I was just reading that DataViz Twitter page. You can really glean some interesting information from that feed. But not enough to make me sign up for an account just yet.
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The Pre Gets a Release Date
Palm and Sprint have finally revealed that Saturday, June 6th, will be the official launch date for the Pre smartphone. The Pre is first device to be powered by Palm’s new mobile operating system, Palm webOS.“Sprint today announced pricing and nationwide availability for the highly anticipated Palm Pre phone, offered exclusively from Sprint. Palm Pre will be available nationwide on June 6 in Sprint stores, Best Buy, Radio Shack, select Wal-Mart stores and online at Sprint.com for $199.99 with a two-year service agreement and after a $100 mail-in rebate. Running on the new Palm webOS mobile platform, Pre brings together your important information from where it resides – on your phone, at your work or on the web – into one logical view.”
“The argument that you need one phone for work and another phone for play, or that you have to make compromises between business and lifestyle productivity, is over,” said Dan Hesse, president and CEO of Sprint. “With Pre, compromises of the past are history.”
“The Palm Pre takes full advantage of Sprint’s Everything Data plans,” said Avi Greengart, research director for Consumer Devices at Current Analysis. “The Pre has been expressly designed for multitasking among multiple web pages and applications. It also builds on Palm’s heritage in PDAs by managing your digital information – whether that’s on a corporate server or on the web.”
“Pre is truly a new phone for a new web-centric age,” said Ed Colligan, Palm president and chief executive officer. “We’re a mobile society, and we want our people, calendars and information to move with us. With Pre’s exquisite design and the unique webOS software, running on Sprint’s fast broadband network, we’re changing the perception of what a wireless phone can be.”
Also debuting with the Pre is the Synergy synchronization engine that is built in to Palm webOS.
The new webOS platform introduces Palm Synergy, a key feature that brings together your personal and professional calendar, contacts and e-mail into one centralized view, making transitions between work and personal life smooth and easy to manage.
With Palm Synergy, users get:
- Linked contacts – With Synergy, you have a single view that links your contacts from a variety of sources, so accessing them is easier than ever. For example, if you have the same contact listed in your Outlook(3), Google and Facebook accounts, Synergy recognizes that they’re the same person and links the information, presenting it to you as one listing.
- Layered calendars – Your calendars can be seen on their own or layered together in a single view, combining work, family, friends, sports teams, or other interests. You can toggle to look at one calendar at a time, or see them all at a glance.
- Combined messaging – Synergy lets you see all your conversations with the same person in a chat-style view, even if it started in IM and you want to reply with text messaging. You can also see who’s active in a buddy list right from contacts or e-mail, and start a new conversation with just one touch.
Pricing and Availability
The Palm Pre phone will be available from Sprint on June 6 for $199.99 after a $100 mail-in rebate with a new two-year service agreement on an Everything Data plan or Business Essentials with Messaging and Data plan. An array of compelling accessories also will be available for Pre, including the Palm Touchstone charging dock. The Touchstone™ Charging Kit, which includes the Touchstone charging dock and Touchstone back cover for Pre, will be available June 6 for $69.99. The Touchstone charging dock and Touchstone back cover also are available separately for $49.99 and $19.99, respectively.
For more information, visit the Sprint website at http://www.sprint.com/pre. You can read the full Sprint press release on the Sprint website.
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Rumor: Wal-Mart to Sell the Palm Pre?
I was reading an article on the Reuters’ website this morning and an article on Wal-Mart caught my eye. In the article, Reuters was reporting on how “Wally World” was revamping their electronics department in an attempt to bring in customers who had been formerly shopping at the now defunct Circuit City stores.At the end of the short article, the following was written:
“Wal-Mart executives said the stores would soon offer Palm Inc’s Pre smartphone, a highly anticipated gadget. The retailer also is adding to its selection of higher-end televisions by manufacturers Sony Corp and Samsung Electronics Co, and broadening its array of movies, the newspaper said.”
It has been a long time since I’ve been in a Wal-Mart electronics department and I didn’t know if Wal-Mart has partnered with Sprint for retail sales. I’ll have to stop by one or both of the local stores to see if they carry Sprint phones. If they don’t, either the unnamed Wal-Mart executive was wrong or this could be an indication that a GSM Palm Pre might become available sooner than we originally though in the US. My personal guess is that a GSM Pre will go on sale here in the States late in 2009 at the earliest, with the first round of GSM Pre smartphones going to Vodafone first.
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Rumor: Palm Pre Set to Launch on June 7th
I just saw this over on BoyGeniusReport.com. If it is true, it looks like the Palm Pre will launch in just under a month on June 7th.“We’re prefacing this by saying we’re definitely not 100%, but it looks like Palm could be gearing up for a round of meetings that will lead up to the day we’ve all been waiting for — Palm Pre launch day. We just received what an anonymous tipster claims to be an internal Palm memo regarding some meetings that will take place in early June. According to the document, the meetings will conclude on Friday June 5th with what is labeled ‘LAUNCH LUNCH!'”
Back in February I was predicting a lunch of the Pre on either May 17th or the 24th. More recently, though, we heard some rumors that Palm and Sprint might push back the launch of the Pre to ensure that there was sufficient inventory in the supply chain and that there may have been some early production problems on the Pre manufacturing line. (I can’t confirm either of those rumors.) At any rate, it looks like the Pre is go for June 7th. I really can’t wait to see how the Pre’s email stands up to the BlackBerry email system. I’ve been using a BlackBerry Curve 8330 since December and I have really become addicted to it’s virtually instanatious email delivery. Will the Pre cause me to dump my CrackBerry? We’ll soon find out.
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1SRC Podcast 210
The latest 1SRC Podcast has been posted for your listening enjoyment.This week, on the 1SRC Podcast, I cover:
- BoyGeniusReport claims they have the pricing model for the Palm Pre on Sprint.
- Rumors are flying this week about the Centro replacement, the Eos.
- Will the Foleo II with Palm webOS be the netbook Foleo always should have been?
Download 1SRC Podcast 210 enhanced edition…
Subscribe to the enhanced 1SRC Podcast feed…
Read the transcript for 1SRC Podcast 210…
Discuss 1SRC Podcast 210… -
Bell Mobility Exclusive Carrier for Palm Pre
Palm and Bell Mobility in Canada have announced that Bell has been selected to be the exclusive carrier of Palm’s new Pre smartphone powered by Palm webOS. The Pre will be released in Canada during the second half of 2009.“We’re excited to bring Pre to Canada with Bell Mobility,” said Brodie Keast, senior vice president of marketing for Palm, Inc. “We’ve seen enormous interest from mobile operators worldwide and fully expect to continue to expand distribution for Pre, putting it within reach of more and more customers.”
“Bell is excited to be only the second carrier in the world to announce the 3G Pre,” said Adel Bazerghi, senior vice president of Products for Bell Mobility. “With the unique user experience of the world’s first webOS phone, running on the country’s largest 3G network, we’re confident that Canadians will embrace Pre as the phone for their lives today.”
You can read the full Palm press release, which includes the specifications for the Bell Mobility Pre, on the Palm website. Pricing for the Bell Pre was not announced today and the release date was only indicated as “in the second half of 2009.”
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Will Palm Get Its ‘Mojo’ Back with webOS and Pre?
RedmondDeveloper News has written an article on the growing grassroots support for Palm’s new mobile operating system, webOS.“As smartphone developers await the release of devices based on Microsoft’s Windows Mobile 6.5, tinker with the recently released Google Android SDK, and pine over the one billionth iPhone app downloaded, a grassroots movement by some influential developers is pushing the adoption of an alternative mobile platform.
A burgeoning community of developers are investing time and resources on a device and platform they’ve barely seen from a company that was, until recently, written off for dead: Palm Inc. While many observers are skeptical that Palm can make a sizable dent in the mobile market, hundreds of developers are eagerly awaiting the release of the company’s new webOS and the Palm Pre mobile device.
These developers have signed up to participate in dev camps that are slated to take place on the first weekend after Palm releases webOS and Pre. These camps are being organized by the developers and are not under Palm’s purview, nor Sprint’s, the carrier designated to sell the device in the United States, according to the organizers.”
I believe that Palm doesn’t have to dominate the mobile phone market to make a fair amount of money. The mobile phone space is really big and it doesn’t have to be one vendor takes all. I also think that Palm really does have a solid foundation with Palm webOS and it can be the vehicle, together with some new hardware, to jump start the company and make it a major player in mobile computing again.
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More On a Possible “Foleo II” Device
While looking for more information on the rumor from this past weekend that Palm might be mulling over their options on releasing a redesigned Foleo running Palm webOS, I found this interesting article over on JKOnTheRun.com. Mr. Kendrick writes:“Lots of companies are currently working on Google Android netbooks and there have been whispers of how great a WebOS-based netbook could be, even though not a single device with that OS is actually shipping yet. This obsession with netbooks and how to make a great one has me thinking that there’s no reason Palm couldn’t produce one, and right now.
Just hear me out. A netbook that is designed from the ground up to be a cloud machine could be easily produced using high-end PDA components. The main requirements would be a decent processor, very long battery life and an easy-to-use OS. Enter Palm.”
I think that this is a really cool idea. I’ve been using a Dell Mini 9 since late November (2008) and I have mixed feeling about it. Yes, it is light and super portable. I liked the Foleo’s exterior finishing better than the glossy lid on Dell’s netbooks. I also like the fact that I can run Windows XP on the Dell netbook, but with only about 2.5 hours of battery life, I’m not going too far without my AC adapter. (I often can’t go to a full morning’s or afternoon’s worth of meetings without having to break out the charger. Ugh!) There are only a handful of applications that I use my Dell Mini 9 for: note taking and word processing in Microsoft Word 2003; checking my email in Microsoft Outlook 2003 (I do have access to corporate email via a web mail portal but I prefer Outlook or my BlackBerry); calendaring; and web surfing with FireFox or Internet Explorer.
Now, here comes Palm with a “Foleo re-mix” taking the best concepts of the Foleo and combining it with the flexibility of Palm’s new webOS platform, and you can have an ultra-portable device that can easily provide the kinds of features I’m looking for (word processing, email, calendaring, and web browsing) in a device that can run at least 8 hours with the screen set to a reasonable brightness level with Wi-Fi enabled. That would be a perfect device for me.
You can bet I’ll be keeping a close eye on this rumor as we continue to move through th rest of the year.
You can read the full JKOnTheRun.com article here…
[Photo credit: JKOnTheRun.com]
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Rumor: Sprint Still Toying with Pre Pricing
A recent article posted over on BoyGeniusReport.com suggests that the Sprint is still considering the pricing for Palm’s Pre smartphone.“Pricing is supposedly still being discussed but the probable points are as follows: New customers with a 2-year contract, $199.99. Existing customer upgrades, $299.99. Outright, $999.99. Yes, seriously.”
Ouch! A thousand dollars to purchase a Palm Pre free and clear? Yikes!
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Rumor: The Foleo to Become a webOS Netbook
Calling all Foleo Fanatics! I just read an interesting post over on Palm InfoCenter that was posted by Ryan.“Rumor: Trip Chowdhry, an analyst with Global Equities Research, asserts in a note to clients today (via Tech Trader Daily) that Palm intends to produce a $399 netbook that will run WebOS. The speculation is not without precedent as Palm has stated on numerous occasions that the WebOS will power a family of products and has said in the past that a Foleo followup is not out of the question.
Chowdhry is saying that the device will basically be a revised version of the Foleo and will be powered by an ARM chipset and will use a Gobi 3G wireless chip from Qualcomm for an estimated 8-10 hour battery life. He says the project is being designed by three ex-Apple iPod guys.”
Shortly after the Foleo was canceled, company officials indicated that the Foleo might return one day in the future. Here is to hoping that day has gotten a little closer.
[Via PalmInfocenter.com…]
