Also this week: AT&T ditches is bargain messaging plans; Netflix streaming gets kid-friendly; I go eyes-on with a new glasses-free 3D phone; free Hulu videos on your PlayStation 3 with a magic (well, sort of) Blu-ray disc; and how to decline calls on your iPhone without making enemies.

HP kills off HP TouchPad tablet, leaves mobile WebOS platform in the lurch
Once upon a time, there was a once-great smartphone company called Palm (remember the Treo?) that had fallen behind the times in the wake of the game-changing iPhone. Palm aimed for the fences with WebOS, a gorgeous touchscreen phone interface that rivaled Apple’s, but the resulting phones didn’t hit a home run with consumers.

Then HP came along and bought the struggling Palm, pledging to take the promising WebOS platform and make it its own, starting with a series of new handsets and the enticing TouchPad tablet.

Sounds like a heartwarming story—especially for those consumers who’d taken a bet on WebOS phones like the Pre, the Veer, and the new Pre3. Except this story doesn’t have a happy ending, as a stunned tech industry learned Thursday. Read more…

Google to buy Motorola: What it means to you
Once upon a time (yes, there’s a theme here), Motorola was the mightiest cell phone maker in the world (you remember the glorious RAZR, right?), while Google was just another frog in a big pond of search engines. But then something funny happened.

Google got really good at search and advertising, and it got bigger and bigger. It also invented Android, a software platform for smartphones that gave even the mighty iPhone a run for its money.

Motorola, meanwhile, managed to kill the RAZR that had laid so many golden eggs, and it started to flounder. But then it paddled over to Android and stayed afloat, making some pretty good Android phones in the process.

Now Google says it wants to buy Motorola, and Moto couldn’t be happier. But the other companies making Android phones are feeling spurned (and what about your non-Motorola Android phone, by the way?), while others think Google had an ulterior motive for sweeping Motorola off its feet. Read more…

Whatever happened to cheap messaging plans for cell phones?
The days of getting monthly “buckets” of, say, 200 or 500 messages for your cell phone seem to be numbered, with AT&T announcing Thursday that new customers who want to text will either a) have to sign up for a pricey unlimited plan, or b) pay through the nose for each individual text or picture message. Unfortunately, there might be a trend here. Read more…

Skype offers by-the-minute Wi-Fi for iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch
Ready for some good news? If you’ve got an iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch, you can now buy Wi-Fi time at more than a million global hotspots by the minute, rather than by the hour or day—all thanks to a new Skype app. Read more…

LG Thrill review: Fuzzy outlook for a glasses-free 3D smartphone
3D without glasses? Great, right? Not so much. Read more…

Orb Blu-ray disc lets you watch Hulu videos on your PlayStation 3, no subscription required
A new Blu-ray disc for the PlayStation 3 lets you skirt around Hulu’s $8-a-month subscription fee for watching TV shows on your big-screen HDTV. But it’s not magic, and it’s not the easiest thing in the world to use. Read more…

iPhone tip: A sneakier way to send incoming calls to voice mail
There are, in fact, two ways of sending an incoming call to voice mail on the iPhone—one a bit sneakier than the other. Read more…

Netflix’s “Just for Kids”: Yes to iCarly and Big Bird, no to Rambo and Jason
Nope, Freddie Krueger and Tony Soprano aren’t invited to Netflix’s “Just for Kids” party. Read more…

Google brings (more) catalog shopping to the iPad
The new—and free—Google Catalogs app takes all the paper catalogs piled on your coffee table and puts them on the iPad, perfect for searching, tapping, and swiping. Read more…

Don’t want to download “Lion”? Try Apple’s $69 USB installation drive
Now there’s an alternative for Mac users who’d rather install Mac OS X “Lion” using good, old-fashioned packaged media: a (pricey) USB thumb drive. Read more…

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Barely a month and a half after launching the TouchPad tablet, HP shocked the tech world Thursday by abruptly announcing (as reported by All Things Digital) that it will discontinue its iPad competitor—and not only that, it will also stop making any and all devices running on the once-promising WebOS mobile platform.

This is jaw-dropping news for those of us who’ve been covering the saga of WebOS, the impressive touchscreen operating system that powered devices ranging from the Palm Pre to the TouchPad.

The much-hyped TouchPad tablet only landed in stores (with a thud, according to some reports) a little more than a month ago.

The once-$499, then $399 TouchPad was greeted with mixed reviews, with the tablet winning praise for its “attractive and different interface” while also getting slammed for its “rather hefty” shell, “lack of polish,” and poor battery life.

So, what was the big deal about WebOS? Here’s how I described it back in June:

First introduced back in 2009 on the Palm Pre smartphone, WebOS is a truly beautiful, intuitive, and rather powerful touchscreen platform that boasts features like email and text alerts that bubble up unobtrusively from the bottom of the screen, the ability to seamlessly pull contact information for your social-networking friends into your Address Book, and application windows organized like a deck of cards that you can swipe back and forth, or flick up when you’re ready to quit.

Sounds nifty, right? But the Palm Pre never took off with consumers, and the financially-crippled Palm (which, let’s not forget, was behind the legendary Treo smartphone from the late 2000s) was finally snapped up by HP last year.

Die-hard WebOS fans hoped that the innovative platform could get a second lease on life with the resources of HP behind it. But with today’s news, it’s clear that HP has decided to cut its losses and move on.

The move would appear to strand just about anyone who did buy the TouchPad, not to mention newer WebOS handsets like the Pre3 and the Veer. Hopefully, we’ll get more news on how HP plans to handle customer service for its remaining WebOS customers.

For its part, HP says it will “continue to explore options to optimize the value of WebOS software going forward.” Personally, though, I wouldn’t take any comfort in that pronouncement.

So, anyone out there with a HP TouchPad they’d like to trade in?

Note: I haven’t even mentioned the other mind-bending announcement from HP today—that it’s looking to unload its PC business. Yes, that’s HP … no longer selling PCs. Mind blown.

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At the other end lie the latest, feature-packed smartphones, armed with mammoth color touchscreens, high-resolution cameras, full-on keypads worthy of a typewriter, brains the size of yesterday’s supercomputers, and price tags to match.

But there’s also another category that tends to crop up whenever you go cell-phone shopping: the mysterious, so-called “feature” phone.

OK, so what’s a feature phone? Are we talking some kind of middle-of-the-road cell phone, with some of the fancier smartphone features (like full QWERTY keypads and video cameras), or maybe a basic phone with a dash of style (like flashy colors or slim profiles)? What’s the deal?

Well, here’s the thing: A “feature” phone is a label used by many cell phone carriers to describe just about any phone that isn’t a smartphone—including everything from the most basic, bottom-of-the-line handsets to fancier phones with music players, camera, and even touchscreens.

So, what defines a “smartphone,” then?

These days, we think of smartphones as handsets that run on a mobile “platform” like Apple’s iOS (for the iPhone), Android (which powers phones like the Motorola Droid), BlackBerry, Microsoft’s Windows Phone (or Windows Mobile, as it used to be called), Web OS (from HP), and Nokia’s “Symbian” operating system.

These “platforms” are basically scaled-down versions of desktop operating systems, like Windows on your PC or Mac OS for the MacBook or iMac. They can run sophisticated applications (or apps) and games with 3-D graphics, as well as get regular updates that add new features (like voice commands or turn-by-turn driving directions) to the handset.

If your phone doesn’t run on any of those platforms (and if you’re not sure, ), then it’s probably a “feature” phone—even if it comes with such bells and whistles as a color touchscreen, a video player, a high-resolution camera, downloadable games, or even a full-on QWERTY keypad that slides out from beneath the display.

At the end of the day, of course, it’s the carriers who decide what’s a “feature” phone and what isn’t—a key distinction when it comes to your monthly cell phone bill.

While smartphones typically require pricey wireless data plans, on the order of at least $25 a month, “feature” phones will let you browse the web, post to Facebook, and check your email for as little as $10 or a month—or you can even skip the data plan altogether if you only want to use your phone for phone calls (imagine that).

Got more questions about “feature” phones versus smartphones? Let me know!

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Meanwhile, it’s still not even clear whether the number of tablet apps in the Android Market has hit four figures yet (Fortune has the number pegged at about 1,300, while GigaOm says it’s a mere 170), while the HP TouchPad (which runs on another mobile software platform, dubbed WebOS) will have only 300 or so tablet-optimized apps available for its Friday launch.

here’s the thing: 100,000 apps versus a few hundred—the numbers pretty much speak for themselves.

Source: MacStories

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