It looks like the Palm Profile has been having issues with corrupted backups, leaving users trying to restore from a backup without their data. It's not everyone who's had this problem, just more people than can be called a fluke.

Here's Palm's statement on the matter:

We are seeing a small number of customers who have experienced issues transferring their Palm Profile information to another Palm webOS device. Palm and Sprint are working closely together to support these customers to successfully transfer their information to the new device.

Good to know, clumsy Pre owners. [PreCentral]

If you hate the gallery format, click here.

All pricing shown is with a new 2-year contract, and some deals may be temporary.

AT&T

iPhone 3GS
The iPhone 3GS is the best overall smartphone you can buy. It's really that simple. Best user interface, best internet, best apps, best media support—the list goes on. Okay, not the best network, but nothing's perfect. $199

BlackBerry Bold 9700
I miss the original BlackBerry Bold's king-sized keyboard, but the Bold 9700 squeezes the best of the BlackBerry for CEOs into an impressively tight form factor—faux leather back included—making it very possibly the best BlackBerry you can buy. $10

Bonus: Nokia e71x
It's free, and an actually good smartphone—my favorite Nokia phone on the planet. Free

Verizon

Droid
It's a terminator. A huge, disgustingly high-res screen, Batman-worthy industrial design, and the full power of Android 2.0 make it the best phone on Verizon—and the fact that it's running on arguably the best network in the US make it the second best smartphone you can buy, period. $150

BlackBerry Tour
Sure, it's notorious for trackball problems and it's missing Wi-Fi, but this is the BlackBerry of choice for email warriors if they're not on AT&T or T-Mobile—and it sure as hell beats anything running Windows Mobile. $50

Bonus: Droid Eris
If you're desperate to save $100 over the Droid, the Droid Eris will run Android 2.0 soon enough, and is smoother, smaller, and friendlier, if a little blander. $100

Sprint

Palm Pre
The Pre offers one of the best user experiences of any smartphone with Palm's webOS, and it's probably the best phone on Sprint, hardware build issues and comparatively dinky App Catalog aside. $80

HTC Hero
The best Android phone not running Android 2.0, HTC's Sense UI makes the sometimes confusing Android interface more digestible and has a few nifty tricks of its own, like integrated social networking. $100

Bonus: There is none. The Pixi's close ($25), but the fact that you can get the Pre for nearly as cheap undercuts a lot of the value, as much as we like the design and form factor.

T-Mobile

Motorola Cliq
Motorola's other Android phone is gussied up with Blur, a custom interface that's bright and friendly, with widgets for keeping track of everything happening on your social network. It's our favorite Android phone on T-Mobile. $100

Unlocked iPhone
No, I'm not kidding. A jailbroken and unlocked iPhone, even without 3G powers, is the second best smartphone you can use on T-Mobile.

Bonus: BlackBerry Bold 9700
The BlackBerry Bold 9700 is the first BlackBerry with 3G on T-Mobile, which is reason enough, really, but it's good the reasons listed above, too. $130

When WebOS 1.3.1 skipped updating the camera app, the developers of Precorder decided not to wait any longer, and things are looking promising. The app supports MPEG-4, H.263, and H.264/AVC video recording, lets you control the flash, and videos can be played back in the Pre's video player. Again, it's alpha software, so try with caution. But you can check it out at: [Precorder via Pre Central]

I call this a deal on a phone with a terrific UI on a terrific network, but I'd pay double these rates if the Palm had a more sizable app library. But if your'e set on palm, remember what we said: For $80, even if 3x as much, the Pre is a much nicer piece of hardware. All Things D's John Paczkowski says it best: "If Things Get Really Bad, Palm's Pixi Will Make a Great Happy Meal Prize" [Amazon via All Things D]

The $100 Pixi made sense once upon a time, when the Pre was $200 and Palm needed a phone for the masses—like the Centro, oncer upon a time—to establish the webOS as a real platform. A leaner, cheaper version of the Pre was a good idea. Now, you can get the real thing—faster, stronger, screenier—for under a hundred bucks. The Pixi's existential crisis is not insignificant.

What's Neutered vs. the Pre

• Slower processor (using an older ARM11 architecture vs. faster ARM Cortex A8)
• Smaller and squintier 400x320, 2.63-inch, 18-bit color screen (vs. 480x320, 3.1-inch, 24-bit color)
• 2-megapixel camera (vs. 3MP)
• No Wi-Fi

Pixi Perfect Design (Just About)

There has not been a candybar phone more perfectly designed and executed than the Pixi. It's exactly the size and shape a phone that aspires to be small should be. It's a Hot Pocket sliced in half, but flat and glossy on top and round and rubbery on the bottom. It almost feels fake, like a concept that you hope is a real phone but isn't, except that in this case, it really is. It fits inside of an iPhone, if you wanna get more literal.

Plastic, slightly sticky Rice Krispie keys, arranged in four rows form a keyboard so electrifyingly good it's thrilling, like finding an actually sweet wind-up toy in your cereal box (Rice Krispies, of course) every time you type. They keys are tiny, but have a deceptive amount of rise, so your fat thumbs can feel out individual nubs, which pop in this remarkably satisfying way when you click down. The size-to-goodness ratio might just be the best on any keyboard I've used. If there's any reason to pick the Pixi over the Pre, it's if you type a shocking amount on your phone, because the Pixi's is better by like an order of magnitude. Or eleventy.

Between the screen, with its shaved corners, and the keyboard is a stretch of empty space. Until you run your finger along it, and a spark—a line of light, really—emerges. The LED strip, invisible when it's not indicating something, replaces the ball on the Pre, which I always thought was a weird little speed bump when you stroked the gesture area, anyway. It's kind of beautiful, the stark aesthetic of it emotionally tinged with sci-fi imagery, from Gort to Cyclop's visor.

Two things are wrong. The screen lock button on the top left is a little too in touch with the overall robustness of the phone, so it's hard to push and doesn't provide enough feedback. On the opposite end of that spectrum, the trap door covering the micro USB port feels flimsy and aggravatingly snaps shut, making plugging in a USB cable a struggle worthy of a Homerian epic every single time.

Tinkerbell Would Be Pissed

The Pixi is slow.

Achingly.

Maddeningly.

Ripyourhairoutandsmashitagainstthewallingly.

It lags, it hangs, it stutters, it freezes. A lot. A simple fact: Multitasking isn't better than unitasking when it takes longer to get shit done. An example: I wanted to take a picture while I had the browser and and App Catalog open. Simple. The camera froze spectacularly, rendering the entire phone completely unusable for well over 30 seconds—whenever I tried to flick the camera card away (cards are apps), it would shoot halfway off the screen, then appear back in its place. Somewhere between 30-45 seconds later, it regained composure. That's with just three core apps open, and no active syncing happening in the background.

True, I could sometimes have up to four apps running without problems, at least for a minute or so, before things starting getting cludgy. But it hangs even with just a single app running sometimes. (Just try loading the full Gizmodo page.) And every time you open an app, there's a solid expanse of time that elapses that you can feel, and it gets old real quick. Maybe webOS is just more transparent about load times than the iPhone, which masks them with title screens, but the whole experience of using this phone is like swimming through very pretty Jello, with one arm, wearing a cast-iron suit, or something like that.

Screen, Camera and Other Hardware

You get used to the smaller screen and its 80 fewer pixels, mostly. It's cramped, but you'll only be directly, painfully cognizant of it from time to time, like when you're reading some text outside of Palm's own apps or navigating web pages. It's not a crappy screen, but it's not exceptionally bright or vibrant, either. The touch accuracy seemed less spot-on than the Pre too, though that could've been the effect of smaller targets because of the tinier screen, like the drop down menu for apps in the top left corner, which is just a sliver on the Pixi.

The Pixi's 2MP camera is unimpressive. The comparison shot above—of ramen, people—was taken with a 2MP iPhone 3G in the exact same lighting and place, snapped within 10 seconds of each other. The camera app, when it's not freezing up, is quick to shoot once you press the button though, which is definitely something.

And I'll just say it: No Wi-Fi sucks, since there are lots of place in NY where even Sprint's 3G can't penetrate.

Software

The Pixi comes with webOS 1.3.1. Palm's definitely tuned things up since webOS originally shipped in June with stuff like more support for Yahoo services, the ability to buy songs over 3G, performance improvements and other interface sprucing up, but it's not a radically difference experience than the one Chen documented exhaustively here. (In other words, read that for the software review, since it's basically the same, just much slooooower on the Pixi.)

What's different now is that there are over 300 apps in the App Catalog, and Palm's dumping fresh ones in every week. So the app situation is greatly improved. The problem is that it's still behind the rest of the pack though—iPhone, Android and BlackBerry—and being fourth-place development priority for cross-platform developers with limited resources it not a great place to be, so Palm's got a rough road here. Oh, one interesting point, since this is supposed to be the smartphone OS for multitasking, is that while an app is downloading from the App Catalog, you can't browse for other apps—if you leave the download page, it cancels. So I hope you've got good Sprint reception in your house.

The other thing that's changed is iTunes. Palm's former official way to sync your media to your phone is broken. Irrevocably. Even if Palm does restore iTunes syncing with its dirty hack (no really, it is a dirty hack, impersonating an iPod with a false USB ID) the entire model is screwed. Putting people buying your phone in the middle of a stupid pissing match that you're destined to lose isn't cool. In the meantime, Palm's official solution is for people to sideload or use third-party apps like DoubleTwist.

Don't Buy It

The Pixi is screwed. It's totally cannibalized by the technologically superior Pre, which you can find for under $100. Even if you can get the Pixi for $30 at Walmart, it's worth trading up to the Pre for $40 or $50 more if you're absolutely wedded to the idea of a webOS phone, simply for the speed and screen. Mostly the speed, since the Pixi is brain damaged, three-legged dog slow, as nice as the hardware is on the outside.

Not to mention, for a hundred dollars, there are phones that just offer better experiences and aren't in the same awkward position Palm is in the smartphone fight. I'm talking of course, about the Droid Eris, Android's 99-dollar darling on Verizon. The entire reason to buy the Pixi—a value proposition—has completely evaporated. And I almost feel bad about that. Almost.

Incredible keyboard (for the size)

Awesome design and build

webOS is nice

Camera sucks

Palm's dumb iTunes fight

Slow

I mean, slooooooooooooooooooooow

The $30 Pixis (Pixies?) are backordered already, probably because this is far and away the best deal we've seen so far for this handset. This news does two things: It raises the possibility of a free-on-contract Pixi sometimes in the near future, and calls into question again whether or not the Pixi can ever be a truly good deal. Today, the Pre is $100 at Amazon, so a $30—or even free—Pixi might not be worth the loss of screen size, speed, Wi-Fi and camera quality. This isn't the kind of queasy, awkward decision a company that's so close to the brink needs its customers making right now anyway.

And as BusinessWeek crunches it:

Amortized over the required two-year contract, with the cheapest offering being Sprint's $70 a month unlimited data, 450 voice minute Everything Data plan, the Pixi works a out to $74.15 a month and the Pre to $76.25. Not much to choose from there in budgetary terms.

And that's at $100 and $150 prices for the Pixi and Pre, respectively—not the new bargain basement/flea market/crack den rates. So what does that leave in the Pixi's favor? Size? Style? The fact that its name actually sounds like a noun? [EverythingPre]

It May Be The Best WoW Costume Yet, But It Makes Me Cry

Right now this kid is probably thinking that he's the coolest MMMORPG player on the block with his costume that comes with a LED health bar, mana bar and spell casting glove, but I have the feeling that he'll be haunted by the glowing fairy companions of Halloweens past one day. I, on the other hand, already feel haunted by the misguided costume ideas of this particular Halloween. [Make]

Cupcake Frosting Robot Takes The Fun Out Of Licking Up Messes

The MakerBot Frostruder MK2 is the second prototype of a computer controlled cupcake froster. It looks kinda cool, but is it really necessary to build a robot for consistently frosted cupcakes, cakes, and toast? I'd rather use the time saved to nibble on the "defective" inconsistently frosted treats. [Makerbot via Make]

Palm Will Not Be Having A Very Merry Christmas

Things worse than creepy commercials loom on the horizon for Palm as analysts at Citigroup and CL King are predicting a rough winter for the handset maker. Part of the reasoning is the release of several Android handsets including the much discussed Motorola Droid over the next few months. Is it really surprising that people would flock to the new and shiny toys of the season? [All Things D]

Personalized Google News Pages Appeal To The Narcissists In Us

Google News now allows for personalized pages with multiple queries (rather than the single query sections of the past) which are publishable in a directory. Not really all that exciting, but as Techcrunch suggests, the best use for this feature is as the ideal vanity search, rounding up everything you didn't even know was online about yourself. [Google News Blog via TechCrunch]

Songs are a mere ten pennies through Lala because they would be streamed to your phone, but there's more to the app than streaming. It would allow for your own music collection to be uploaded to and accessed through the cloud for free. No more fretting over music storage.

There's good news for the non-iPhone users too. Lala intends on coming out with an app for Android, Palm Pre, and Blackberry phones as well. [Wired]

Straight from the Twitter feed:

@lanvuch We will be carrying the Palm Pre smartphone early next year.

Finally, it's looking like Verizon is going to get a decent phone selection. Between this and the Android Devices we could see any day now, it seems like Big Red is finally getting with the times. [Twitter via BGR]

Just head over to the Palm store and enter in PALMPRE at checkout. [Palm]

Full HotSync compatibility is the highlight, and it works over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. As for the pre-installed apps and games—some are freebies, while others are limited trials; see the link below for the full list.

Other useful tweaks include quick keyboard mode switch, improved reset functionality, and reduced power consumption. As was the case before, Classic runs side by side with other WebOS applications. It's not a replacement OS and doesn't limit its features, it just runs the Palm OS apps inside the WebOS environment.

The Classic emulator is available in the App Catalog for $30 bucks, and there's a demo you can try out first. [Motionapps]

Why Homebrew?

Pre homebrew is as much about adding apps that Palm has been so slow to approve as it is tweaking your handset. Think of it like jailbreaking an iPhone, except that it's easier to do, and the benefits are much, much greater.

(This guide owes a huge debt to the PreCentral forums, where the developer of WebOS Quick Install, with others, have collected most of the necessary resources. Recognition is nice, but donations are better. If you find WebOS Quick Install useful, send Jason a few bucks.)

What You Need

Some downloads! The only app you'll need to run on your computer is a Java app, so it's completely cross-platform. This guide should work for Windows, Mac or Linux.

1. WebOS Quick Install:
This is the desktop program that effectively opens up your Pre for business. It's got quite a bit of power on its own, but one of its greatest talents is the ability to install package managers like Preware, which make installing homebrew apps to your Pre, from your Pre super-easy.

2. WebOSDoctor ROM (Sprint, Bell): This is just a restoration ROM for webOS, which WebOS Quick Install needs to work. It should be saved into the same directory as WebOS Quick Install, then left alone.

3. Java SE 6: Make sure you've got Java 1.6, or SE 6, so you can run these apps properly.

And one trick:

4. Dev Mode: Switching your Pre to dev mode is either sort of fun or sort of tedious, depending on your capacity for nostalgia.

All you have to do is type "upupdowndownleftrightleftrightbastart" on the keypad. That'll open a search query that'll uncover a new app on your Pre called "DeveloperMode." Run it, and it'll switch your phone into, you guessed it, developer mode.

Running WebOS Quick Install

5. Plug your Pre into your computer. When prompted for connection type, select "Just Charge"

6. Open WebOS Quick Install, making sure that the WebOSDoctor ROM is in the same directory as the Quick Install JAR.

You'll get this message:

Heed it.

7. When you reopen WebOS Quick Install, you'll be prompted to choose which kind of device you want to access. Choose "USB Device," which'll install the drivers necessary to crack into a physical Pre, not just an emulator.

8. Follow the driver installation prompts through to completion.

9. Open WebOS Quick Install again. You should see the app's home screen. Click on the bottom button in the right panel, as indicated here:

10. Select "WebOS-Internals Feed (all)" from the download list. Select both "Package Manager Service" and "Preware" from the resulting list. These will enable you to download and apply the tweaks and apps you want.

11. After download, they will be added to the previously empty list in the app's homescreen, where you should highlight both, then click "Install"

There you go!

Getting the Most Out Of Homebrew

Now that you're set up and ready to go, it's time to do stuff. Launch the Preware app on your Pre—at first load, it takes a while to sync up with all the repositories, so be patient—and explore the 200+ apps included by default. (You can add other repositories on your own, but most of the good stuff is already here.)

The "Package Manager Service" installation doesn't just enable downloads through Preware—it enables a whole range of WebOS Quick Install tweaks, which you can access through the Tools ->Tweaks menu. WebOS Quick Install may prompt you to install a few patches; just go along with it, it'll only take a second.

Once you're in the panel, you'll see a wealth of useful tweaks, from a 4-icon-wide app launcher, to a browser ad-blocker, to a user agent string changer, so your Pre asks for snazzier iPhone mobile pages instead of standard mobile fare. Generally, each tweak will restart your Pre.

Themes are managed either through Preware, which has a selection of over 200 that you can install with a single button press, or through the WebOS Quick Install menu, at Tools -> Themer. To install a new theme from WebOS Quick Install, you'll have to manually download from an external site, which you'll be directed to automatically. Once you've downloaded the theme, it's just a matter of loading it into the app. Preware is probably your best bet for this, though there isn't really a way to find out if a theme is any good without actually trying it.

As for that onscreen keyboard? You can install that through WebOS Quick Install: It's in the same place you found Preware, in the "WebOS-Internals Feed (all)" section of the package downloader. A word of warning: It's only officially supported up to WebOS 1.2.0, so you might be best advised to wait a few days until the developers have worked out any bugs with 1.2.1.

Anyway, the Pre Homebrew community is rich and fast-moving, so I'll let you all take it from here. Some great resources to get you started:

• PreCentral
• WebOS-Internals
• PimpMyPre
• PreYourMind

And again, a gajillion thanks to WebOS Quick Install Developer Jason Robitaille and the users over at the PreCentral forums.

If you have more tips and tools to share, please drop some links in the comments-your feedback is hugely important to our Saturday How To guides. And if you have any topics you'd like to see covered here, please let me know. Happy homebrewing, folks!

Palm's possibly heroic, mostly inconsequential iTunes-molesting theatrics aside, the fix most people were actually waiting for involved an error introduced this week by 1.2, which broke Exchange 2007 EAS syncing for quite a few people. That, along with a few bugfixes, is the main component of 1.2.1, which should be making its way to handsets over the weekend. In other news, paid apps are still totally MIA in the App Catalog. Weird.

Here's the full 1.2.1 changelog:

Email

* Resolved an issue where after installing the 1.2.0 webOS update some customers running Exchange 2007 could no longer synchronize with their Exchange account for Email, Calendar, Contacts, and Tasks.

System

* Resolves an issue preventing media sync from working with latest version of iTunes (9.0.1).
* Media sync now synchronizes photo albums, maintaining the album structure in the Photos app.
* Media sync now allows for synchronizing photos without requiring the full-resolution originals. This provides faster display of high-quality full-screen images and enables users to store more photos on the phone.

Web

* Resolved an issue where if a user tried to play streaming music or video, the media stream might drop out or have a long delay before starting.

Security

This release implements several security fixes, including the following:

* Addresses a security issue encountered by webkit developers. This issue did not impact end users.

Individuals interested in contacting Palm to report suspected security issues can find more information at palm.com/security .

[Palm]

You can expect movies a few weeks after they arrive to DVD from current participating studios Paramount, Universal Pictures and the Weinstein Company. The rentals are good for anywhere from 24 hours to 5 days.

Streaming a trailer, the quality wasn't super high (framerates, especially, took a hit). Plus, with iTunes rentals running only $4, it's tough to imagine mSpot taking over (iPhones, at least) entirely.

But a little competition never hurt anyone. [NYTimes via Engadget]

• It's a corporate policy all apps use a version number of less than 1.0.0
• Ten pages of legal documents to print out, sign and scan
• If an app is in the App Catalog, it can't be distributed anywhere else—a problem, because Zawinski's apps are open source and free
• Developers need a verified PayPal account to pay Palm $99 a year to distribute their apps
• A whole mess of reviews and re-reviews
• 27 emails and months later, the apps are still in limbo

On the bright side, at least Palm actually replied to some of the emails. [jwz via Daring Fireball]

Recorded video is fairly clear and in color (see for yourself below), but some video software won't play the file yet. VLC or SMPlayer should work OK, though. And given the Pre can reportedly manage 720x480 video at 30fps, they definitely still have a ways to go.

But overall, this is great news. And considering Palm's semi-support for the homebrew community, maybe an official solution isn't a pipe dream. In the meantime, you can grab the open source test application and try it yourself. You'll need to know what you're doing, though. [PreCentral]