It was obvious someone would buy Palm, but I didn’t think Hewlett-Packard was the top contender. HP bought all of Palms stocks for $1.2 billion, and while there are plenty of transition details to work out, HP is definitely is getting the WebOS asset. Whether or not HP will invest to compete against Apple, Google, and Microsoft or simply use the WebOS for its tablets is unsure. We have to give them a few months to get all the details set.
Introduced at CES 2009 in January, Palm Pre was expected to be an “iPhone killer.” Unfortunately, the Palm Pre is not even close to killing the iphone yet, not to mention the new fast iPhone 3G S. However, it does beat the iPhone in multi-tasking, and it is easily the best phone for Sprint. It runs Palm’s new WebOS and has a physical slide-out keyboard. The browser has zooming capabilities and is smooth. It does have an App Store, but it is in Beta and has only around a dozen Apps currently. The voice quality is great also. The Palm Pre includes Bluetooth, Wi-fi, GPS, and 3G. It is currently available for $199 with 8GB of storage. It has only been two days since its release and we don’t know what the Palm Pre can really do. Can it satisfy the Sprint users as much as the iPhone does to AT&T users? Can the Pre save Palm from the terrible economic crisis it is in? Is the Pre Palm’s and perhaps Sprint’s only hope (this one went a little too far)?
While the Palm Pre gets ever so closer, we can only watch those sparse YouTube videos of demos, look at screenshots, and sneak across the internet looking for any clue we can find. For those of you who care about the Pre, that including myself even as a pledged iPhone/Mac user, a few news stories leaked information today about the all new webOS god phone.
As you can see here, lists, post-it-notes, and the web browser for the webOS are shown here. You can find more links with more images and details at the end of this post.
The to-do list and post-it-note features look promising, and will surely hit with a bang if the interface is snappy. If you also notice, at the top left hand corner there appears to be a drop down menu for each application. This would show a small connection to the old PalmOS, and there is no word on if that menu would control app switching, or settings for that app to de-clutter the phone’s OS. It is most likely that the menu is NOT for application switching, due to the introduced “cards” and “banned” feature introduced at the first press event.
The web browser also looks promising, showing off multiple content-heavy pages. Hopefully, the network (Sprint) preforms properly and is speedy.
Meanwhile, Sprint has published a list of apps that they think will be out by the launch date. The picture leaked, and features a “SlingMedia” titled app, which is most likely a SlingPlayer application just like the one recently released for the iPhone.
Palm OS Web Browser, “Memo’s“,
OMG, turns out AT&T might be getting some webOS on it’s network. The Palm Eos, code named “Castle” is suspected to launch on AT&T.
UPDATE:
Sprint will also be getting this phone in Q3 2009.
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