One of the new apps in the Catalog is “The H. G. Wells Collection” by Appible and it goes for $3.50, there are nine of H.G. Wells’ sci-fi classics. But if you want something to read with the kids Appible also has Rudyard Kipling’s “The Jungle Book” for $0.99, which is a story of a child named Mowgli who is raised by the animals of the jungle.

There are more stories from Appible like Moby Dick, Peter Pan, The Scarlet Letter, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea, Wuthering Heights and even The Complete Works of Jane Austen. For those who want to save a complete webpage as a PDF there is PDFMyWeb Pro by IT-Dimension for $1.99 with options for low-quality and grayscale saving for bandwidth and storage savings.

There are a lot of good free and paid applications in the Catalog so go on and hit the App Catalog icon on your webOS smartphone and see which ones you like.

Another very important arrival with webOS 1.4 is ‘Enhanced notifications’, which makes the LED in the gesture area light up if you have a notification (even when the screen is off). And for those of you who wanted customize notification sounds we got new notification sounds in the ringtones library and we can customize the notification sounds in Messaging, Email (on an account-by-account basis), and Calendar.

When the update to webOS 1.4 arrived to us Sprint users many Pre owners with other carriers had to wait for their turn. Sprint in the US, O2 UK, O2 DE, O2 Ireland, and Movistar networks in Europe were among the first to get the update, others had to wait. So if you have a Pre or Pixi (normal or Plus) go on and enjoy the new features on your webOS device, record some clips and post them to youtube or facebook, or simply send them to your loved ones by MMS or email.

On the screenshot above you can see the new and improved call log — the image is from a UK GSM Pre as you can clearly see. There are already a lot more screenshots of the webOS 1.4 update on the web, but I will hold on until I get my update to post more “screen captures”.

A Precentral forum member on vacation in Vietnam has already the new webOS version (1.4) on his German unlocked Palm Pre. He even took a video with his webOS device and uploaded it to youtube, the video is not long and is in Spanish (from Spain, not from Latin America) but it looks good.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Verizon, Rubinstein says, have agreed that “their execution of [Palm's] launch was below expectations and recommitted to working with us to improve sales.”  This will involve greater advertising and more Palm “experts” attempting to teach would-be buyers why webOS should feature in their future.  Full email is below:

Team,

This morning we announced preliminary results for our 2010 third quarter. Since the quarter has not yet closed, it is too soon to offer exact numbers, but we stated that we expect to report revenues for Q3 between $300 and $320 million. We also announced that we expect our revenue for this fiscal year to fall below the guidance we gave to Wall Street, which ranged from $1.6 to $1.8 billion. As we mentioned in our press release, our softer than expected performance is due to slower than expected customer adoption of our products, which in turn has prompted our U.S. carrier partners to put additional orders on hold for the time being. On a positive note, we expect to exit the quarter with over $500 million in cash on our balance sheet. We’re scheduled to announce our full financial results in March.

I realize this news is difficult to swallow. We made this announcement today to prevent a surprise for Wall Street when we announce quarterly earnings in March. In the meantime, the entire executive team has been working extremely hard to improve product performance, and have implemented a number of initiatives to increase awareness and drive sales.

Dave Whalen and I just returned from a very successful meeting with Verizon Wireless, where they acknowledged that their execution of our launch was below expectations and recommitted to working with us to improve sales. To accelerate sales, we initiated Project JumpStart nearly three weeks ago. Since then, nearly two hundred Palm Brand Ambassadors, supplemented by Palm employees from Sunnyvale, have been training Verizon sales reps across the U.S. on our products. Early results from the stores have already shown improvement on product knowledge and sales week over week. You may have also seen a growing number of Palm ads on billboards, bus shelters, buses, and subway stations—all getting the word out about Palm.

All of these efforts are examples of how we are working to accelerate adoption and grow distribution of webOS. In the next few weeks, your management will work with you to make sure your priorities are laser-focused, primarily on helping to increase sales, improve product quality and differentiate the Palm product experience.

Our goals are taking longer than expected to achieve, but I am still confident that our talented team has what it takes to get the job done.

We’ll schedule an all-hands meeting after our earnings announcement in March, and I’ll be happy to answer your questions.

Go team!!!

jon

We have seen the Palm Pre from Sprint to go really low on price on different online vendors before. Now is time for the Pre Plus from Verizon to hit a lower price tag, Best Buy is selling the webOS handset for only $99.99 after instant rebates and a 2 year agreement.

But that’s not all, if you don’t need the Pre Plus or don’t want to spend $100 bucks on a phone than you can get the Pixi Plus at Best Buy for only zero dollars (after instant rebates and a 2 year contract with Verizon of course). In case you prefer Sprint’s service you’ll have to spend $79.99 on the Palm Pixi.

One of the new applications on the Catalog is called ‘All 15 Games FREE’ by DS Effects and of course is a free app. The app is actually a portal to download 15 different free games from the web distribution feed. Arcade Basketball, Mad Fighters and Jewels Mania are some of those 15 free games, if you have some time to kill or are just bored then go on and fire up this app and choose one of the free arcade style games and have fun.

Real Soccer 2010 by Gameloft is another game app on the Catalog but this one will set you back $6.99, it is a 3D game with 8 leagues and 245 teams populated by real players. Now if you are into quotes from famous people then you’ll be happy to see ‘L. Ron Hubbard Quotes’, ‘Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes’, ‘Lyndon B. Johnson Quotes’, ‘Martin Luther Quotes’, and ‘Mao Tse-Tung Quotes’ all from the Brighthouse Labs folks and each app will cost you $1.99.

webOS 1.4 is expected to bring with it the ability to record video using the smartphone’s previously still-only camera, together with paving the way for Flash 10.1 support.  However Flash 10.1 won’t actually be part of the update itself.  According to PreCentral’s sources, the update will begin distributing to users in 100,000 blocks, but can also be manually triggered.

This is all rumor right now, however, so we’ll have to wait until February 25th to see if it pans out.

On the last quarter of 2009 AdMob shows a significant growth for webOS traffic that they even gave the OS a color to itself (see image above). And unsurprisingly the iPhone still dominates these traffic reports as you can see on the charts above and below. Well, the only places the iPhone doesn’t have the control it commands in other parts of the world is in Africa and Asia, where Symbian is the dominating force (see image above).

The webOS platform has been so significant indeed that it got a place in both the Western Europe (shown below to the left) and North American (shown below to the right) Top smartphones of December 2009. If you like to get the entire AdMob report in Pdf format so you can check every single detail, go on and click here to download it.

The redesigned tab bar features more (and useful) search options (see image above) with Web, Images, Local and a drop down ‘more’ for everything else on there. Some of the extras on there are iGoogle, Shopping, YouTube, Gmail, Calendar, Photos, Docs, Reader, Talk, Translate, and Tasks.

After Tasks it gives you an ‘even more’ option to give you all the Google possibilities on there. Also, Google mobile now not only ’suggests’ as you type the words on the search space bar, but also gives you a search history as you can see on my screenshot (above). Everything here is very welcome but I really like to see other features like Latitude on my Palm Pre. Don’t you?

Remember the app named ‘This App Saves Lives’ by HFH from last time? Well now there’s another app in the Catalog trying to get those $100,000 that Palm is offering to the most downloaded app. The app is AutismAware by Shnerooni and is free of course, is not only to help people with autism but it also has information about the disease.

Another app that jumps up to you here is Endless Babes (free) by Funmobility. This app is not about naked women and that has many users really upset, as a matter of fact, this app doesn’t have the “Endless Babes” it promised. You also get new games and other interesting applications (free and paid), so go on and check them out.