It has been a little over 8 months since the Palm Pre was released to the public, and its just this week that Palm has finally released a Video Recorder as part of the operating system upgrade for webOS 1.4.

My initial tests with the video recorder generated video in .mpg4 that looks pretty good on the phone itself, a 60 second video takes up just under 40 megabytes of space on the phones memory.

It comes setup with a YouTube and Facebook video uploader, but neither one of them worked the first 3 days, I used the video recorder. 

But finally today, I was able to upload one of those videos successfully to YouTube so maybe the bugs are getting chased out of the new system.

So from my perspective, I am a mobile video blogger once again! I haven’t had this capability on a smart phone in almost 2 years since my Treo 700P on Verizon died and was replaced under warranty for the 5th time and I switched to a non-smart phone so I could actually make and receive phone calls.

You can also email videos with the Palm Pre but for some reason you are capped at sending videos of no more than 17 seconds (about 10 megabytes), which is very different from the Treo, which allowed you to send and attachment as large as the receiving email system would allow.

The webOS 1.4 update has a few other changes.  The buttons look ‘cooler’ and when you launch any given application, a slightly smaller than full screen image of the application shows up immediately on the screen as if your Pre is doing something, but unfortunately, the actual launch of almost all applications from the point of pushing the button to the point of actually being able to do something with the application seems to be a couple seconds slower.  (Score one for Form over Function!)

All in all, I’m still very happy with my Palm Pre.  Glad Palm finally decided to meet the minimum market standards for a smart phone by adding video.  I could never understand why Palm followed in Apple’s moronic foot steps and decided not to include video on the Pre (a year after Apple made the same mistake).  Regardless, I’m glad video recording is here now, and from my perspective the Palm Pre is now a fully functional smart phone.

Finally!  Palm is finally (almost) going to turn on the video recording and editing capability in Palm Pre’s.  The Pre has been out for a year and they expect to send this out in an over the air update in February.  Sure you might ask why the delay until February.  Well ask away, it was silly to wait this long, no point in expecting rationality at this late stage. 

Palm will be pushing out and over-the-air update to all webOS devices (Pre and Pixi) that will enable video recording and editing without the need to purchase additional hardware. This is a feature that has been sorely lacking on webOS.

The recording feature works nearly identically to that of the iPhone’s on-device video editing tool. It lets users crop a video and reduce the size of the clip. Users can then upload to sites such as YouTube, Facebook, and MySpace with a single tap. Uploads will occur the background. Once uploaded, webOS will alert the user and give then the opportunity to send SMS links or MMS messages to the video to their friends.

The update will be free and will be available in February.

Informationweek

Not Really?

There have been several major updates for the Palm Pre since it was launched last summer.  One update made the camera function a bit overly complicated, and another one fixed it.  In general that is rather representative of the 2 steps forward, steps back results that your typical user experiences with Palm Pre’s.  Completely absent still today is any video recording capability in the Palm Pre 1 year after it was announced at CES 2009, and over 6 months after it was launched in the US.  That’s rather extraordinary considering Palm has offered video recording capabilities in Palm devices for about 5 years or more, yet the Palm Pre designed to save the company doesn’t offer this basic standard functionality, following in the Apple iPhone tradition of releasing a very advanced phone with a very noticeable flaw (the same exact flaw no less).

So today, as I went to pick up my phone and make a call, I was call blocked with the news that an update was destined to be downloaded and installed on my phone.  Its been my experience that whenever one of these bad boys is coming down the pipe, NOTHING really works until you bring it in.

So I proceeded to download the update, which I later learned was about 13 mb in size.  I brought it in while at home, where my Sprint network bars on my Pre fluctuate from 0 – 3, even though my wife’s Sprint phone consistently shows 2-4 (not a Palm).  Maybe someone is curving up the bars on her phone, or maybe my Pre gets crappy reception, I don’t know.  I tend to think its partly the update from 1.3.4 and partly the Sprint network, which does not seem to broadcast at a steady strength despite the fact that we are just a few miles from the 4g rollout in Charlotte.

It took about 25 minutes to download, then I got the opportunity to actually ‘install’ it.  That took another 30 minutes.  Ironically, I was helping my wife pull in about 35 updates and one Office Service pack at the same time.  Crazily, the updates and the service pack downloaded faster!

Even though my wifi was turned on on my Pre, it didn’t help speed things up either.

OK, so complaining about the lack of progress (or benchmark maintenance), here’s what you do get with this update.

webOS 1.3.5

Version information

Version: webOS 1.3.5

Release date: 28 December 2009

New applications

NONE

Feature changes to existing applications

App Catalog

• App Catalog significantly improves the application download experience.
• A user can now download multiple applications simultaneously.
• Downloads continue in the background if the user moves away from the download screen.
• A user can manually pause, resume, and cancel downloads.
• A user can also download all available updates for the user’s downloaded applications with a single tap.
• App Catalog automatically resumes downloads in cases where a download was paused because it was interrupted—for example, if a user moves out of network coverage and then moves back into coverage.
• Users can now take advantage of the full storage capacity of the phone for downloading applications. This gives the user more control over how to allocate the phone’s storage space across applications, music, photos, and other media. Downloaded applications are now stored on the phone’s USB drive.
• App Catalog lists search results based on an improved search algorithm.
• Locations from which users can purchase paid apps from App Catalog now include U.S. territories.

Calendar

• In Day view, switching between days happens more quickly.

Date & Time

• When the user has network time zone enabled, a city and country are no longer displayed.

Device Info

• A user can perform a full erase by pressing and holding Sym + the orange/Option key + power for 10 seconds.

Email

• A user can now edit forwarded text for all email account types.
• When the user sets up more than one Yahoo! email account, the account names displayed in Account List view include the associated email address so that the user can distinguish them.
• If an account mailbox is too full to send messages, after the user frees up space in the mailbox on the server, the user can send the messages successfully.
• The default email signature no longer includes the macron over the “e” in “Pre,” so that the product name shows correctly on a recipient’s phone.

Messaging

• If a user deletes a conversation with a contact, new conversations with that contact are now correctly displayed in Conversations view.

Screen & Lock

• When the screen is locked, the time displays in a new font.

Sprint Navigation

• A user can launch Sprint Navigation from an address in an open contact entry in Contacts.

System

• Users can now take advantage of the full storage capacity of the phone for downloading applications. This gives the user more control over how to allocate the phone’s storage space across applications, music, photos, and other media. Downloaded applications are now stored on the phone’s USB drive.
• This update improves battery life in areas of poor wireless network coverage.
• If the user is working in an application that supports landscape mode (such as Web or Videos), notifications now appear at the bottom of the landscape screen.
• After a user signs in to an existing Palm profile, applications the user installed from App Catalog are restored in the background. The user can use other features of the phone while the apps are being restored.
• Swiping to delete a list item that contains a link no longer causes the link to open in the web browser.

Updates

• After taking the 1.3.5 update, users can download future updates over a 2G (1xRTT , GPRS , EDGE ) data connection by opening Updates and tapping Download Now.

Web

• The web browser now supports the display of animated GIFs.
• Audio files with a .3g2 extension play correctly as audio files, not video files.

Security

This release includes a security fix to the dev portal. Credit to Kris Siegal for reporting the issue. Individuals interested in contacting Palm to report suspected security issues can find more information at palm.com/security.

source http://www.precentral.net/webos-135-now-available-download