The other day, I noticed the PreCentral that someone has hacked the Palm Pre to shoot videos.  Well, it took me awhile to follow the directions but I finally got it working.

Beauty of open source, when you make something open source, you get all these hackers flocking to make free apps.  This video hack example proves how quickly the open source community can develop programs. (faster than Palm development team!)

The video right now does 320×240 pixel only and there’s no sound but I am finding that the video feature is a cool add-on until Palm developers make it part of their default apps.  And certainly, this video hack proves that video will be added on to the Pre in the near future.

Here’s step-by-step instructions for computer-dummies so you can enable this cool video feature.

1) Download video-cam-test.zip here.  (via PreCentral Forum)  Unzip it of course.

2) Download both WebOSDoctor(Sprint or Bell), download WebOSQuickInstall from PreCentral and put them in the same directory like this:

*NOTE: If you don’t have Java installed, you will need to install it, just goto Java.com to install.  If you can run WebOSQuickInstall.jar, you have Java installed so…

3) Click on WebOSQuickInstall.jar and it should automatically install any files needed. (for the first time)

4)  Then connect your Palm to your computer via a USB cable.

5) Then click on the “+” button on your WebOSQuickInstall program and select both ca.canucksoftware.videocam_0.1.1_all.ipk and com.canucksoftware.videorectest_1.0.0_all.ipk.

6) Now, click on “Install!” and it should install on your Palm Pre.

7) Reboot (Power OFF and ON) your Palm Pre.

You should see new app like this:  (Press IT!)

9) Hit the “ON” button on your Pre.

10) Hit “Start Rec” to start recording and “Stop Rec” to stop.

11) Now, this app doesn’t actually show you the video itself while its recording so you will simply have to shoot your Pre. (somewhere…)

12) To re-play your videos, you will need to transfer the MP4 files to your computer.

To do this, connect your Pre to your computer via USB cable and choose “USB Drive” option.

13) Browse your Palm on your computer and you should see MP4 files in the root directory such as “09_29_09_04_48_20.mp4″ which is basically timestamp for your videos.

14) Copy the MP4 videos over to your computer and either use SMPlayer to view the videos or upload to YouTube.

*NOTE – I found that the portable SMPlayer works the best, don’t use the install version, I haven’t got those to work.

Enjoy~

FULL VIDEO Step-by-Step directions on how to install the video hack on your Palm Pre for computer dummies:

Test videos I made:

My first video with Palm Pre in front of mirror:

My second using whiteboard:

My third while at Fishermen’s Wharf:

If you are a Palm Pre owner, chances are that you already downloaded the new version 1.2 for webOS. And maybe you encounter a small problem, a big problem, maybe one or many problems, or you were lucky and did not have any problems at all. One of those problems is the one on the image below, even if you only have 1, 2 or 3 cards open, the Pre will say that you have too many cards open.

Every update for any device normally has a few hiccups, so for us Pre users this new webOS update was no exception. Many Pre Owners in different forums are complaining about different things. Some users have noted that when they receive a new IM/SMS, the text is not there anymore, instead they only see the message icon and the user’s picture. Others have found that Exchange Activesync is also having problems with hosted exchange accounts like 1and1, 4smartphone, or mail2web.

Other problems are with certain Bluetooth devices, you have to re-add the device to fix this. Also gDial Pro is very slow,I had that problem, but now is gone. The Blubbles game was having problems for some users. One of the major issues is the Online Radio V1.0.1 program, which freezes the phone. And others, like me, had been having trouble connecting to the Palm Profile, although my issue is minor compared to others since I just can’t get my Pre to backup.