Promising bigger and better things for the future, Palm’s email to customers about the HP purchase (or is it HP’s email to customers about the purchase of Palm? We can’t tell anymore...) indicated that there is indeed a new generation of Palm webOS products brewing (emphasis ours):

Great news. Palm is now part of the HP family. And that means bigger and better things for customers like you. With the power of HP behind us, the excitement created by the first Palm® webOS™ phones will grow even stronger as we introduce a new generation of devices. At the same time, you’ll still receive the same outstanding support that you’ve come to expect from Palm.

Of course, that’s little surprise, and the folks at Palm, Inc., a subsidiary of Hewlett-Packard, is being their characteristic tight-lipped selves. New smartphones? A tablet or two? Sure, maybe.

But what else does HP make that could benefit from a dose of webOS goodness? A lot, it would seem. A quick perusal of HP’s product catalog reveals a veritable cornucopia of devices ripe for some newness. Apart from the printers that HP keeps crowing about, and the tablets they keep hinting at, several other devices fit the bill. How about a webOS-powered netbook? Or a TouchSmart desktop PC running super-sized webOS? What of the webOS digital photo frame that passively brings seamless multi-tasking to your desk? Or maybe we could see the resurrection of the PDA, this time running the awesomeness that is webOS? Okay, maybe that last one's a bit far-fetched.

The possibilities for the future of webOS on HP devices are pretty much wide open. Only time will tell where webOS is going to end up, but we wouldn’t be surprised if more than a few HP devices outside of the Palm division are running webOS this time next year.

Source: Palm

Android Central sends word that Adobe is touting that Flash 10.1 for mobile is finally done, finished, and has been released to their partners - including Palm.

Flash Player 10.1 was also released to mobile platform partners to be supported on devices based on Android, BlackBerry, webOS, future versions of Windows® Phone, LiMo, MeeGo and Symbian OS, and is expected to be made available via over-the-air downloads and to be pre-installed on smart phones, tablets and other devices in the coming months.

In other words, the pressure is apparently on Palm now to ensure that Flash appears in the App Catalog and right quick. Our feeling: even if using Flash for games doesn't pan out as well as some have hoped, at least we can all stop waiting for it to arrive.

Source: Adobe; full press release after the break

Thanks to everybody who sent this in!

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Launched at the beginning of February, Palm’s Hot Apps competition promises to award $1 million to the top free and paid apps in the Palm App Catalog. Since then, the competition has chugged quietly along, but today got a boost in the arm from Palm. The newly-launched PalmHotApps.com lets you, me, and anybody else with one of those fancy-pants web browser things hop onto the interwebs and track the competition for themselves.

The website breaks down both halves of the competition, paid and free apps, listing the most-downloaded free apps since the start of the competition (currently lead by MojoJungle’s The Helicopter Game) and the highest-revenue paid apps since up to this point in the competition (YouView’s Visual Voicemail at the front). The site also tracks the progress of apps qualifying for the Hot Apps competition, rating their change in ranking from day-to-day and listing up-and-coming apps.

We also have gotten a better idea of what it’ll take to qualify for a piece of the Hot Apps pie: More than 11,625 downloads for a free app, or more than $513.81 in revenue for a paid app. Of course, that number is bound to rise over the remaining 78 days of the competition, but it seems that the barrier for entry is rather low for the time being.

A Hot Apps refresher: The most-downloaded free app between February 1 and June 30 will win $100,000, the #2-21 free apps will be awarded $10,000, and #22-221 will win $1,000. The highest-revenue paid app will net $100,000 at the end of the competition, while #2-21 will get $10,000, and #22-221 will win $1,000 apiece. That’s $1,000,000 total, split amongst 442 developers.

Oh, and if that June 30 date doesn't seem right, that's because Palm has extended the end of the Hot Apps competition from May 31 to June 30!

Or, “Why we didn’t see webOS 1.4 yesterday as was rumored.”

With multiple carrier partners, Palm’s update schedule for webOS has a tendency to leak out, especially from Sprint. Rarely has the leaked date lined up with the actual release, but before now that hasn’t been a huge deal. We’re writing this to address the consternation in the comments and forums over the fact that the webOS 1.4 update was not pushed out on the 15th as had been leaked.

Updates to webOS are a multi-step process between Palm, developers, and carriers. We'll break down how it all works after the break.

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The “Send All Contacts via Email” patch by bsiegel provides a way to get your contacts out of the Palm Profile and into whatever you want. The patch adds the menu option to export your contacts into a standard vCard file (which can take a while if you have a lot) and then attaches that file to an email for you to send to wherever you desire. We’ll use Google as an example here: once exported you can save the vCard file to your computer, and then upload all the contacts to Google by opening Contacts and clicking on Import.

Apart from transferring your contacts from the Palm Profile to Google, you can also use the patch to perform backups of your contacts data, as the patch does not discriminate between sources like Google, Palm, and Exchange.

Thanks to Matt for the tip!

UPDATE: We have a changelog after the break for you, but what's important may not be in there. According to German-language tech site Heise Mobil, Palm has baked and enabled bluetooth tethering into webOS 1.3.5.2. Users in our forum have tested this out and wonder of wonders, it works.

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