Little T in the Cog mobile

Archive for January 2012

webOS 2.2.4 on the veer

2012-01-09

Well I couldn't wait - with AT&T dragging it's feet over the Veer update (and really, after being so badly burned by HP who can blame them?) I've gone ahead and run the manual update procedure to bring my Veer up to 2.2.4 (which the Pre 2 and Pre 3 are also now on). I've been using it like this for about 10 days now and I'm really pleased - it certainly seems a bit more responsive and I haven't come across some of the bugs I used to get on 2.1.2 (like phone crashing, too-many-card errors even when there weren't any other cards open etc). The only problem I've had so far was once when going from my hands free kit in the car to normal speaker all sound stopped and I couldn't hear the other person at all until I rebooted the phone but hopefully I won't encounter that particular bug again :-)

But the main thing is I now have Skype integration! I've used it a few times already and it works really well (no camera obviously as the Veer has no forward facing camera), integrating seamlessly with the phone dialler and the messaging app (all txt's, Google talk and Skype updates appear in the same message thread - really handy!). As well as that I can now send and receive txt messages on my TouchPad (not really too fussed about this tbh but is kinda neat), the camera app starts up much faster and everything seems to scroll around much smoother than before.

It's not all gravy however - the biggest problem is my battery life seems to have taken a bit of a hit since the upgrade (I'm hoping that this is because I'm always signed into Skype which should stop once the novelty wears off a bit, I'll try tomorrow going without being signed in and see if that improves things) and also Bing maps have got even worse (I didn't think that was possible!), being very slow to load and stuttering badly when panning around. I want my Google maps back HP! Seriously, Bing may be awesome in the US but here in NZ it is next to useless...

I know it's been said so much it should be Palm's slogan but *this* is the software version that the Veer should have been released on!