Palm webOS system upgrades mandatory; hacking scene forbidden from tethering
By Nilay Patel 
posted Jun 15th 2009 11:48AM
posted Jun 15th 2009 11:48AM
We have been politely cautioned by Palm 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.Yeah, that's pretty aggro for a company that needs to court all the developer support it can. We're not sure what'll happen after Sprint's exclusivity runs out, but we can't imagine any other carriers are going to be thrilled about hacked tethering options either, so we'd say Palm's going to keep the pressure on until unlocked GSM webOS devices hit the scene -- and we can almost guarantee that tethering hacks are going to make it into the wild regardless of Palm's actions.
Even worse for hackers, Palm's taking an unusually aggressive approach to webOS system updates -- they're mandatory. According to the support docs, webOS updates are automatically downloaded in the background within two days of being available, and they're required to be installed within a week of the download -- after seven days and four install prompts, the phone will give you a ten-minute countdown and then automatically begin installing the update. Sure, we can understand why Palm would want all of its devices to be updated, and we know that a lot of webOS system foundations are in flux while the Mojo SDK is being finalized, but forced updates seem extremely heavy-handed to us -- it's one thing to try and maintain control over a platform, it's another to keep it with an iron fist. Of course, it's probable that we'll see a hack to bypass all of this extremely soon, so maybe it'll all work itself out, but we'd really like to see Palm develop an official policy friendly towards hacking and homebrew and stick to it -- the Pre and webOS have attracted a lot of talent in the past two weeks, and it'd be a shame to lose it.
[Via PreThinking; thanks, Justin]
Read - Pre Dev Wiki tethering policy
Read - Palm webOS updates support doc
Lack of tethering is the dealbreaker for me on the Pre. What are these brilliant corporate types thinking? Business users no longer need tether? Ridiculous...
not too excited about this. i plan on buying a Pre in the next couple of months but i may have to hold off even longer if i cant tether. i just hate the idea of paying extra for something the phone can do with the data plan i already pay for. hopefully PDANet will get an app out for it and Sprint and Palm allows it to stay on there.
i agree completely. sure phones can do more stuff these days but if i have an option to use the internet on my smartphone or on my laptop, the laptop will pretty much always be choice 1. smartphone internet is for when i can't just whip out a laptop or want to surf discretely (like at work or something).
this is a funny post. I understand where you're coming from, but this isn't gamecast. Palm doesn't want WebOs to be remembered for its hackability and be gone soon after only to live on through eBay and hacks. This is a ten year thing they're talking about, and the updates they're pushing are turning a 1.0 OS into a fully mature OS. Plus as you pointed out, I'm sure they'll figure out a way to bypass this feature also.