Crazy for the Palm Pre

Oh boy. I’ve found a reason to charge my Pre back from the dead

Jailbreaking emulation legend ZodTTD has started the ball rolling on Pre gaming by installing his PlayStation emulator, psx4all, on the smartphone—and while there are kinks to be worked out, he says it runs even faster than on iPhone. There’s no denying the Pre has several huge advantages over the iPhone family when it comes to gaming, especially the hardware keyboard, and it looks like it won’t be lacking in the graphical department, either. The emulation is still in the early stages; there’s no sound and he hasn’t figured out the screen scaling yet, but this little demo of Wipeout XL looks incredibly smooth.

Emailed to me from an anonymous source, was the download link to the Linux Novacom. To my understanding, Novacom is what connects your Palm Pre/Emulator to your computer for rooting/hacking. And up until now, only the Mac and Windows compatible Novacom was found via the Sprint Recovery ROM.

Palm’s new smartphone, the Pre, is off to a rolling good start and has plenty of room to grow, but it isn’t likely to emerge as a solo iPhone killer, said ABI Research analyst Michael Morgan. His assessment comes amid widely reported news accounts of a note from Charter Equity Research estimating sales of the Pre approaching 400,000 in the month since it launched on the Sprint network.

Earlier this month we reported on rumors of the Palm Pre coming to Verizon. At the time the CEO of Verizon Wireless was heard mentioning that the Palm Pre would be on the Verizon network over the next six months.

Palm Pre sales into the channel in June were above 300,000 units with another 70,000 in May , according to Charter Equity Research analyst, Ed Snyder . To put that into perspective, last quarter Palm shipped just 351,000 phones , though the folks in Sunnyvale continue to be silent about any number specifics, sticking to the words of Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein, that “sales have been strong and growing.”. Other numbers Snyder released included: 120,000 – the number of phones in stock due to start-up problems with manufacturing and uncertainty in demand

Palm Pre Sales Reportedly Top 370000 Smartphones eWeek Palm has sold an estimated 370000 Palm Pre smartphones and is likely to sell 1 million units in the first quarter the mobile device is available, … and more

Many Pre owners are complaining about cracks, wobbles with the slider, and other quality control issues. Above, you can see a quick video of the hardware issues I’m experiencing with my own Sprint-store, Launch-day Palm Pre. A quick tour through our Palm Pre Forums reveals many of our users are dealing with similar issues: How many times have you exchanged your Pre?

Many Pre owners are complaining about cracks, wobbles with the slider, and other quality control issues. Above, you can see a quick video of the hardware issues I’m experiencing with my own Sprint-store, Launch-day Palm Pre. A quick tour through our Palm Pre Forums reveals many of our users are dealing with similar issues: How many times have you exchanged your Pre?

We’ll see plenty of “Pre sells X units in Y amount of time; not as many as iPhone” stories in the next year—in fact, we already have . That may be the wrong way to look at it

We’ve talked about Speed Brain and Connect4, the two other games on the Palm Pre apps catalog, but we don’t want to leave out this clean and basic implementation of Sudoku. The interface is nice, easy on the eyes, and offers good-sized number inputs that work well with the touch-screen. In all other respects it’s a basic Sudoku app that does what it’s expected to do without much fanfare.    It would be fun to see some more variants of Sudoku on offer, with different grid sizes and different constraints

After being caught on camera in Vietnam this week, the next sighting pegs the Pre as in London, UK.  Twitter user utku spotted what sounds like a field tester using his Pre on the Tube; however when approached the user became highly secretive. “So I went to the guy and said “Ooh, I see you have a Palm Pre.” On which the guy got very secretive and was like “Er, year it’s for work.” and put it away and turned away” utku, Twitter Now, we’ve heard of at least one CDMA Pre being bought in the US, activated via a workaround and used solely as a WiFi device .  However if this was such a case, we can’t imagine a reason for the owner to be so cautious with the smartphone; rather, we’d expect them to be pleased to show off their modified toy. This could indicate, then, that a UK carrier (or Palm’s UK arm) are currently testing the GSM version of the smartphone, in advance of the European launch.  That’s only been narrowed down to “second half of 2009″, but considering the first in-the-wild shots of the CDMA Pre began to emerge just two months before the official launch, the GSM model may be closer than we expected.

New York Times A Skeptic Sees Strong Sales of Palm's Pre New York Times Paul Sakuma/Associated Press Sales of the Palm Pre might exceed industry estimates, according to one analyst. So the report he issued Monday bears notice.

The European Palm Pre is definitely coming, but which carrier and when is the release date? To start to pin that down, we present a little old, a little new, and try not to leave you a little blue.

A Palm Pre for Europe and AT&T in GSM is the next big thing we’re all waiting for. We had a chance to hold one ourselves at MWC in February , but since then Palm has kept the GSM Pre under tight wraps. Not anymore – Enzo has sent in links to photos and a video of the GSM version of the Palm Pre in Vietnam.