So HP just bought Palm. That came out of nowhere.

I'm with most of the world out there when I thought that HTC was for sure the frontrunner, if anyone. But, that came with the very serious possibility that it would mean an end to webOS, it would merely be an IP purchase. Being a webOS developer/user/fanatic this was a pretty depressing revelation. But a couple weeks passed and HTC apparently walked away. "Whew" I thought, assuming Palm would now try to stick it out. This came with yet another troubling thought that Palm is bleeding away to death right now. They have a fantastic phone, fantastic platform, they just can't sell a phone no one has heard of! And without money, they weren't going to fix that problem.

Enter HP. HP really makes so much sense in hindsight. A company who once was a trailblazer with a mobile form factor (iPaq anyone?), now not even a second thought from most consumers. And in the dust of the latest Dell phone leaks, HP, being far larger and more dominant, had a gaping hole of a product line to fill. It really was a perfect match: Palm, who had a fantastic product line but no money to support it, and HP, who had no mobile product line and too much money to know what to do with it!

Now you have to step back and take a glimpse at the bigger picture. Although Palm is first and foremost a smartphone company, webOS was built from the ground up to be able to run on any device and any form factor. Did you just think that too? That unusually mysterious Windows 7 table, the HP Slate? With webOS? Amazing! Granted, the HP Slate is already very far along in its development so it's unlikely that they will jump ship from Windows 7 for now, but the framework is there from a hardware standpoint. There is a very interesting opportunity here to make the iPad look l<more like> a children's toy.

HP will reportedly "double down" on investing into webOS. Porting it to many form factors to suit its diverse hardware portfolio. At the same time though, HP and Palm have done an incredible thing for people like me: developers. All of a sudden I see this budding platform which has yet to become saturated with apps (like the iPhone or Android variants) with several form factors and possibilities. Double that with the fact that with the PDK, porting apps is now easier than ever. I wouldn't be surprised at all to see a massive influx of apps over the next few months.

One thing you can be sure of is that I will be making some new apps, this time they will go to the app catalog instead of the homebrew gallery. 

So with the swift purchase of Palm, the game has changed. There is now a newly confirmed big player in the game. It will be interesting to look back a couple years from now to see how much HTC, Lenovo or RIM missed out by not capitalizing on this brilliant opportunity.

If you're one of the many (including me) who struggle daily with having their phones get stuck in headset mode, this may be your lucky day. After a final frustrating encounter with this problem, which required me to once again clean out the headset with alcohol, I decided to do something about it. Long story short, I created an app.

The Ghastly Headset (derived from the fact the Pre thinks there's a headset that isn't there... a ghost headset) is fairly limited and approximately 3 hours in its infancy. It has three main functions:

1. Show the current audio mode (either speaker, headset or headset w/ mic)
2. Force headset mode
3. Force speaker mode

com.palm.futurepr0n.theghastlyheadset_0.0.1_all.ipk (32.38 kb)

This post is to help anyone who might google not having any audio play through their headset speaker on the Pre.

So there I was, listening to some streaming radio with headphones on the commuter train home when I get a call. I realize that you can answer the call fine and talk through your headphones but, through natural habit, I unplugged my headphones and tried to talk on the phone normally. All of a sudden, there was no sound! SHIT! My phone is barely a month old and already the speaker is broken.

There is a bit of confusion around this specific problem because there are really two problems with the same symptoms. These being:

1. You hear no audio through music apps without headphones
2. You hear no audio when accepting a call (except through the speaker phone)
3. The proximity sensor doesn't work, or the screen doesn't turn off when you put the phone to your face during a call

Through my past experiences with my xbox breaking, I've grown more and more restless in dealing with warranties. So I decided to investigate the problem on the single most powerful resource for the Palm Pre, precentral.net. I immediately found that many people were experiencing this problem, and the accepted solution was either doing a soft reset (sym+orange+r) or by plugging in the headphones back in a couple times to get the phone back into normal mode. This, however, did not work for me. Growing frustrated, I tried pulling the battery, several resets, plugging in the headphone over and over with no luck. As a last ditch effort, I used webOSDoctor to erase my phone back to factory. Still nothing.

Fuck!

Well, this is where the useful information may come for you. As I said before, there seems to be two unique problems with the same symptoms. The first being a software issue, the second being hardware. Yes, believe it or not, there is a hardware problem. The good news is you can fix it completely by yourself!

Before doing what I suggest, please know that I accept NO responsibility for any damage you do to your device. I do not work for palm, nor do I represent them in anyway.

Continuing on, the problem has to do with the headphone jack becoming blocked with dirt - dust - or some sort of fragment. This tricks the phone into thinking that the headphones are always plugged in. Not good! To fix this, you need to simply follow these steps:

1. Shut down the Pre, remove the battery
2. Get a Q-tip and remove some of the cotton so that it will fit in the Pre headphone jack (see where I'm going with this?)
3. Dip the Q-tip into rubbing alcohol and shake off any excess
4. Clean out the inside of the headset jack thoroughly (if you don't see anything on the Q-tip, don't fret - neither did I)
5. Use the other end of the q-tip to dry out the alcohol

Done! That's it! This is what worked for me and I'm hoping it will save you the trouble of dealing with warranties.