Should Palm Have Re-Enabled iTunes Sync?
Our pal Rene Ritchie at sister-site The iPhone Blog has put up what he admits is "an editorial of the scathing variety" about the just-re-enabled iTunes sync functionality in webOS 1.1 and we have to admit, we think he may have a point here.
At issue: Palm playing chicken with Apple when it comes to something as important as syncing media seems like a recipe for a bad user experience. "Can I sync music to my Pre today?" ... "Dunno, let's see what the latest in the escalating war of software patches is." We'll let Ritchie tell it:
What’s so wrong about it? It doesn’t serve the webOS/Palm Pre user. Bottom line, no company should ever base a user experience on something they don’t own or license. Regardless of caveats like version numbers, Palm telling Pre users they can sync with iTunes when Palm can’t guarantee it will work going forward is irresponsible.
Truly, though, you need to go read the entire article - Ritchie makes a fairly strong argument about us users being hurt by this back and forth.
Sure, you're reading this blog so you 'get' what's going on here and are more likely than the average user to know what the present state of iTunes syncing is. But would we be better off with a sync experience we know Apple won't break? Should Palm create an in-between software app? Are the many 3rd party software solutions out there good enough?
webOS 1.1: Tons of Undocumented Features
We're currently tracking all the undocumented improvements to webOS 1.1 on the Palm Pre in this forum thread, (and here too), the stuff not covered in the changelog. Well, I'm here to say that there are plenty:
- Changed sound for notifications - You still can't change them yourself, but the new sound is much richer, if a little quieter
- Animated drop down menus - they look really slick and really change the experience. The Context menus also have some nice animation.
Additional photo upload options - you can now upload a photo to either Facebook or Photobucket(not new - thanks commenters!)- Lots of Photo app improvements. A more distinct bar between all photos and your albums in the photo app, plus they're calling the Screenshot album "Screen Captures." The preview thumbs also slide in from the right. Faster photo rendering. Overall the Photos app feels much more fully baked.
- Emailing Memos - The memo app now has a menu option to email a memo.
- A new font for the Browser - uses Palm's system font and, truly, it looks fantastic.
- Disabled the key combo in browser to open in a new card. Boo-urns.
- Javascript interpreter Performance upgrades - this will speed up virtually everything and is great news
- Sporadic reports of speed improvements both in the browser and system-wide, but it's always tough to know if these are real or just perceived
- Seems to have better Gmail handling - not failing when you tap on a notification for an email you'd already archived on the desktop
- A new icon for AIM
- more more more! If you find some, post in this thread and we'll update this list as they come in.
- More auto-complete / auto correct entries in the dictionary.
- With the slider open, the Center button now turns on the screen, where as before you had to hit a keyboard key or the power button.
- It's a little finicky, but you can double-tap to start text selection in editable fields (note, however, that cursor placement in the Memos app is buggy)
Although a lot of homebrewers are going to need to re-patch a lot of stuff (Check this thread for a list of homebrew busts), the homebrew tethering solution still appears to work. We're also tracking webOS 1.1 bugs in this thread.
Of course, the wish-list of stuff that wasn't added is still a mile long, but hey, we're at 1.1 less than 2 months after launch - this is tasty stuff, Palm. Keep 'em coming.
