apple to pull GrooveShark from their app stores.
Google simply said of their decision, "We remove apps from Android Market that violate our policies."
Of course, Google also is dodging it's own legal troubles – congress is investigating their allowance of alleged software pirates to utilize google advertising. And, they are paving the way for a new Google Music service. But surely, those are totally unrelated stories!
So, for now, GrooveShark rocks on with webOS devices. Perhaps it is because webOS is too small a fish to go after for now? Regardless, at least we can brag about something, right?
[Source: CNet]
NewsRoom App Scales Back in Face of Financial Reality
Our favorite webOS RSS news reader app has scaled back its services due to financial reasons.
If you use NewsRoom (and you should), you love it because it has the best user interface and a suite of features that really make keeping up-to-date with your RSS feeds easy and fun.
However, one of its best features is its ability to "harvest" entire articles – not just the summary paragraph that most RSS viewers provide. They call it "content extraction." It accomplishes this feat by performing additional processing on their servers. And that, says NewsRoom developers, is starting to put them into a financial bind.
NewsRoom is developed by Trilett (http://www.trileet.com/)
On Wednesday, NewsRoom reported, "Our overhead to run the service actually exceeded the monthly sales last month. So, in effect, we are now paying to build and maintain NewsRoom."
To keep the service open for their Android and webOS users, NewsRoom has had to scale back the "content harvesting" features so that they now only harvest full articles on only the most popular feeds amongst their users.
For example, if you subscribe to the popular CNN feed, then you'll still see the full article. If you are one of the five people who subscribe to the weboscenter.com feed, you'll probably only see a summary paragraph (we'll get there one day!).
It's another reality that app developers must face. How will they maintain profitability on a product that continues to have server and maintenance expenses after the one-time $4.99 purchase price?
We wish the developers the best because it IS the best rss reader on the market. Truth be told, it is the most used app on my webOS Palm Pre Plus!
[Source: NewsRoom's On-App RSS Feed]
Skype Service Rolls Out for Verizon Pre2 Owners
Skype for Palm Pre2
Our little Pre2 received some love this week. On Friday, Skype announced that it's service was now available on Palm Pre2 for Verizon subscribers. The Pre2 now joins (finally!) the ranks of iPhone and Android devices that are able to use Skype's calling and messaging services.
From the Skype blog:
With Skype mobile built in, you can make free calls to friends and family on Skype, great value calls to landlines and mobile phones overseas, and send IMs to people on Skype anywhere in the world.
Will we see any Skype action for legacy webOS devices (i.e. the ones that most Palm users have right now)? We wouldn't count on it. But it's nice to know that moving forward, Skype will be a viable app.