I received a bunch of cool stuff. Here's a Sprint Pre with a clear bezel running Nova Main based on #webOS 2.x pic.twitter.com/6v2xMwBQ1X

— Alan Morford (@alan_morford) June 12, 2016

I recently got my grubby little hands on some rare webOS stuff. In a few episodes or so, I’ll chronicle what I received. Let’s start!

Clear Bezel Sprint Palm Pre

You can see from the tweet above that this little Pre is unique for a couple reasons. First, it’s got a clear bezel! How cool is that? What’s more, it’s also running Nova Main based on webOS 2.x. Former Palm intern, Donald Kirker, explained what that means recently. He said, “Nova Main is […] the name of the development software. The underlying OS project name was Nova and Main just means the main code branch“.

It’s notably faster than the full release 2.x software which you’ll see a bit in the video below. What you won’t see in the video is that the device actually boots with the Palm logo instead of HP.

Sprint Palm Pre with 2.1.0 on Bell Mobility

This device boots with the HP logo. It is physically identical to a Sprint Pre but has been reprogrammed to work on Canadian cell company, Bell Mobility, as you can see in the video. But what’s more interesting is it’s running a complete build of webOS 2.1.0. It’s not meta-doctored if that’s what you’re thinking. We knew back in 2011 that HP killed the update cycle for devices older than the Pre 2 citing lacking horsepower as the reason. This device proves they were testing each iteration on the devices internally or at the very least were creating custom doctors for themselves!

You can also see an etched number on the top left of the device and unseen in the video is “not for sale” and lots of X’s where device information should be under the battery.

Check the video!

More weirdness to come!

#webosforever