Did you upgrade your Palm Pre to webOS 1.2 last night? If you downloaded and applied the webOS 1.2 update, you probably went to bed all warm and fuzzy with the knowledge that your Pre could now download premium webOS apps, direct download from the web, control music from the lock-screen and all that jazz. Unfortunately, Palm’s all-powerful Palm Profile server took a nose dive last night, causing many Palm Pre owners to wake up to a completely blank-slated smartphone.
The problem, it seem, is that the Palm Pre uses the Palm Profile server to continually synchronize and backup information. Palm Profile allows the webOS Synergy feature to seamlessly integrate your Facebook, Google accounts and various email accounts into the Palm Pre. It’s an incredible feature that sets the Palm Pre (well, the webOS) apart from other smartphones out there. That also means the Palm Pre has to be in constant contact with the Palm Profile server. When the server crashes, the Palm Pre freaks out and goes into a hard reset – basically returning the Pre to its factory, out-of-box state.
After having webOS 1.2 installed for a matter of hours, the Palm Profile server crash rendered a lot of Palm Pre smartphones out there almost useless. Until the server came back online, users were left with a useless handset. Sure, those users could still make phone calls, but we’d argue that voice calls aren’t as important as data features on a smartphone like the Palm Pre. When the server made its way out of downtime territory, Palm Pres across the country were able to finally restore themselves back to health.
Our Palm Pre was actually powered down (the battery died, like it does every night) and wasn’t affected by the Palm Profile server crash. We’d imagine it’s annoying to wake up and find your phone had hard-reset itself overnight.
All in all, the Palm Profile server technology is on point. But, Palm would do well to make changes so that future server crashes don’t cause connected devices to go crazy and reset themselves.
[Via: jkOnTheRun]