Yesterday, I brought word of a relatively minor update to Palm’s WebOS operating system, for those of you using a Palm Pre on Sprint’s network.  While WebOS 1.3.1 had a few bells and whistles (you are welcome Yahoo users) it was mainly a maintenance upgrade.  Although there were a few hints of things to come (video recording, perhaps??).  Which begs the question, how did such a minor upgrade break so much on my Palm Pre.  Seriously, while an upgrade to the operating system can often cause some minor, unforeseen quirks, this is worth than anything I saw with Windows Mobile or the iPod Touch.  Let’s take a look at what was broken as a result of this minor upgrade:

Hey…my apps don’t work.  Yes, that is right.  Quite a few apps, particularly homebrew apps, are not compatible with WebOS 1.3.1.  That was certainly unexpected.  I woke up after installing WebOS and found that most of my commonly used apps would no longer load.  It took a little hunting through the homebrew forums, but I did find that many of these apps have been updated in the last week, so pay attention to those updates.

Hey, my email and calendar don’t work.  I am not saying this is related to Yahoo (it really is not) but at the same time they Palm offers syncing through Yahoo, they shatter Exchange sync.  Fortunately, I do not use Exchange for anything except my secondary email account, but the forums were in an uproar from one end of the Internet to another over this one.  hopefully, a patch will be coming soon.

Hey, nothing works.  I have noticed a lot of little things that do not work the way they should.  Some folks reported in various forums that they cannot install any new apps. Fortunately, I have not experienced this myself, though I have found that many of my keyboard shortcuts no longer work…which makes it difficult to take any screenshots.

to say I am disappointed would be an understatement.  For a minor maintenance upgrade to break significantly more than it fixes is absurd.  I certainly hope that Palm gets a fix for their fix soon.  I hate to say it, but this is exactly the reason Palm has had so many former users lately.  Hopefully, they are not sliding back to their old ways so soon after such a large success.  With Android threatening to overtake Palm (or have they done so already), they really do need to be careful they do not slip into the trash heap of great design, poor execution. 

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