Are you a competitive person?  Do you compete with close friends or family members?  Are you so competitive that if you got a high score in a video game that you would want to rub that in the face of share that wonderful accomplishment with someone you love?  If you answered yes to these questions, then you are the type of customer that Apple and Palm may have had in mind when they designed one of my favorite features on the iPhone OS and webOS, the built-in screenshot function.

My wife and I have had a “friendly” competition with Bejeweled on the iPhone.  She quickly beat my highest score and then I never had a chance…until our son was born.  I found that a game like Bejeweled is a great way to pass the time when you are feeding an infant with one arm, which really gets in the way of other games like Resident Evil 4 or Need for Speed Underground.  To make a long story short, I finally destroyed beat my wife’s high score in Bejeweled.  Now the problem was that she was not around for me to prove it and I know she wouldn’t believe me unless I showed her proof.

Enter the great screenshot feature that Apple built into their iPhone OS.  All you do is press the power/top button and at the same time hit the home button.  Your screen will flash for a second and whatever was on your screen will be saved to your iPhone.  All I had to do was send her a MMS attach the screenshot to an email to share this life-altering accomplishment with my wife.

Like Apple, Palm also built a screenshot function into the Pre.  Their solution requires holding down the Orange + Shift + P buttons.  While I find the iPhone method quicker and easier, I ultimately prefer the execution of the Palm screenshot function.  The iPhone puts the screenshots in your Camera Roll, which is also where all photos you take with the camera and any pictures you save from a third party app are stored.  The Pre saves the screenshots in a category called Screen captures and that is all that goes into that category.  The Pre also has more meaningful names since it will actually include the name of the program you took the screenshot of in the file name.  If that wasn’t enough, Palm also stores both a .JPG and .PNG version of the screenshot if you connect your Pre to a computer in Mass Storage Mode.

Now, you might be asking yourself, what keys to I use if I am using Windows Mobile…or S60…or Android…or a Blackberry?  The quick answer is, without installing third party software, you don’t.

Big props to Apple and Palm for including a feature that has been overlooked by many others over the years.  I know that I really appreciate the fact that I can easily take screenshots of any app that I am reviewing without having to fool with third party software.

Does anyone else regularly use the screenshot functions on your phones?  If so, what do you use the screenshot feature to do?

Just caught this over at TechCrunch, and all I can say is Holy (you know what).  Apparently, someone let loose that a Palm Pre 2 (or related WebOS device) could be coming as soon as this fall.  Here is about all the information TechCrunch could offer:

The details are still slim – it’s a smaller device (and hopefully that means slimmer), but it will run Palm’s new WebOS operating system that everyone is raving about. We’re trying to determine if the device has a physical keyboard – no word on that yet.

Not a lot of detail, but it does offer quite a few areas of concern.  What could news like this, true or not, mean for initial sales of the Palm Pre?  A lot of people may hear this rumor and decide to wait for the new version (it is only a few months away).  I also wonder if Palm is not rapid firing their releases in order to essentially minimize the news cycle (or attempt to) of the upcoming iPhone 3. 

Finally, and more importantly, what the heck is WebOS going to look like?  How will it work?  Most of us have not even seen a WebOS device, and this already makes the initial offering look obsolete.  Rumors, innuendo, and speculation persist.  Let us know what you think.

[via TechCrunch]