There’s been plenty of speculation as to when Verizon will begin offering the Palm Pre or the Pixi, but some leaked internal training slides would suggest that it’ll be sooner rather than later.

According to Phone Arena these 20-minute long training sessions are “to re-introduce Palm and webOS to [Verizon's] personnel [and] will be ongoing until January 4, 2010,” so we could speculate that there’ll be some excitement in the first quarter of the year.

Source: Gizmodo

Handhelds · Palm · Palm OS · palm pixi · PalmPre · Verizon · Verizon Communications · WebOS

Palm demonstrates webOS platform and UI on the new Pre smartphone.

Engadget · Handhelds · Palm · Palm OS · PalmPre · Unix and Linux · Video Games · WebOS

Finally some good Palm-Verizon news for us:
A second CDMA-flavored Palm Pixi just cleared the FCC and we can say with confidence it’s not coming to Sprint this time around. Better yet, Palm’s model P121EWW matches up with that P121 code we saw leaked a while back for Big Red (Sprint’s model is P120EWW), and this one got tested for 802.11b/g WiFi.

Source: Engadget

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• Sprint touts Palm Pixi’s nonexistent WiFi (engadget.com)

Handhelds · Palm · Palm OS · PalmPixi · pixi · Sprint Nextel · Verizon Communications · Wi-Fi

he latest publication to rank the Pre high is PC Magazine, billing Palm’s first webOS powered smartphone as the “most innovate new platform” in the phones category for 2009.  As their mobile phone guru Sacha Sagan puts it:

Palm has returned with the coolest handheld device we’ve seen in a long time. The Palm Pre has the same exhilarating sense of possibility as the iPhone—and it’s even worth switching to Sprint for. The Pre is the start of something genuinely new: Palm’s webOS, an innovative operating system that’s benefited a lot by what the company has learned from Apple’s smartphone successes.

Source: Pre Central

Apple · Handhelds · iPhone · Mobile phone · Palm · Palm Pre · Smartphone · WebOS

A Palm Pre user is suing Palm and Sprint Nextel, alleging they caused him to lose most of the data from his phone, and he wants to turn the suit into a class action.

The suit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, in San Jose, is the latest black eye for the Palm Profile cloud-based synchronization service, which debuted with the company’s webOS on the Pre earlier this year. Palm and Sprint last month said “a small number of customers” had had trouble transferring their data from Palm Profiles to new Palm devices and that they were working on a solution.

Read the full story on PC Magazine

Handhelds · Palm · Palm OS · Palm Pre · Palm Profile · Sprint Nextel · United States District Court for the Northern District of California · WebOS

Checkout Pre Central round table about the Palm Pre and the webOS; here is a highlight:
What was the most important event for Palm in the last six months, and what will be the most important in the next six months?

Craig: There has been no single big event from Palm since the the Pre was introduced but there are dozens from the user community. In July, WebOS Quick Install and fileCoaster threw open the door to homebrew apps like Solitaire and Checkers but none rocked like Music Player (Remix). Then came Preware and our world exploded. In September themes and patches came to the masess and suddenly our Pre phones could do almost anything. Oh, and somewhere along the way Palm released some updates and the Pixi.

Hopefully the biggest events ahead for Palm will be incorporating user patches and introducing the Pre 2. Imagine if Palm incorporated key user patches in one area each month: Messaging, Email, Phone, App Launcher, Browser, and Top Bar. Add in the Music Player (Remix) and the Pre and Pixi would suddenly have world-class apps, users would be a buzz, and the pundits would be blown away. Users could provide an endless source of patches. But if fragile Palm egos prevail, the Pre 2 will be irrelavent.

Derek: More important than the Pre launch in the long term will be the Pixi. Despite what Palm keeps saying, the Pre is a smartphone for smartphone geeks. The Pixi, however, has much more mass-market appeal, ala the Centro. In the 18 months after Palm launched the Centro they sold more than three million units, which is an awful lot for Palm. The hope, and expectation, is that the Pixi will replicate that success. Like the Centro, it’s the smallest smartphone on the market. Like the Centro, it’s a scaled down version of its big brother, the Pre. Like the Centro, it’s a new smartphone at a very attractive price-point: $100. And like the Centro, it’s an approachable cute phone. Assuming that Sprint’s exclusivity on the Pixi isn’t too long (they don’t seem to be making a big marketing push behind it), the Pixi’s eventual landing on multiple carriers will make it a serious contender in the mass-appeal smartphone market.

While the Pixi’s launch may be the most important of the last six months, the next six months will be all about webOS and the successor to the Pre. While I have absolutely no evidence apart from industry trends to back up this assertion, I believe that summer 2010 will bring both the Pre II and webOS 2.0. Assuming that the Pixi performs as well as we expect, Palm will be well positioned for an iPhone-style global launch of the Pre II. What makes the hypothetical Pre II important is that it will demonstrate whether or not Palm has learned lessons on the hardware front. Software is easy enough to correct, but once the physical phone is out there, there’s nothing that can be done to correct design deficiencies. The Pixi has shown that Palm does indeed know how to design a solid phone, but it remains to be seen whether that will be a fluke or the start of a trend.

Handhelds · iPhone · Palm · Palm OS · Palm Pre · pixi · Smartphone · WebOS

Saul Hansell’s blog post for the NY Times talks about Palm’s chances, here are some highlights:
In a land of cellphone giants, Palm is a mouse. Palm is tiny compared with Apple, Research in Motion, Samsung, Google, Microsoft and Nokia, which are battling to control the future of smartphones.
…
While no one expected Palm’s sales would rival the sales of iPhones or BlackBerrys — and they have not — developers have not rushed to write applications for the phone as they have for the iPhone and Android phones.
…
Jon Rubinstein, Palm’s chief executive who was the top Apple engineer and the first head of its iPod division, said in an interview that Palm does not need to be as big as its rivals to thrive. His former employer, after all, was long able to carve out a lucrative niche in the computer business.

“One of the key things we need to do as a company is to get to scale,” he said. “We need to bring on more carriers and more regions.”

Analysts expect that Palm will sell an upgraded version of the Pre with Verizon early next year and add AT&T later in the year. It sells phones in six countries and is steadily expanding to others in Europe and North America.
…
Mr. Rubinstein said Palm would never need as many applications as the iPhone. “We are focused on quality over quantity,” he said.

Palm is still testing its app store, called the App Catalog, with a small group of developers. It will open to anyone who wants to write an app next month — six months after the Pre was introduced.

Mr. Rubinstein says he expects developers will write for Palm devices, in part because Palm’s operating system, called webOS, is based largely on the same languages used to design Web sites. Android, by contrast, is based on Sun’s Java language, and Apple uses a variation of the C computer programming language.

He discounts Android’s chances because, he says, it does not yet have mass appeal. “Android, and the Droid in particular, are designed for the techie audience,” Mr. Rubinstein said. “We are doing a more general product that helps people live their lives seamlessly.”

While Android is getting a lot of attention because it has attracted so many phone makers, those companies, Mr. Rubinstein, argues “have to depend on the kindness of strangers” — meaning Google — for their software.

“The companies that will deliver the best products are the ones that integrate the whole experience — the hardware, the software and the services — and aren’t getting one piece from here and one piece from there and trying to bolt it all together,” he said.
…
“The Palm Pixi is the only low-end smartphone with a new operating system,” said Mr. Kuittinen. “That is fairly impressive.”

He estimates Palm may be able to sell 10 million handsets next year, about 5 percent of the smartphone market. That assumes the company can get more carriers in the United States and Europe to sell Palm phones.

Apple · Google · iPhone · Microsoft · Nokia · Palm · Research in Motion · WebOS

Online phone retailer Wirefly is launching the Palm Pixi at a price lower than you’ll find anywhere else: $24.95 for new contract customers. Current Sprint customers won’t left out in the cold either – they’ll be able to pick up the Pixi from Wirefly for a mere $99.99 with a renewed contract. Both new customers and current Sprint subscribers will be treated to a rebate-free experience.

[Source: Pre Central]

Handhelds · Palm · Palm OS · palm pixi · Sprint · Sprint Nextel · Unix and Linux · Verizon

Gadgetell is trying to decide if the Palm Pre has saved Palm:

The successful launch of the Palm Pre, Palm’s darling of a phone running the “revolutionary” webOS was supposed to save Palm. Launched on June 6 in the US, the Pre was off to a fast start, depending on who you asked. The Pre continues to be sold on one network, Sprint, while it’s application catalog fills out. The question now becomes, did the Pre save Palm?

That was the question poised to me by our Robert Nelson who was standing next to me when the phone was announced at CES last year. Both of us left with a sense of hope and excitement about the new phone and about the webOS. Where are we now?

Robert says, “To me, I think it has gone stale. It almost seems that Palm is back on life support. But at the same time, I like the Pre (of course, that could just be the fan boy in me).”

My take is two parts: I agree with Robert the gloss has faded a bit on the Pre. I attribute that to an unappealing design, at least for me. I am edging closer to despising key’d phones, the split second it takes to slide out the keypad or worse, reorient the device is far too long for me. The Pre doesn’t live on the now network, it lives on the, wait for it, slide out, network.

So it’s clear I am not a big fan of the hardware on the Pre. That’s a personal call and one that I may be on my own with it; I can deal with that. I have the same problems with the Moto Droid and the slew of Android phones with slide out full-size keyboards. A phone store clerk explained it to me like this: the teens and 20 year olds love the slide out, the 30 and up crowd digs the slider phones. Test that one out, I’ve found it to be a decent predictor.

Part two is this, while the Pre hasn’t saved Palm, the webOS will. The OS is fun, simple, brilliant in some ways. I think the Pixi will do well, assuming it gets off Sprint in record time. I think the phone after Pixi will do even better. There is much competing operating systems could learn from webOS. While it still could use some polishing around the edges, it works and works well.

There is no question in my mind that the webOS can compete with Android for most people. Competing with the iPhone OS isn’t the problem, it’s the Santa’s sack of apps that is getting harder to get around.

Palm · Palm Pre · Sprint

The Best Mobile Phone blog reports that Verizon is working hard to add the Palm Pre to their lineup this year. We can’t wait!

Palm · PalmPre · Verizon