Here at HP’s ‘Think Beyond’ webOS event, Jon Rubinstein just announced that the Pre 2 will be available to pre-order tomorrow on Verizon Wireless, right in line with what rumors had suggested.
The last Palm -branded holdout on Verizon’s inventory — the CDMA Pixi Plus — is now gone from the company’s online store, once again leaving the country’s largest carrier without a webOS option to be had.
Want a Pre 2 on Verizon? Too bad, you’ve gotta keep waiting — but it might be getting a little closer now that the mythical CDMA variant of Palm’s latest handset apparently has its own line item in Best Buy’s inventory system.
Whoa, we didn’t see this one coming: Verizon just slashed the cost of its 3G Mobile Hotspot feature for the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus all the way down to $0, effectively giving you a broadband modem for your laptop, iPod touch, and up to three other devices for $60 less per month than you’d pay with a MiFi that accomplishes exactly the same function (and $50 less than any other tether-capable Verizon handset).
It’s unclear how the data’s being collected, but a handful of analysts have started backing away from Palm this week on some information that the phone’s webOS debut on Verizon has proven something less than bombastic at the sales counter. Of course, it’s no secret that Verizon has poured less money, time, and energy into its marketing of the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus than Sprint has with the original versions, but Palm and the market analysts following its progress may have been banking on the unspoken “if only this were on Verizon” factor to counteract that a bit. The biggest concern seems to be that Palm’s on the cusp of being washed into irrelevancy by a massive Android push, with a couple stock downgrades and price target cuts making their way into the hearts and minds of the market makers.
Motorola’s official spec sheet for the Devour reveals that there’ll be a Flash Lite runtime on board — presumably version 3.1, which offers support for a variety of video codecs and Flash 9 content — and more importantly, it’ll work in the browser. That’s pretty cool — it gives the Devour one small leg up on its Droid big brother and matches capabilities that HTC has rolled out in the past on the Hero , but what’s more interesting is that the Devour allegedly uses the same next-gen low-cost smartphone processor from Qualcomm, the MSM7627, as the Pixi .
It doesn’t look like we’ve got any showstoppers here — but just as with any major new smartphone release, Verizon’s Pre Plus is starting to take some lumps after romping in the field for a week since its retail availability kicked off. Of the two biggies being cited so far, one is of particular concern: apps other than VZ Navigator don’t seem to take advantage of GPS augmentation, meaning they’re relying on a straight-up GPS signal alone to get a location lock — something that often doesn’t work on a phone (a reliable workaround seems to be to open VZ Navigator before you open the app you really need, but still, not an optimal situation)
It’s been about a year since Palm pulled itself back from the brink of imminent destruction with the announcement of webOS and the Palm Pre , and even less time since the products announced actually hit the market. In that time span, the company has issued another handset (the small, less powerful Pixi ), released a number of over-the-air updates to its OS (nine in all), and created and disseminated a slew of developer tools, including iterative releases of its SDK and a new web-based development environment called Ares . Throughout the ups and downs of the past 12-or-so months Palm has been “back,” the company has stuck with Sprint as its lone carrier partner in the US — so while it’s been innovating and tweaking on its platform and devices, the third-place partner has kept it from the larger audiences AT&T or Verizon might offer.
We just had a chance to play around with the new Palm Pre Plus (and Palm Pixi Plus ), and we must say — they’ve made some solid improvements to these devices. We’re going to focus on the Pre, since it’s really had the bulk of the changes. Firstly, it’s now a Verizon branded (and bound) phone, which should bump the status of the device in many people’s minds
We’ve alluded to this a couple times already, but Boy Genius Report is coming out today and saying that Verizon’s webOS launch devices early next year will indeed be called the “Pre Plus” and “Pixi Plus.” We’re able to independently confirm that this is the intel out in the field right now — so unless Big Red calls an audible, these are the names you should be keeping an eye on as you’re scanning the shelves.
