Dear Palm: What I’d like in the next update
We know that webOS and the Palm Pre are 1.0 1.1 products, so we’re going to cut you some slack for now. But that slack is starting to run out, and looking at the competition there are some areas where I think you could improve the Pre to both catch up to and leap frog over iPhone and BlackBerry and Android. So here’s what I'd like to see in the way of software updates before that slack runs out and the real complaining starts.
My list is after the break, and it’s by no means comprehensive. Feel free to sound off in the comments if there’s something you think should be added in!
Oh, and Palm, this isn't an ultimatum or anything. It's a wishlist. Of stuff I want. So consider it a shopping list, and you're the grocery store. Some things we can do without, but others are staple items that we need to get through the week, and if you don't have it, we might have to go across town to the other grocery to get it. After a while, that can get kind of old and we might consider just going to the other store. We don't want to, as it's simply not as nice, but they have a lot of what we need.
webOS 1.1.0 breaks Google Maps integration with Universal Search (Updated: For some)
Google Maps will still work fine if you open it from the launcher, but that handy link in Universal Search is another matter. After this latest update we have a small problem: searching Google Maps through Universal Search loads an instance of the program with no controls and instead of your search result, it plops you down at your current GPS-triangulated location. Even better, tapping a contact’s address or mapping a calendar event location opens Google Maps, this time with controls, but again at your current location instead of your desired search (Update: this second bug is sporadic and I experienced it myself before the 1.1 update from time to time -- Dieter)
Palm, this blogger travels a lot for his real world job and has come to rely on the calendar-maps integration. Fix this.
Update: Alright, we're getting lots of reports both ways here. It seems that there was some oddness before 1.1 and there's some oddness after for some users, others only after, while still other users have no problems at all. It's possible that we could get resolution to this without a further software patch. Stay tuned.
Update 2: Turns out there was some coding server-side somewhere unrelated to webOS 1.1.0 that broke things. This blogger's Google Maps is working as designed now, hopefully the server-side changes have filtered down to everybody and brought goodness and joy to everybody's mapping worlds.
