As rumoured earlier that Palm is working on multiple webOS devices, here is more info on the same. Apparently somewhere in the webOS code buried are references to new devices(roadrunner is Palm Pre 2) :

if ((machineType.contentEquals(“broadway”)) ||
(machineType.contentEquals(“windsor”)) ||
(machineType.contentEquals(“mantaray”)) ||
(machineType.contentEquals(“stingray”)) ||
(machineType.contentEquals(“roadrunner”)))
{ this.flasherLogger.logPrintln(“temporarily not
restoring logs for newer devices”);

So, pretty good days ahead for webOS fans like me and you . Will update as more news comes out on this.

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Finally after one n half year or so we are treated with all new Palm Pre 2 which comes loaded with updated Web OS 2.0. Although there was not a complete overhaul on the hardware front but Palm did modify(for better) the Palm Pre 2 to suit the Web OS 2.0 it houses.

Some Features Include :
Processor : 1GHZ
Display : 3.1-inch multitouch screen with a vibrant 24-bit color, 320×480 resolution HVGA display
Digital camera : 5-megapixel camera with LED flash, extended depth of field, geotagging, and video capture
Memory : 16GB
Headphone jack : 3.5mm stereo

For full tech spec sheet please check out the official page. Palm Pre 2 will be launched in US with Verizon Wireless, so Palm seems to be going away from their last year network partner Sprint. More details on the Pre 2 coming soon, for more info please check out the press release included below which will give out more info the whole release and Palm plans for the new smartphone.

HP Introduces webOS 2.0, the Next Generation of Mobile Innovation

Coming first on new Palm Pre 2 in France, the United States and Canada
PALO ALTO, Calif., Oct. 19, 2010

HP today announced HP webOS 2.0, the most significant update to the platform since its launch in 2009 and a substantial step in HP’s vision to transform how people think, feel and connect.

The first device to run webOS 2.0, HP’s new Palm Pre 2 smartphone, will be available Friday in France from SFR and is scheduled to be available in the coming months in the United States from Verizon Wireless and in Canada.

“With webOS 2.0, we’re advancing the innovations we introduced 16 months ago, expanding the features that make webOS great for consumers, enterprises and developers,” said Jon Rubinstein, senior vice president and general manager, Palm Global Business Unit, HP. “We’ve made tremendous strides since the platform launched, and now we’re taking our biggest leap forward with powerful new features that make it easier to get more things done with your webOS device.”

webOS 2.0 offers consumers compelling application experiences not available on any other platform, while providing developers an unparalleled level of openness to integrate their applications and services. The next generation of webOS makes it easier to get more done:

* True Multitasking – Pause a game, tap an email notification, check your calendar, read a restaurant review, send an email reply, then switch back to the game without closing anything.(1,2) webOS lets you easily manage multiple open applications and notifications using natural touch gestures. New in webOS 2.0, Stacks logically groups together your open apps so they work the way you do. Whether you’re reading email or planning a night on the town, Stacks keeps related items together so managing multiple tasks is even easier.
* Just Type – Start an email, create a message, update your status, search your favorite websites – all before you’ve even opened an app.(1) With webOS 2.0, whenever you want to do something on your phone – whether it’s emailing, texting, searching or almost anything – just type. And Just Type is open to developers, so they can integrate with the search function and add their own user-customizable shortcuts, called Quick Actions.
* HP Synergy – webOS was the first mobile OS to connect you seamlessly to multiple web services. With the Synergy feature, you just have to sign in to your Facebook, Google, Microsoft® Exchange, LinkedIn and Yahoo! accounts and your information automatically populates your phone.(3) webOS 2.0 will extend the support for Synergy so developers can easily plug new Messaging, Contacts and Calendar application sources directly into the core webOS experiences.(4)
* Exhibition – A new way to use your webOS phone, Exhibition lets you run apps designed specifically for the Palm Touchstone Charging Dock, turning charge time into useful time.(4,5) Set your phone on the dock and Exhibition launches automatically, showing you anything from today’s agenda to a slideshow of your Facebook photos. Exhibition will enable developers to display aspects of their existing app experience or create specialized apps for use when users have their webOS device in charge mode on the charging dock.
* Adobe® Flash Player 10.1 Beta – With version 2.0, webOS now supports a beta of Adobe Flash Player 10.1 in the browser, which provides access to rich, Flash-based web content.(6)

webOS 2.0 also includes many more new features, including the following:

* Favorites – With webOS 2.0, you can tag your favorite contacts so they appear as favorites in Phone and Contacts views. When you search for them by name, they instantly show up at the top of the Contacts, Email, Messaging and Phone apps. Favorites make it simple to get in touch fast.
* Skype Mobile™ (Verizon Wireless only) – For Verizon Wireless customers, webOS 2.0 supports Skype-to-Skype calls and messaging while in the United States to anywhere in the world, and low-rate calls to international landlines and cell phones.
* Text Assist – webOS 2.0 offers greatly expanded capabilities to spell check, auto correct, set up macros and customize the dictionary.
* Quickoffice Connect Mobile Suite – An all-new document viewer from the leading provider of mobile document viewers offers support for Microsoft Office Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents and provides integration with a variety of services, including Google Docs and Dropbox.
* Facebook 2.0 – Available via the Palm App Catalog, Facebook 2.0 will support Facebook IM via Synergy in the Messaging application,(4) as well as Stacks, status updates via Quick Action and the Exhibition feature.
* Browser – The browser adds support for more HTML5 features, including geolocation support. OpenSearch plug-in support makes it easy to add your favorite websites to Just Type web search.
* Messaging – The unified Messaging app in webOS 2.0 adds Yahoo! IM and buddy management. Customers can now connect to their buddies through SMS, MMS, Google Talk, AIM and Yahoo! IM.
* VPN – webOS 2.0 supports the most popular ways to connect to a corporate network, including IPsec and Cisco AnyConnect mobile-optimized VPN, which supports SSL (TLS and DTLS).
* App Catalog – The redesigned Palm App Catalog makes finding and discovering great apps even easier.(7) And the new Software Manager helps you keep your apps up-to-date.
* Launcher – A redesigned app launcher lets you add, label and reorder launcher pages.
* Phone – The webOS 2.0 Phone app lets you easily dial your favorites and offers reverse area code lookup and Skype Mobile integration (Skype Mobile for Verizon Wireless only). Accounts – The new Accounts app provides a single place to manage all your Synergy accounts.
* Bluetooth® keyboards – webOS now supports Bluetooth keyboards and Bluetooth SPP peripherals, enabling applications such as barcode readers and realty lock boxes.
* A host of developer features – In addition to Exhibition, Just Type and Synergy APIs, webOS 2.0 adds Node.JS, enabling developers to create services in JavaScript. They also can now use the webOS Plug-In Development Kit (PDK) to combine C/C++ with web technologies in a single app.

More information about the features of webOS 2.0 is available at www.palm.com/softwareupdate.

Introducing Palm Pre 2

HP also introduced the Palm Pre 2 smartphone, the latest evolution to the Palm Pre lineup. Pre 2 is the first Palm phone with a gigahertz processor and features a 5-megapixel camera, a glass screen and a sleeker, streamlined design that still gives users the ideal combination of a vivid touchscreen and a slide-out keyboard.

More information about Palm Pre 2, including features and specifications, is available at www.palm.com/Pre2.

Availability

Palm Pre 2 featuring webOS 2.0 will be available Friday in France from SFR and is scheduled to be available in the coming months in the United States from Verizon Wireless and in Canada. The webOS 2.0 update will be delivered to existing customers in the coming months, with exact timing to be announced at a later date.

Developers will be able to purchase unlocked UMTS versions of Pre 2 in the United States to use as a canvas to build the next generation of webOS applications and services. More information about the purchase program will be available at http://developer.palm.com/devdevices.html.

There is a new application as well, its NFL Mobile Live from Sprint .

Here is the complete list of features being released in the webOS 1.1 update :

New applications

NFL Mobile Live from Sprint

• Watch or listen to live NFL games right on your phone.

Feature changes to existing applications

Calendar

• For Calendar accounts you create on your phone, the default reminder intervals are 15 minutes for timed events and one day for all-day events. A few notes:
  • This change applies only if software version 1.1 was on your phone when you bought it, or if you did a partial or full erase on your phone and signed in to your Palm profile again after updating to version 1.1. If you simply update your phone to software version 1.1, the default reminder intervals in Calendar do not change.
  • This change applies only to Calendar events you create on your phone, not to events that are synchronized to your phone from an online account.

Camera

• The Photos application opens more quickly when launched from the camera.

Clock

• Enhanced support for time zones in Clock.
• When you set an alarm in Clock, an alarm icon appears in the notification area at the bottom of the screen. Tap the icon to display alarm details. Alarm details include the following:
  • If the alarm is set for the current day, the alarm time appears.
  • If the alarm is set for tomorrow, the alarm time and “Tomorrow” appear.
  • If the alarm is set for any day other than today or tomorrow, the day of the alarm appears.

Contacts

• Friends added and deleted in Facebook on the web are now correctly added and deleted in the Facebook account in Contacts on the phone.
• As soon as you create or makes changes to a Google contact on the phone, the phone begins a sync to reflect those changes in Google on the web.

Email

• When you set up an Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) email account, you can enter the mail server name as an IP address.
• Support for self-signed certificates with multiple common names has been added.
• When you reply to an email in HTML format using an EAS account, the formatting of the sender’s original message is now retained in the reply.
• Palm’s EAS implementation now supports several Exchange ActiveSync Policies, including the following:
  • PIN/Password Required. IT administrators can ensure a password is assigned to the phone. Administrators can also specify the minimum length of the password.
  • Inactivity timeout. IT administrators can ensure that an inactive phone goes into a locked state after a certain time period. You cannot set a higher timeout interval for your phone, but you can set a shorter interval.
  • Remote Wipe. IT Administrators can remotely erase all data on a phone from their Exchange console. IT administrators can also have the device wipe itself if an incorrect password is entered more than a specified number of times.

Messaging

• You can enter emoticons in new text, multimedia, and instant messages. Emoticons also display in incoming messages.
• If you set the phone to use a 24-hour time format, the message times shown in a conversation appear in 24-hour time.
• If you go into an IM account’s preferences, all the options are available even if you are signed in to the account. You can tap Remove Account to delete the account, enter a new password to update the password, or tap Sign In to sign in with your updated password. Previously, you needed to sign out of the account before you could use these preferences.
• When you delete an IM account, a message now appears asking you to confirm that you want to delete the account.

Phone

• When multiple missed call notifications are displayed on the dashboard, the time of the most recent missed call is shown.
• When you slide the ringer switch off, a bell icon with a slash is displayed. Previously, the icon was a speaker with a slash.
• In Phone Preferences, the Show Contact Matches preference is now turned on by default. When typing on the keyboard in the phone app, the phone automatically displays both the numbers being entered and any contact matches for the characters entered.

System

• Improved functionality of person reminders. A person reminder is a notification that you create in a contact entry. The notification appears when you have a call or exchange an email, text, multimedia, or IM message with a contact.
• Resolves an issue preventing media sync from working with latest version of iTunes (8.2.1).
• When you enter a search term in Card view or the Launcher to perform a universal search, if you select the Wikipedia web search option, results are shown in the Wikipedia Mobile site instead of the Desktop site.

Web

• You can now use symbols from the symbols table (Sym + key) when you enter text into a web page dialog box.
• If you have a page open at a certain zoom level, leave the page, and use the onscreen Back button or the back gesture to return to the page, the zoom level is restored right away.
• A new gesture is now available that works the same as the onscreen Forward button. To move forward through open web pages, make a short swipe left to right in the gesture area.
• When using the Wikipedia drop-down search feature in the address bar, results are shown in the Wikipedia Mobile site instead of the Desktop site.
• When you tap a link, the link appears highlighted to indicate it has been activated, even if it takes a moment for the linked page to open.

YouTube

• After you enter search text, you can tap the Search icon to perform a search. You still have the option of pressing Enter to perform the search.

There are also some undocumented features included in the release which are being tracked by PreCentral at link .

So in all its a pretty big update with introducing lots of features, plus making things to work faster will always be good .

Do check out the Palm Pre Updates Page on how to install updates or details of the past webOS releases.

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There are also some inbuilt applications coming up with update but their details are still not released. I will update as soon as more news comes out on this.

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If are not having on idea on installing the updates please check out the Palm Pre Updates Page.

New update for Palm Pre webOs is available now. There are no new applications being added in this update but existing applications are getting new features.

Feature changes to existing applications

Calendar
Events created in your Google calendar—either in Calendar on your phone or in Google online—that contain a symbol or accented character in the event name can now synchronize. Previously, including a symbol or accented character in an event name prevented the event from synchronizing.
Changes made to Google events on the phone now sync with Google online within a few minutes.
The sync interval for Google events has been decreased from every few hours to every 15 minutes.

Clock
If you create a weekday alarm on a weekend, the alarm sounds only on weekdays. Previously the alarm would sound on the weekend also.

Contacts

Changes made to Google contacts on the phone now sync with Google online within a few minutes.
The sync interval for Google contacts has been decreased from every few hours to every 15 minutes.

Email

Power performance in areas where wireless coverage is sporadic or unavailable has been enhanced.
Non-SSL Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) mail servers are now supported.
Other

Miscellaneous updates for Email, Phone, and other applications.

via

The firmware included a new clock app and few addition features. Below is the complete list of additions :

New applications
Clock

• Use your phone as an alarm clock.
• Create and save multiple alarms.
• Customize sounds for individual alarms.
• View a full-screen time display.
• Switch the time display between analog and digital.

Feature changes to existing applications

Camera

• Increased speed of return to capture mode when taking successive photos.

Other

• Numerous bug fixes for Email, Calendar, and other applications.

More details on Palm’s website.

Also do check out Palm Pre update page, where I will be tracking all the Palm Pre related updates, it also includes steps on how to install the app.