[Mike] sent in this project he’s been working on. He has posted instructions on how to get your Palm Pre to tweet its GPS coordinates at regular intervals. It does require that you have Linux installed on your Pre, but that’s not that big of an issue as he has a tutorial for that too. Getting the tweet to happen involves setting up a custom PHP file that sends the tweet, then a cron job to get it to run on a schedule. He mentions this could be useful for finding a lost phone as well as keeping track of loved ones. We would like to see him add a script to do similar with a picture. Maybe take a picture and upload it every time a call is placed?
Pre Insiders has reported that the Pre’s Mojo SDK has been leaked to the internet. Palm was planning an early access program, eventually releasing the SDK by the end of the summer, but this leak has accelerated the process. They are posting several download links, including torrents, but they warn developers to use the tools wisely.
The newly released Palm Pre has been torn down by both Rapid Repair and iFixit. They note the easy to use interface, but the slide out keyboard makes for weird transitions. There’s nothing surprising on the hardware side except capacitive screen and LCD come as a single unit and would have to be replaced together if either fails.
The new Palm Pre cellphone has a “media sync” feature which lets the device sync with iTunes in a fashion identical to an iPod. Last week [Jon Lech Johansen] speculated that this was not done in cooperation with Apple and that Palm was spoofing the iPod’s USB controller. This was confirmed today when a tipster sent him a screenshot of what the device reports in both standard and media sync modes. The Palm Pre reports its Product ID as iPod and Vendor ID as Apple with a few other changes. [Jon] notes that it doesn’t change the root USB node, so Apple should be able to block this behavior with an iTunes update. With Palm already pulling tricks like this presumably through software we wonder if this will become a full-on arms race.
