Palm news from CES

[TazUk]

So Palm have been onstage at CES and have anounced the following :-

Pre Plus and Pixi Plus coming to Verizon on January 25th, the plus part means an extra 8Gb of memory on the Pre and Wi-Fi on the Pixi. Also the Pixi plus will be available in multiple colours, green, blue, black, orange and pink judging by the slides.

Pre coming to French carrier SFR.

Flash 10.1 beta available soon in the app store

New SDK for game development which makes use of the Pre's GPU, so expect games on a par with the iPhone Games announced include Need for Speed Undercover, The Sims 3, Monopoly, Asphalt 5: Elite Racing, Let's Golf!, Glyder 2, and X-Plane. Five other games were introduced which were Tetris, Sudoku, Scrabble, The Oregon Trail and Brain Challenge.

Open web distribution of WebOS apps, from the press release :-

Distribution on the web - For developers who wish to promote their applications exclusively online, Palm will provide just the sales transaction and fulfillment service. Every app will receive a unique URL, allowing developers to freely promote their applications online and enabling customers to download and install the application directly from the cloud to their phone using Palm's unique over-the-air process. This distribution option offers a fast self-certification process as well as the ability for developers to control the distribution and promotion of their applications using the online marketing vehicles they already have and creating new ones as they see fit.

And last but not least WebOS 1.4 coming in February with video recording and editing and Flash 10.1 built in, plus the usual tweaks and performance updates.

So all in all lots of positive news

[jfa02]

There was news reported on BGRthat the ere will be two webos devices on ATT in 2010 I would assume that they will be the pixi plus and pre plus with gsm radios and 3G frequencies. Also for ATT the dell mini and backflip android phones

Sorry the article was in posket now CES: Palm Comes to AT&T: 2 webOS Devices for Ma Bell

[docgwen]

Thanks for the updates!

Has anyone taken at look at the new LG GW990 Intel Atom Processor Mobile Phone?
Will it be available gsm?

[deibelsan]

Yeah, this is pretty bad news for Sprint...Verizon with an exclusive on the 2 new versions of the WebOS phones. Sprint was hardly able to sell them when they had an exclusive now they have an exclusive on the inferior models.

[Treo Musketeers]

I'm a bit disappointed at Palm. I thought they would build some momentum and close the gap some more on the iphone and Android, by introducing some new phones that use WebOS. The addition of some GBs of memory to the Pre and wifi to the Pixi is hardly innovative, but rather things that should've been there to begin with. At a minimum Palm could've added a phone model that restored some of the items lost in previous Palm phones, such as memory card backup, better sync capabilities with one's PC, etc.

[jfa02]

You would think!

[TazUk]

I think they've done quite well with their limited resources. It is only a year since the Pre and WebOS were anounced and only six months since it became available from Sprint. The iPhone has been around for three years and a couple of years for Android. Considering how long it took between releases and updates prior to WebOS they've come on in leaps and bounds. Of course they can't become complacent and have to keep pushing just as hard.

With regards to the plus models on Verizon I haven't read anything which has said they are exclusives, was this announced by Palm/Verizon at CES?

[jfa02]

Not that Isaw or read but it could have slipped past me.

[comiken205]

Yes, Rubenstein announced it as an exclusive deal.