The unannounced and never-released TouchPad Go, HP’s 7-inch webOS tablet. Going smaller doesn’t mean you have to compromise.

Inside this review…

First, a bit of background

When HP pulled the plug on webOS hardware development, there were a number of products coming down the pike, including the HP Pre3, TouchPad 4G, and the unannounced Bluetooth audio Touchstone dock. Also in the works was the HP TouchPad Go, a seven-inch webOS tablet. The Go was slated for a launch in fall 2011, though for obvious reasons that never came to pass. Instead, all of HP’s webOS hardware work was cancelled and the numerous TouchPad Go prototypes were sent to be destroyed. From the various hands-on photos we’ve seen over the past few months, it’s clear that at least a few Go tablets escaped that undignified fate, though exactly how many remain is a mystery.

For a few days we had one of these rarified tablets in our hands. The TouchPad Go will not be the saving grace of webOS, and we doubt it could have been. It’s a fine tablet for what it is, but it would have had serious trouble competing with the likes of the Amazon Kindle, Nook Tablet, and Samsung Galaxy Tab 7 Plus.

It’s also worth noting that the Go we are reviewing here is a prototype device, and while it appears to be physically whole (mostly), the webOS software isn’t a final version of what would have shipped (or at least we hope it isn’t). So with those disclaimers out of the way, let’s dive in to the TouchPad Go.

Video Review

Hardware

The difference between a seven-inch tablet and a ten-inch tablet can be startling. You don’t really think about it, but it’s the almost equivalent to the difference between a full-size magazine and Reader’s Digest. For those accustomed to the original ten-inch TouchPad, upon first grasp it’s startling how small the Go is. In fact, it makes the older ten-inch model seem positively massive in comparison.

The TouchPad Go takes the design of the original TouchPad and cuts it down by nearly half. In fact, it’s almost as if HP lopped off the top half o the portrait-oriented TouchPad and made a smaller landscape Go out of what remained. In fact, HP has turned the controls a full ninety degrees, putting the center button and front-facing camera on the longer sides of the screen.

When held in landscape the power button and headphone jack are on the top of the top right corner, with the volume jack around down along the side of the same corner.The single pin-hole mic remains at the top and the micro USB port remains at the bottom below the center button. From the front, the Go looks merely like a squished TouchPad, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

You get your first sign of something being different when you look at the sides. The speakers are no longer carved out of a long side of the tablet (which is now the bottom edge) and there’s a seam running along the entire edge that separates the shiny plastic frame around the glass screen from a soft-touch matte finish back panel.

It’s here that the TouchPad Go makes its first marked improvement over the original TouchPad, swapping out the sealed fingerprint-magnet glossy black plastic back for a removable soft-touch panel.

Now located on the back, but still towards the bottom, are the stereo speakers.

Up in the top right corner is a new addition on the Go – a 5 megapixel rear-facing camera and LED flash.

There’s a small notch right below the Micro-USB port to pry the back panel off.

A set of nine clips holds the panel in place; it takes very little effort to pull the panel off, though as this is a prototype we can’t say if the production version would be different. For what it’s worth, the panel takes a reassuring amount of pressure to reattach and feels quite solid once in place. In fact, despite its removable nature we’d say that the TouchPad Go actually feels more solid than the single-piece original TouchPad.

Take off that panel and you’ll find the two exposed speakers, connection points for the Touchstone coil embedded in the back, a quasi-removable battery, and a SIM card slot.

We call it “quasi” removable because while you can reach out and touch it, you’re going to need a #00 Phillips screwdriver to remove the four screws to swap out the battery. Not exactly an on-the-go job, though presumably it would have made for easier repair work for technicians and the hacking crowd.

Between that battery and the screen is packed a full-size tablet’s worth of internals. The beating heart of the Go is a 1.5GHz dual-core Qualcomm APQ8060 processor – the same used in the white 64GB TouchPad and the unreleased TouchPad 4G. It’s accompanied by a full gigabyte of RAM, 16GB of storage, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and AT&T-compatible cellular radio, and a GPS chip.

Internals-wise, the Go we spent time with is practically the same tablet as the AT&T-bound TouchPad 4G.

All of this is packed into a 13 mm-thick body. That thickness matches the other TouchPad models and the original iPad, but falls short of the svelte dimensions of the competition. For comparison’s sake, the Apple iPad 2, Asus Transformer Prime, and Samsung Galaxy Tab (8.9 and 10.1) all clock in under 9 mm, while in the seven-inch crowd the Kindle Fire, Galaxy Tab 7 Plus, BlackBerry Playbook, and Nook Tablet measure less than 12 mm from front-to-back. That’s not to say that the TouchPad Go feels thick in the hand; the back is curved in a manner reminiscent of the larger ten-inch TouchPad (though with a larger flat portion in the center), so it doesn’t feel all that girthy. At least it doesn’t until you pick up another tablet, even the same-thickness standard TouchPad.

Display

As with every tablet ever, the front of the TouchPad Go is dominated by the screen. In this case it’s a seven-inch screen, but it takes an unusual turn here for this size bracket. Whereas most seven-inch tablets sport a 16:10 screen made for landscape use (typically with a 1024×600), the Go has a 4:3 ratio 1024×768 screen. The end result is a tablet that’s comfortable both in portrait or landscape mode.

The reason for the smaller 1024×768 screen vs. the wider-yet-shorter screen is a simple one – 1024×768 matches the pixel dimensions of the screen on the ten-inch TouchPad. By having the same screen size, at least as far as the processor and graphics chip are concerned, HP was able to make the Go fully compatible with every one of the thousands of already-available TouchPad apps. Unlike with the different-screened Pixi/Veer and Pre3 where there had to be different versions or coding of apps for the different resolution screens, the fact that the Go has the same pixel count as the big brother TouchPad means developers wouldn’t have to make any changes to their apps if they didn’t want to.

By packing that many pixels into the smaller seven-inch space, HP managed to up the pixel density from 132ppi on the original TouchPad to 184ppi on the Go. As far as pixel density is concerned, the Go actually has a higher-density screen than any tablet available, regardless of platform. The result is that the pixels almost, but not entirely, disappear at typical holding distance (right around 14-18 inches from the eyes).

Color reproduction on the display is plenty accurate, with excellent saturation and contrast. The Go’s panel isn’t the brightest on the market, nor does it offer the blackest blacks. But it’s a competent display nonetheless, with negligible brightening when viewed from extreme angles. Brightness-wise the Go actually was a bit disappointing, with its top brightness matching right around 60% on an original TouchPad. That’s not to say that the Go isn’t bright enough for day-to-day use, because it is, so long as you aren’t planning to use it in direct sunlight.

Cameras

Every iteration of the ten-inch TouchPad came with one camera: a seriously disappointing 1.3 megapixel noisy mess of a sensor mounted front-and-center over the screen (in portrait orientation). The TouchPad Go carries over that same sensor, slapping it over a long side of the screen, and it’s still just as disappointing. It’s good for marginally-acceptable video chat, crappy candid shots, and not much else.

The TouchPad Go is the first webOS tablet to pack a rear-facing camera. This model has 5 megapixel sensor with an LED flash slapped onto the back. The flash is surprisingly bright, but if we’ve learned anything from reading the reviews of the tablets coming out running iOS and Android, tablet cameras are almost universally garbage. The TouchPad Go’s camera is no exception. It lacks autofocus and while it snaps pictures quickly, they’re generally dim, dull, and blurred.

(images will open full size)

We never would have been one to say that a tablet camera makes much sense except for the “best camera is the one you have on you” mantra, but in the more compact seven-inch form factor it actually kind of works. At least in theory we could see how it might work. A seven-inch screen is pretty mammoth for a camera, even larger than all but the most insane of DSLRs. But it’s also about the size of most print-outs and a fairly comfortable and stable size for holding up for extended periods.

Only problem is that it takes exceptionally unremarkable photos. With a 13 mm-thick body we find it hard to fathom that HP could not fit a higher megapixel sensor, or at least one with autofocus and better quality into the Go. There’s also the problem of the camera software, which is inexplicably oriented with the controls along the bottom of the screen in landscape. The buttons rotate in place as you turn the tablet, but putting them on the bottom makes the shutter button a stretch given the most likely holding position: one hand on either side with thumbs over the sides of the screen. The controls are in the right spot (the side) if you switch into portrait mode, but by nature of human perception we tend to take most photos in landscape (with two eyes we see in landscape).

As the TouchPad Go is the first webOS tablet with two cameras, it’s also the first with the ability to switch between the front and back cameras in the photos app. Switching is accomplished by hitting the circular arrows button right next to the camcorder button. At least in theory that’s how it’s done. In our testing it’s something we only managed to get the Go to do twice – all other times it locked up the camera app and eventually crashed the tablet. Given the very un-webOS not-looking-like-a-button button used to switch, we’re guessing this is still a function HP was working on when the plug was pulled. Presumably they’d either get the kinks worked out (and the button looking better) before shipping.

Performance

Earlier we mentioned that the TouchPad Go packs a 1.5GHz processor and 1GB of RAM. That’s still technically fairly high-end for a tablet (though fast approaching high middle-range with introduction of the quad-core Tegra3 chipset), and as with the White 64GB TouchPad, the performance improvement over the original TouchPad isn’t all that obvious. It’s also difficult to fairly judge performance on the Go, as it’s running a version of webOS that’s both new (3.0.5 (more on that later)) and clearly not yet finished (see: camera rotation).

Regardless, what we’ve seen with the Go is that its performance is at least on par with currently available hardware. As it ought be, considering it has the same set of chips and only modestly different software. With the full gigabyte of RAM, the Go was unsurprisingly a capable multitasking machine, easily loading multiple apps, including very heavy PDK apps.

There are still some points worth noting on the performance downside. The Go occasionally would hiccup the video when asked to play a high definition clip, though audio would continue unabated. It also struggled when asked to play any Flash video, even though it was buffering plenty quickly from our high-speed cable connection. These aren’t issues we’ve often noticed with our older TouchPads (even the lesser 1.2GHz original TouchPad), so we’ll have to chalk it up to optimizations still pending with the build of webOS 3.0.5 on this tablet.

Thanks to the practically identical internals and pixel dimensions, the Go is capable of running any app available for the ten-inch TouchPads. This extends from upsized Mojo apps, Enyo apps as complex as Glimpse or Graphite, and full-screen PDK games like Asphalt 6 and Angry Birds HD. In our testing every app performed flawlessly, though we definitely had to dial down the accelerometer control sensitivity in Asphalt 6.

Audio

Like its bigger brother TouchPads, the TouchPad Go also includes Beats Audio. And like the bigger TouchPads, the speakers are actually pretty decent. They’re not going to power a party, but for music in a hotel room or office it’ll do fine. The speakers are a bit smaller than on the bigger TouchPads and as such don’t pack quite as much bass oomph. The speaker placement itself is a bit problematic – the speakers are directed into the back panel, with sound routed to the outside world via a narrow channel that leads to the narrow speaker grilles on the back.

The result is sound that is noticeably muffled. It’s not all that obvious when listening from the TouchPad Go on its own, in fact the vibration felt through the back panel is deceiving as to the quality of sound you’re getting. But compared to a regular TouchPad the audio quality is clearly lesser. Until you pop off the back and suddenly everything’s clear as it ought be.

Unfortunately the design of the TouchPad’s case left HP’s engineers with few options for the speakers. Placing the grille openings over the top of the actual speakers (as done with the smartphones) would have meant they’d be straddling the border between the flat part of the back and the start of the curve, meaning audio coming out would almost certainly be muffled if the Go were placed back-down on a flat surface. They couldn’t place the speakers themselves much closer to the edge due to the diminishing depth thanks to the sloping edge. The speakers themselves are actually tilted slightly towards the edge to help with the sound transmission and the direction channels are rimed with foam to keep the sound headed to the grilles instead of leaking out into the rest of the back. Perhaps they could have made the channels deeper, but we wouldn’t be surprised if there were chips of some sort crammed into that space. The ten-inch TouchPad is crowded enough as it is – space has to be at a premium in this smaller version.

Audio coming out of the headphone jack was as you would expect, which is to say beefed up by Beats. There was nary a hint of static and little noticeable distortion. It’s worth noting that for all of the isolated audio circuitry and static-free connection points, the majority of what makes the Beats magic is some fancy EQ work. It’s great for listening to any bass heavy music (or music you want to be bass heavy), so pretty much anything popular after 1970, but even then it distorts the music from its “true” self. The audio distributed via MP3 or pulled off a CD is how it’s intended to be heard, so long as you have a quality set of speakers or headphones to back it up. Beats compensates for not having a quality set of speakers or headphones – if you do have such, we’d recommend turning off Beats on the TouchPad before plugging in so you can hear your music the way it was meant to be heard.

webOS 3.0.5

The TouchPad Go we tested came with webOS 3.0.5, build 3883. It’s hard to say how close that is to final, but even so there are a few small visual changes worth noting apart from the bug fixes we already know about. When you’re in the multitasking card view, cards off to either side of the screen are dimmed slightly, placing more focus on the center card – it’s a subtle effect, but it makes sense once you notice it.

The sender/date header in Email has been reworked to include the sender’s image if they’re a contact of yours.

Also, the week view in Calendar has lost the darker color bar on the left side of events, opening up a dozen or so pixels for additional even information.

In our testing we also noticed two welcome changes. The first is that video played from on-device rotates in any direction, portrait or landscape. So if you’ve got something that was awkwardly filmed in portrait view you can finally view it fullscreen. Fullscreen Flash video, however, does not rotate. The second is that the browser has gained scrollbars. They appear on when you’re scrolling the page and disappear once the page has stopped, almost exactly replicating the behavior and appearance of the scrollbars in Safari on iOS. We haven’t noticed these scrollbars in any other built-in app.

The Go we tested also included an AT&T Communication Manager app for monitoring your data usage from on-device. We were unable to get service working on the device to test the app (and the cellular connection in general), but it’s nice to know that AT&T was willing to give TouchPad Go owners (and presumably the bigger TouchPad 4G) the ability to track their data usage from on-device.

Apart from these relatively minor changes, webOS 3.0.5 isn’t that different from webOS 3.0.4 currently on TouchPads. No changes have been made to accommodate the Go’s smaller screen, nor did any have to be made to accommodate other hardware differences (of which there are few).

Seven inches

The biggest difference between the TouchPad Go and the original TouchPad is the size. We know, “duh,” but that’s really what it comes down to. The removable back, rear camera, and SIM slot are mere add-ons; they don’t fundamentally alter the experience of using the tablet the way the size does. While the seven-inch tablet loses just 23% when measured diagonally, in total you’re losing 48% the screen space. In fact, the TouchPad Go’s screen’s longest side is a tad shorter than the short side of the bigger TouchPad’s screen.

The ten-inch TouchPad was designed around a portrait orientation and for most applications is comfortable and perfectly usable as such. The Go, however, is designed around landscape, with the front-facing camera and center button aligned along the long sides. Even though it has the same 4:3 aspect ratio of the ten-inch tablet, the Go just feels more natural in landscape.

The natural inclination of a TouchPad owner is to rotate from portrait mode to the left for landscape, that way the speakers are facing you and the volume buttons at the top. In its natural landscape orientation, the Go has its speakers already facing you, and a rotation to the right (to get into standard portrait) puts the volume rocker at the bottom of the tablet. It’s very easily triggered here if you’re the type to lean back and rest the tablet on your stomach to read. If you’re going to hold the Go off your body, then the natural position of both hands in portrait mode puts the power button under your left palm, though it’s not as easily triggered as the volume rocker.

The no-brainer solution is of course to rotate the other direction, but old habits die hard (especially if you were to own both the ten-inch and seven-inch versions of the TouchPad). Thankfully, the TouchPad Go is noticeably lighter than its ten-inch brother, making one-handed holding a much more reasonable affair. The size helps in addition the weight, keeping the center of gravity with the reach of an grasping hand in both portrait and landscape orientations.

With webOS not altered in any way for the seven-inch screen, all of the touch targets are smaller on the Go (like the screen they’re approximately half the size in area, dimensionally about ¾ the size). For everything we tested this didn’t prove to be a major problem. The only place where the smaller screen size coupled with no changes proved to be an issue was with the keyboard, where the XS setting for key height was laughably small (approximately a quarter inch tall). Thankfully, webOS 3.0 still packs the adjustable size keyboard, and where we tend to use the S on a ten-inch TouchPad we find M more comfortable on the Go.

The seven-inch screen was no hindrance to use, with every app functioning as expected and working just fine at the smaller size. The higher pixel density, while welcome, wasn’t really that noticeable in practice. What is noticeable is how much smaller text is. Even in landscape orientation we found that we often had to zoom into easily read text on most websites. Portrait mode text was legible, but still rather small. That’s not a problem in and of itself, though if you’re visiting a website that’s not formatted in a linear manner you may find yourself doing lots of side-to-side scrolling or zooming in and out.

One thing actually made easier with the smaller screen is typing. In landscape mode its easy enough to hold with both hands and reach the center of the screen with your thumbs (at least we found it such, and we aren’t the owners of massive hands). In portrait mode we found it most natural to hold with one hand and perform multi-finger typing thing with the other.

The smaller size and weight also made the TouchPad Go a great on-the-go companion. Really; we suppose that’s where the name came from. A few weeks ago I stopped throwing his ten-inch TouchPad in my laptop bag, getting tired of lugging around the extra pound-and-a-half. But the much lighter and smaller Go could find a welcome place in my bag. You know, if it actually existed in a capacity outside of ultra-rare collector’s item.

Other things and everything else

As we said at the outset, this was all testing performed on prototype version of the TouchPad Go running an unfinished version of webOS. We have no doubt that at the very least some of our software glitches would have been ironed out by the time the Go would have launched, but that work was either abandoned as it pertains to the Go.

On our Go unit we were unable to get the cellular radio to work, nor was the Touchstone charging system functional. Touch-to-Share, if present on the Go, was also not responsive to the repeated overtures from our Pre3 (though pairing and text message sharing was achieved over Bluetooth). We did not test battery life with the Go – it wasn’t great, but we don’t know if that’s the fault of the hardware (which itself was possibly not final) or of a not-yet-optimized operating system.

By and large webOS has not changed considerably from the ten-inch TouchPads of yore. If there’s something we didn’t cover in this review, we likely touched on it in our reviews of the White 1.5GHz TouchPad, the original TouchPad review, and the webOS 3.0.2 and 3.0.4 updates.

Conclusion

If we were asked to sum up the TouchPad Go in five words, we’d say “It’s the TouchPad, but smaller.” But in reality it’s more than just a smaller TouchPad. The decreased size and weight changes the potential set of use cases for the Go. It now makes more sense as portable webOS companion device, as the Go moniker implies. The Go was designed very much as a tag-along device, an intention assisted by the inclusion of GPS and a SIM card slot. In fact, we’d love to have a full-fledged GPS solution and car dock to go with the Go – it’d be the perfect in-car navigation solution. It’s already tied into your music, your phone, and your contacts and comes with its own internet connection.

But alas, it’s not to be. HP’s pulling of the plug on webOS hardware means that very few of this little tablet will see the light of day. And that’s a shame. Not because the TouchPad Go would have been the saving grace of webOS for HP – we doubt it could have been. While the hardware of the TouchPad wasn’t massively impressive, it would have been good enough had the software support been there too. The TouchPad Go would have suffered from the same problem, though it would have brought better hardware to the playing field.

The question is could the Go have competed successfully against the Amazon Kindle Fire, Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet, or Samsungs Galaxy Tab 7 Plus? On the hardware front, sure. With the exception of thickness and maybe weight, the TouchPad Go outclasses or matches every other seven-inch tablet available (and for some other unmentioned tablets it even bests in the thinness and lightness department). But without the support of a robust app ecosystem, the Go would have struggled alongside the other TouchPads. All of the other seven-inch tablets have the advantage of Android backing, even the heavily-skinned and siloed Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet.

Of course, it’s hard to say how much struggling there would have actually been. The App Catalog has been picking up steam lately, but that was after the webOS community and developer base was stunned with Leo Apotheker’s world wrecking sledgehammer. webOS by now would not have lived up to HP’s lofty expectations, mostly due to the hubris and lack of foresight from the company’s executives. But webOS could be achieving moderate success by this time, possibly carving out a sector of users not interested in Apple’s walled garden but also turned off by the Wild West image both fairly and unfairly painted of Android.

The TouchPad Go is a rarity. It’s more of a collector’s item than a daily workhorse. It’s one thing to use and break a GSM Pre3. They might not be in great supply, but there’s at least a supply enough that if yours is lost or destroyed, you should be able to replace it. The TouchPad Go, on the other hand, is practically irreplaceable. We’re not sure how many exist in the wild, but like the Verizon Pre3 we expect the total numbers somewhere in the dozens, if that.

The TouchPad Go is not a bad tablet. But it’s also not a great tablet. Like the standard TouchPad, it’s a good tablet. Better than okay, but also not mind-blowingly awesome. By virtue of its size it changes how you use it, but not in any fundamental manner. It sought to fill a void in the webOS tablet market, seeking the customer that wants something smaller than the ten-inch tablet but doesn’t want to compromise in the process. While any tablet comes with compromises, the TouchPad Go’s compromises (at least over the original TouchPad) are only directly related to its size.

So as much as this is a review, it’s also a look at what could have been. More so than the Pre3, which we knew existed and had held with our very hands, the TouchPad Go was a product of the webOS future. With the future of webOS now forked into some bizarre alternate reality, what lies ahead is anybody’s guess.

Adam, Derek, and Tim go over the non-news that is webOS, discuss our holiday gift picks for the webOS fan, and due our best Nostradamus impressions.

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Thanks to everybody for writing in!

News

• HP officially reverses course, won’t spin off PC division
• Whitman: We’ll make a decision on webOS “in the next few months”
• Reuters: HP pondering sale of webOS, likely to net “hundreds of millions of dollars”
• webOS all-hands meeting called for this afternoon, answers likely to result
• HP still not sure what to do with webOS, will take three-to-four weeks to decide
• HP keeping webOS a real possibility – what could that mean?
• HP reports Q4 and 2011 full year results – lost $3.3 billion on webOS
• How HP can sell and keep webOS at the same time
• HP to make decision on webOS by early December; sale may be contingent upon HP getting webOS for printers (what else?)
• No TouchPads to be made available through normal channels (but Best Buy will sell you one with an HP laptop)
• HP laptop + TouchPad bundle extended to Wal-Mart, makes us wonder about that whole “out of stock” thing
• TouchPad returns to TigerDirect in yet another HP PC bundle deal
• TouchPad and webOS apps getting Black Friday treatment
• Black Friday discount kicks in behind schedule for Picsel Smart Office
• HP probing TouchPad customers for feedback, which is odd for a cancelled product
• HP’s TouchPad satisfaction survey for everybody
• TouchPad nabs the #2 tablet slot for the first three quarters of 2011, not likely to repeat
• HP Pivot a finalist in 2011 Digital Magazine Awards
• White Pre3 and audio Touchstone make debut on eBay
• PreCentral forum member goes hands-on with swanky Touchstone Audio Dock
• The multi-layer wave launcher that could have been

Thanks again to everybody for writing in as well as everybody that participated live in person and in the chat!

Credits

Thanks to the PreCentral Store for sponsoring the PalmCast. You can email the PalmCast at podcast@treocentral.com or leave us a voicemail at 800-557-6819 x222.

Music comes from ccMixter.org, a great Creative Commons music site. Our specific music is the following:

• “The New Music” by Alex Beroza

This tip is only for webOS slider phones

One bug that sometimes occurs with webOS slider phones is that you will go to press the power button on the phone and it will just turn on instead of giving you the standard lock screen with the “Drag up to unlock” padlock. From what we can tell this occurs because the phone thinks that the slider is already open, which would cause it to bypass that lock screen altogether. Fortunately, there is a really simple fix for this. Just slide the phone open and then closed again to “reset” the slider mechanism and your lock screen with return the next time you press the power button.

Three weeks ago HP CEO Meg Whitman told webOS Global Business Unit employees that she was still pondering what exactly to do with webOS, saying that HP would make that decision “in the next three-to-four weeks.” As was noted on last night’s PalmCast, we’re now into that three-to-four-week window, though Whitman has given HP a little bit of additional wiggle room.

In an interview with French news site Le Figaro, Whitman said that HP “should announce our decision in the next two weeks,” which pushes the decider deadline back to the middle of December. If you’ve been following webOS for any amount of time, you’ve likely gotten used to the waiting game, though we’re not sure which is worse: a vague “in the coming weeks/months” or getting a time frame and having it get pushed back. Granted, it’s only been by a week; we can’t imagine that a week’s delay will have all that big of an impact on the grand picture. Any announcement about a sale or resumption of webOS product development will result in at least several more months of waiting before actual product becomes available.

But there’s more to the interview. In fact, it’s the very next sentence after she touches on the fact that this decision will affect the 600 employees left in the webOS GBU. Whitman says that HP needs “to have another operating system.” Now, what exactly she means by that, we’re not entirely sure, but it seems to indicate that she doesn’t want to put all of HP’s eggs in the Windows 8 basket. That explains why webOS is still in contention for staying an HP property, but it also leaves open the door to them going with another OS, such as Android.

More like Black Tuesday, right guys?

Anyway, there was one notable error on HP’s App Catalog Black Friday sale list: Picsel Smart Office never got the promised 50% markdown before the sale ended yesterday. Fret not, dear TouchPad owner, for if you wanted to grab a full-featured document-editing suite for $4.99, your time has come. We don’t know how long it will last, so if you were on the fence there’s no better time to jump than now.

You better hold onto your socks folks, for they are about to be knocked from your feet. PalmCast Live is back tonight, and though we’ve been going through a bit of a news deficit, we still want to get together and chat webOS. It’s been too long.

So tune in tonight at 8:30 PM Eastern (12:30 AM UTC) for the latest edition of PalmCast Live, featuring Derek, Adam, and Tim at their finest. We know that’s not saying a lot, but you should feel lucky you didn’t see them at the company Thanksgiving party. That was a disaster. Anywho… topics of discussion will include webOS and what the heck is going on with HP (hint: we’re not really sure) plus our holiday gift recommendations for that die-hard webOS fan on your shopping list. And of course, we’ll be taking your questions on the Twitter, just include the #palmcast hashtag and we’ll do our best to provide a reasonable answer on the air.

Tonight. 8:30 PM. Be there. It’s PalmCast Live.

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Kevin, Phil, Derek, Dan, and Rene discuss the future of phone fashion, how to pick a tablet for the holidays, and what happens when all phones are smart. Plus, our holiday gift guide! This is Mobile Nations!

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One of the benefits of Homebrew on your webOS device is to customize almost any image or icon on your phone, as long as you know where to look. You can change the boot logo, the padlock/lock image, the exhibition time background and more just be replacing the image file in the proper location on the phone and performing a luna restart. The location of these images has been mostly consistent on webOS phones and the TouchPad since the original Pre was released. That is, until the Pre3 was “released.” With a higher resolution that previous phones, those same images from other phones would now appear much smaller on the Pre3. To account for this, there are new “1.5″ directories with images that are 50% larger. For example, the padlock from the lock screen is no longer using the file in “/usr/palm/sysmgr/images/” but rather in “/usr/palm/sysmgr/images/1.5/”. If you can not find the image in the “1.5″ directory, that usually implies that the Pre3 is using the same image as the older phones use

The holidays are fast creeping up on us, and if you happen to have a loved one (or yourself) that needs some webOS love, then we have a few suggestions on what to place next to the trusty aluminum pole/under the tree. We’ve already gone over what to get the webOS traveler, but what about the student? They tend not to me on the road a lot, but they’re certainly on the move and have some pretty significant demands. After the break – what to get for that webOS fan of a student on your list.

Devices

HP Pre3

When it comes to webOS smartphones, the Pre3 has no equal. It’s bigger yet slimmer, feels better, and is just darned faster than anything webOS smartphones offered before. But it only ever saw a very limited release. Thankfully, it’s still plenty available, so long as you’re willing to plumb the depths of the PreCentral Forums or eBay.

There are three versions of the Pre3 available: GSM unlocked from Europe, AT&T, and Verizon (in descending order from plentiful to rare). Obviously if your loved one is in Europe or practically anywhere but the United States or Canada, grab the unlocked GSM Pre3 – it will work on 99% of international GSM networks and supports HSPA+ speeds.

In the United States the unlocked GSM will work, but the rare AT&T Pre3 and even rarer Verizon Pre3s are the preferred option. Obviously you have to pick based on the network your loved one is using (sorry Sprint fans).

HP Veer

Say your webOS lover is both a small phones person and on AT&T. If they’re using a Pixi Plus and lamenting how slow and old it is, or a Pre 2 and just think it’s too darned big, then we’d like to point you to the HP Veer – the smallest gosh darn smartphone you ever did see. It uses the same screen as the Pixi, but it runs webOS 2.1 (something the Pixi will never do) and has a better keyboard, more compact design, glass screen, faster processor, and more RAM. Plus the Veer is actually still available from AT&T, and will cost just a penny on a new contract (at least at the time of publishing). If you’re off-contract it’ll cost considerably more, but unlike getting a Pre3 off eBay it at least comes with the option of carrier support. And let’s be honest, between laptops and books and a double shot macchiato, students are lugging around enough as it is. The Veer will lighten the load, especially in comparison to those massive Android phones.

HP TouchPad

Loved one wants a tablet, but didn’t get onto the TouchPad train while the getting was good? Fret not, dear shopper – there are still TouchPads. Deals with the TouchPad have already been made public for Black Friday that don’t require you to buy an HP laptop too, plus there’s always eBay and Amazon third party retailers. Nothing says “I love you” better than a moderately-hard-to-find collector’s item of a tablet.

Feeling particularly generous? Go hit up eBay for one of the rarer versions of the TouchPad. While anybody can get their hands on a black 32GB TouchPad, how many people can say they have a white TouchPad with a snappy 1.5GHz processor? Your loved one can, so long as you’re willing to pay the price. Amusingly, that price tends to come in below the $500 starting price of the 16GB TouchPad at launch. We might suggest the AT&T TouchPad 4G here, but it’s hard-to-find, expensive, and frankly your student’s campus probably already has a Wi-Fi network for them to latch onto.

Accessories

Batteries

So long as your traveling loved one doesn’t already have (or you haven’t already bought for them) a Pre3 or Veer as their webOS smartphone, there’s one thing they’re almost certainly disappointed with: the battery life. The Pre, Pre Plus, Pre 2, Pixi, and Pixi Plus all use the same battery, and they’re available for good prices in standard, extended life, and super-extended life (and size) (Pre only) versions.

Even then, a spare battery is only good if it’s charged. If you need power now and there’s simply not an outlet nearby, the gadget industry has a solution: the backup battery. There are number of good battery packs from the likes of Seidio, Motorola, and others that allow you to just plug up with a USB cable and get charging. The backup battery is also a good option for that loved one that has a Veer or Pre3 (or one waiting for them under the tree), as the first has an integrated battery and the latter never had spare batteries.

Chargers

If there’s one thing that all webOS devices thankfully have come with, it’s a charger. But only one, and if you’re like us you’ve got it set just how you like it on your desk, nightstand, or side table. It’s one thing to have to unpack a charger when staying at a hotel, but in your own home? That’s just unacceptable. That’s also where a Micro USB travel charger comes into play. They’re cheap, and they’re plentiful, and everybody should have at least one. And go ahead and throw in a retractable Micro USB cable or two – you never know when you’ll need one. And why not throw in a handy inductive Touchstone charger while you’re at it?

Audio

If you’ve visited campus, you’ve probably noticed the same thing that we have: everybody’s walking around with white buds stuck in their ears. The headphones that came with your webOS phone (if it came with them) are of barely adequate quality, as we’d expect from the earbuds packaged with practically any phone. But fret not, for there’s a solution: get a new pair.

There are numerous excellent wired and Bluetooth wireless options, including the RF3 LIVE, RF3 ENVI (which are made with real wood), and Qmadix Qi-5 on the wired front and the Motorola S9-HD and Plantronics BackBeat 903 (our personal favorite) for the wireless Bluetooth crowd. And while those will do for tooling around the quad, once dear student heads back to their dorm/apartment/bedroom (sorry they’re still at home), they can pump out some tunes into the open air with the excellent Jawbone Jambox portable Bluetooth speaker.

Keyboard

While webOS phones typically have good-to-great physical keyboards and the TouchPad’s virtual keyboard is quite excellent, there’s something to be said for a nice big physical QWERTY spread beneath your fingers. Compatible with webOS 2.x phones (Pre 2, Veer, and Pre3) and the TouchPad, the HP Wireless Keyboard hooks up over Bluetooth for speedy note-taking in class. Heck, if your student is so inclined they can use it to pound out a dissertation or two using the available document editors on the TouchPad. Other Bluetooth keyboards will work, but they aren’t designed to be as supremely compatible with webOS.

Cases

If your student has a Pre3, we’ve got bad news: there are no Pre3-specific cases out there. Same goes for the Veer. And that’s a shame, as life as a student can be occasionally rough. You never know when you’re going to get roped into a game of ultimate out on the quad or slip and fall on spilled beer juice at the frat house cafeteria. If dear student has a Palm-branded Pre (original, Plus, or 2) or Pixi, there are thankfully several case options available, including tough-as-nails-and-nuclear-bombs Otterbox cases (Pre, Pixi) and slim-but-protective-and-colorful snap-on cases by Incipio, Smartphone Experts, and Seidio.

Thankfully the Pre3 and Veer are pretty toughly built, but the TouchPad can be another story. It’s big, thin(ish), and faced with an expansive sheet of glass on one side and easily-broken plastic on the other. For the custom-fit option, there’s the HP Folio case, which in addition to protecting also folds around to serve as a stand for watching videos or typing at an angle. To protect from scratches and gouges, you can slap on protective films by BodyGuardz, and to keep a TouchPad safe in a bag, there are a number of available padded protective sleeves (though to be honest, pretty much any original iPad-compatible sleeve will also work)

Apps

This is where things get less clean (and you thought hacking together phones was dirty). There currently are no mechanisms for gifting individual apps from the webOS App Catalog or even sending app credit to friends and family. But you want your studying loved one to be able to make the most out of their webOS companion. You’ve got a couple of options, including sending them money over PayPal and telling them to use it to buy a specific app, or just forcibly grabbing their phone, downloading the app, and handing it back with a few Washingtons for their trouble. Now, what apps should you be forcibly downloading?

Studying

Flashcards long been a mainstay in any studying regimen. There’s simply no replacement for the trusty stack of index cards. Or is there? There is, and it’s the aptly-named Flashcards ($2.99) app by independent developer James Harris. Compatible with webOS phones and tablets (just one purchase is required to get it on devices using the same webOS Account), Flashcards allows for downloads from Quizlet.com and Flashcard Exchange, as well as the creation of custom flashcard sets.

Organization

There’s been a long-standing mantra when it comes to heavy workload classes: work smarter, not harder. The key to working smarter is being organized so you know what you actually have to work on. A+ Student Organizer ($2.99), available for webOS smartphones, is hands-down the single best app to keep track of courses, papers, projects, upcoming exams, professors, and the grades the hand down.

Documents

From notes to papers to figuring out your beer hackey sack funding needs fit into your Ramen budget, students are in need of document editing on the go. It’s not a sexy or glamorous feature, but it’s one that can’t be done without. While the TouchPad does now include QuickOffice document editing, it’s a bit of a let-down as far as features are concerned. Picking up the slack in the capability department is Picsel Smart Office ($9.99), an app that brings full Word, Excel, and PowerPoint editing into play. With built-in support for DropBox, you can even make edits to your presentation while away from the computer and have them synced back over by the time you’re hooking up to the projector.

So that’s what we’d get and why we’d get our webOS-loving loved ones to help them make it through the school year. It’s a little bit of everything from stocking stuffers (batteries and chargers) to “Oh, you shouldn’t have!” (Verizon Pre3), but all enough to show that you both care and are paying attention to their needs. But that’s just what we’d get – we know you have your own opinions on the matter. Sound off in the comments!