We just did some live video from the Palm lounge where we saw the Pixi and Pre Plus, two improvements to the current WebOS line-up. Notable points? The 3D gaming was quite impressive and the design has been considerably improved in this iteration.
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Someone’s gotta help Palm out. After the somewhat lukewarm response to the Pixi and the Pre, it’s rather surprising that Verizon would decide to place a big order. Word is though, that’s exactly what they did.
Wow, it’s on. I thought that Palm was going to work out an alternate solution after that official reprimand from the USB Implementers Forum, but they’re going right ahead with iTunes compatibility again. I suppose they feel that it’s more of a crime for Apple to restrict device access than it is to spoof a device’s maker. At any rate, the conflict just got escalated. This will be remembered, 24-style, as the moment Palm went rogue.
When it comes to keyboards, you just can’t make everyone happy. Provide a virtual keyboard, and people complain of inaccuracy and difficult of use. Provide a physical keyboard, and people complain because their dainty hands only have enough strength to slide out the keyboard three times a day. You’ve gotta provide both, or you’ve just given the Internet something to rant about.
Such is the case with the Palm Pre. Almost immediately after launch, the fan forums were filled with flames regarding the handsets lack of an onscreen keyboard.
Well, the Palm Pre does have a virtual keyboard; it’s just limited to a handful of fairly rare characters. The guys over at WebOS Internals have figured out a way to patch into this to add the standard QWERTY keys and make it pop up and stay open at the appropriate times, thus saving dozens of seconds per year that would otherwise be spent sliding the actual keyboard open. The patch is in a shaky state (pre-alpha) as of now, but it mostly works as intended in both portrait and landscape modes.
If you’re up for a bit of hackery for the sake of some onscreen tippity-tappin’, read this and then this for details on how to make it happen.
This is going to end well, and no one will be upset about this. Also, everything I said in that last sentence is probably wrong.
When Debian developer Joey Hess started tinkering with webOS, he noticed that it was sending something to Palm once a day. Surely, Palm wasn’t sending anything too potentially incriminating without making it blatantly obvious to the user, right? Wrong.
Update: Updated with Palm’s statement on the matter
Lets say you just finished hacking and cracking your myTouch 3G through the just unveiled rooting process. With the myTouch lagging behind some other in the looks department, your first quest is to retheme it. You’d heard about a Palm Pre skin, which decks Android out with Pre-esque visuals from top to bottom. Partly out of spite and partly out of genuine curiosity, you set out to find it.
Sorry Charlie, it’s too late.
Earlier this week, the developer of the Palm Pre skin, L3wish, received a letter from the Sunnyvale mothership. “You should probably take this stuff down, or we’ll stop pretending you’re not infringing all sorts of copyrights,” it read – except spread out across 714 words.
Citing the potential for “widespread consumer confusion” and the usage of Palm’s trademarks (the skin was outright called “Palm Pre theme”), Palm demanded that all materials be taken down. The developer has since pulled the download, and any instances of it we knew of have disappeared. You can probably find them in a few minutes with Google – but then again, so can Palm’s lawyers.
[Via EngadgetMobile]
If you weren’t one of the lucky ones that happened to snag a Palm Pre for $99 at Best Buy the other weekend thanks to a pricing snafu, LetsTalk.com has a deal for you. The website has managed to drop the price of the Palm Pre down to only $99 through a combination of instant and mail-in rebates.
Seriously, we’re just as surprised as you are. Not only is Kazaa somehow still in business, they’re also trying anything they can to set themselves apart from all the other digital music retailers you’d rather use instead of them. Now the property of Brilliant Digital Entertainment, Kazaa is setting its sights on bringing HD movie downloads to the masses (well, the masses that use Kazaa), and the Pre is where they’ve decided to make their stand. Read More
The Pre is emerging as a polarizing device, even more so than the G1 (which everyone agreed was kind of beta), probably because it’s the closest thing to a legitimate threat that the iPhone has faced. Who wouldn’t get defensive? With strong sales in its first two weeks and an entirely new OS for developers to do their thing with, it’s strong out of the gate but controlled — because the jockey is holding the reins tight. Palm didn’t expect a dynamite launch or a million app sales in a week; what they’ve got so far is, if we can believe what they say, pretty much what they’d hoped for.
Of course, the TechCrunch network is a treasure trove (a rat’s nest, some would say) of opinions, and we have been known to attack the Pre (savagely and repeatedly) despite our interest in it. The app sales numbers for the Pre need more context than a direct comparison to the iPhone App Store, but that is an important data point, so let’s do it thoroughly.
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You’ve waited so long, and your time has almost come. If you’re anything like me, you’re refining your early morning line strategy, making calls to every Best Buy Mobile, Radio Shack, and Sprint store within a ten mile radius, and psyching yourself up to elbow a guy in the face if need be. In short: the Pre drops tomorrow, and you’re getting one no matter what the cost.
But what if you could order one now? Read More
Well, Twitter has become the pinnacle of gossip, grapevine chatter, and frankly, just good ol’ breaking news. Yesterday, Palm made a very subjective statement through the company’s Twitter account in response to the question about Visual Voicemail: “Palm Synergy presents integrated messaging in lots of useful ways, but not that particular way”. From the statement, it does not look like Palm’s Pre will have Visual Voicemail out of the box when it hits stores and our pockets on June 6th. It’s a shame, really, but as pointed out by PreCentral, if that specific application is truly sought after, the development community will have no issues churning out the Visual Voicemail that will entice the masses.
So, Palm Pre hopefuls and fanboys, is this news a deal-breaker or will you be able to get passed the notion of not actually seeing the messages before listening to them?
[Pre Central via IntoMobile]
I think that’s a phone, no wait, it’s a stapler, no wait, it’s a ham sandwich. That right there is actually the next Palm webOS handset, according to A Boy Genius tipster who really needs a better camera phone.
Honestly, there is no way to confirm whether this is the phone that Michael Arrington’s source was talking about, but at least the form factor seems about right for a Pre-Mini and follows the company’s low-cost Centro styling. But then again, that pic could be the Lock Ness Monster herself, and we wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.
It’s pretty much obligatory at this point: someone announces a new piece of hardware, gets a lot of attention, and iSuppli tears it apart and prices the components.
Whether they’ve managed to get ahold of a Pre and actually tear it apart or they just dug up a list of components, we’re not sure – but iSuppli has pinned the final bill of materials for the Palm Pre at $137.38. Thats 46% of the $300 iSuppli expects Palm to charge Sprint for each handset, and 68% of 200 bucks they expect Sprint to charge the customer after subsidies. Not too bad – but of course, it doesn’t include R&D costs, marketing costs, nor all of the talent Palm had to hire to dig them out of their grave.
[Via TGDaily]
It’s now just about May and there’s still been no official word from Palm when it comes to an official launch date or pricing for the Pre. All we know is what we’ve known for a long time — it’ll launch the first half of 2009; a window that is quickly closing. But a few pieces of new evidence today point to an actual specific date. And it’s a very intriguing one — June 7: The day before a likely Apple keynote address at its WWDC conference.
That is of course interesting because Apple could very well use that keynote to unveil the next version of the iPhone, just as it did last year for the iPhone 3G. A public launch of the Pre the day before could suck some of the wind out of Apple’s sails. But it’s also pretty risky, as it means Palm only has one day to convince everyone that its product is better then the latest version of the iPhone which is likely to have some substantial improvements. And no one knows for sure what all those improvements are — it could very well blow the Pre right out of the water, one day into its young life.
So, Laurence Toney or @lo_toney as he likes to be called on Twitter decided to flaunt the Pre he presumably has in his possession on Twitpic. I don’t know who he is and why he has a Pre but he’s a “busy Internet exec” and is some VP of Product and Marketing at Cake Financial. Anyway, he took some craptacular photos on his iPhone of the YouTube client and what appears to be the e-mail composition screen. Both are too blurry to note any significant details, but it’s out there and it’s just a bunch of random folk with the device.
[PSGallery=2142gpgh4j]
via Everything Pre
It seems that AT&T is getting ready to poison the Pre well by providing its staff with a damning comparison between the upstart Pre and that phone of phones, the iPhone. When was the last time you saw such a preemptive strike against a phone? I don’t think even the G1 got this kind of consideration. Let’s see what AT&T has to say about Sprint’s comeback kid.
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$70 is probably a little more than most people plan on spending on a charger. But if we’ve learned anything over the iPhone years, it’s that people will pay through the nose for must-have accessories, and this is certainly a must-have accessory. According to a leaked pricing sheet Engadget got their hands on, $70 will be the asking price for Palm’s hot little touch-charger. But if you think about it, there will almost certainly be package deals lowering the price — just like any other phone or accessory. So let’s not all freak out, here.
And of course, it’s just part of a whole family of these things. It’s possible that there’s a stripped-down version for $20 less, and a cool super-enabled one that’s $20 more.
Call the president! A Palm marketing manager let slip that Touchstone is a full family of near-field induction products and that the little Touchstone charger for the Palm Pre – basically that magnetic charger thing that you stick the Pre to in order to grab some juice – is just one of many products.
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Palm’s third quarter earnings have been reported, and they’re as bad as anyone might have expected. But with the Pre just around the corner and everything on track, according to CEO Ed Collligan, nobody should be worrying about that. It’s a fair assessment, really: it’s like a boxing match where you know your fighter’s got a win in him. He’s battered and bloodied from being beaten and bullied, but suddenly his opponent is flat-footed, caught off guard, and your guy is winding up for what could be a knockout punch.
Would you cut your losses and leave the arena? Hell no! I can’t wait to try the Pre, and I hope it brings Palm all the success they deserve. So buck up, Palm-lovers, and see if they can’t land that haymaker.
It’s not quite the February 15th rumor from a couple weeks ago, but BGR is reporting that the Palm Pre might be launching around March 15th according to an end-of-life (EOL) list of Sprint handsets leaked from somewhere inside the company.
