I wrote about the Palm Pre back in June.  Just heard that Telstra have no plans to introduce it to Australia.

The Pre, and Palm are dead, they just don’t realise it yet.

Tethering is the process of connecting your phone to your laptop, and then using it as a modem.

Carriers hate this when you do this without them knowing, because you’re using their bandwidth for something they have not costed.
ie. the Palm Pre will use x amount of the internet (bandwidth), where a laptop tethered to a Palm Pre will use x + y bandwidth.

Sure, some carriers will still you a “”tethering”” plan, but that’s going to cost you more money.

So cell phone carriers get very annoyed when instructions are published on how to get tethering for free:

We have been politely cautioned by Palm (in private, and not by any legal team) that any discussion of tethering during the Sprint exclusivity period (and perhaps beyond—we don’t know yet) will probably cause Sprint to complain to Palm, and if that happened then Palm would be forced to react against the people running the IRC channel and this wiki. There has been no legal action of any sort.

We want to retain a good relationship with Palm, since we believe that will be better for the whole developer ecosystem in the long run. For that reason, we are not allowing discussion of tethering on the IRC channel, or in this wiki. There is no secret agreement with Palm, and the IRC channel and this wiki receive no special access to any information that is not publicly available already. This development group has simply decided to take a stand and do things the right way instead of violating legal agreements.

…

– Palm Dev Wiki

I found it ironic that the Pre Dev Wiki who’s motto is, “Let’s open this beast up”, shut down discussion on how to open up the beast for tethering.

Instructions on how to tether the Palm Pre can be found here.

Update:

The Palm Dev Wiki folks forgot to delete the old page from the wiki history.  Here it is:

Now that the Pre has been rooted, we hope to have a tethering solution soon. Until then, I am still exploring the option of a Mobile IP Host Agent gateway. This is easily done with commercial routers from Cisco, Juniper, HP, etc. I am exploring open source options at the moment, with my most hopeful candidate being DD-WRT.

* To view your connectivity settings, dial ##DATA#
* To edit them, you will need your MSL. If you do not know how to get this, ask google or search the forums
* The Home Agent IPs are the last two on the page
* The Primary IP of 255.255.255.255 connects you to the closest Sprint Home Agent. The secondary is tied to a specific region. See here for more information: Sprint ##DATA tuning

Research links:

* AAA Protocol
* Cisco Mobile IP whitepaper
* Cisco 101: Mobile IP
* Juniper Mobile IP docs

It’s been a week since the Palm Pre was released in the USA.

The reviews on the first day were glowing.

By tech journalists.  Who I generally distrust, as they haven’t met a free lunch, or product, they have not liked.
Heck we just need to look at the reviews of the BlackBerry Storm (over-hyped) and HTC Touch Diamond (slow, freezes) , to see glowing reviews of horrible products.

Oh, I understand the pressures of a working journalist.  “Would Sir like the 1962 Grange, or the Kopi Luwak?”

So, we arrive at the Palm Pre.  It’s been a week, what have the average users out there found wrong with the Pre?

• Sluggish at times
• Keyboard too small
• Battery life poor
• Camera does not record video

I think these flaws will be sorted out at the next major Pre software upgrade.  But does the Pre have a future?

Ultimately no.

Apple announced an update to the iPhone last week, the 3GS.  With claimed performance increases of “up to twice the performance of the iPhone 3G”, It’s going to kill off Palm Inc.