A quiet Palm releases WebOS update

Palm has stayed very quiet since its releases of the Palm Pre and Pixi devices this summer, which debuted the WebOS that was at one point seen as a key rival to Apple's iPhone. Other than back-and-forth fights with Apple on the WebOS's ability to sync to iTunes, which Apple has repeatedly disabled, and an announcement that the WebOS SDK would finally be opened up to rank-and-file developers in December, Palm has declined to talk.

But it did release over the weekend the WebOS 1.3.1 update. Key changes include:

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• If you have multiple e-mail acounts from the same service (such as Gmail or Yahoo), the e-mail address for each displays so you can tell the accounts from each other; also if you have mulltiple Exchange accounts, global address book contacts are now searched across all accounts.
• If your Exchange server requires a simple PIN password, you can now enter PINs longer than four digits; you can also use complex passwords in Exchange 2003 even if the server doesn't request such strong passwords.
• Device backups now retain installed browser cookies.
• Calendar and contacts sync options now include Yahoo accounts; Yahoo instant messaging is also now supported.
• Forwarded e-mail messages now include the original sender's e-mail address and correct in-line display of images.
• The manual e-mail setup options now include support for Google and Yahoo business accounts.
• The smartphone can now be set to require an unlock password after a user-specified period.
• Text and multimedia messages can now be forwarded, and the text in a text or multimedia message can now be copied.

There are also a host of bug fixes, such as the WebOS no longer copying the HTML tags along with the text from copied conversations and the WebOS now showing the correct storage space left after deleting a music file. Palm has published a list of the latest changes at its Web site.

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