Palm Pre said to sync up nicely with Apple's iTunes

It is not hard to imagine how this news will go over at Apple HQ. This from a Fortune blog today:

It came up briefly at CES in January when a Palm representative let the cat out of the bag. Nobody followed up.
But with more and more Palm Pres appearing in the wild — in the hands of Palm employees, Elevation partners, one of my high-school buddies, even the Boy Genius — we can now confirm this little secret:
Plug a Pre into a Mac and it syncs, seamlessly, with Apple’s iTunes.
In fact, the iTunes Store treats the Pre just as it would an iPod or an iPhone with one exception: it can’t handle old copy-protected songs.

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Best Buy will have the Palm Pre for $199, no rebate required

Yesterday, Sprint announced that it will charge $200 for thePalm Pre,but to get that price customers will have to send in a mail-in rebate.  As much as I dislike Best Buy, it looks like ‘the’ place to go for the Palm Pre.

This retailer will have Palm’s latest smartphone in its stores on the launch day, June 6, and will be selling this device at $200 with an instant rebate, not a mail-in one.

To get this price, customers will still have to commit toa two-year service plan, a requirementthat’s become standardfor discounts on smartphone purchases in the U.S.

Update on Thursday, May 21, 2009 at 9:39PM by Jon Arnason

Best Buy stores are allegedly restricted to an initial distribution of 4,250 Palm Pres for the June 6th launch day, an unnamed source has told the Boy Genius Report. If true, each of the 1,000 stores to sell the device will only get 4 units at first. A separate source claims that RadioShack will only receive two phones per store, with availability limited to coastal areas such as New York, New Jersey and California.

Palm Pre to launch on Sprint June 6th for $200

At long last we have this thing.  Sprint today confirmed that it will launch the Palm Pre on June 6th for $200 on a two-year plan and after a $100 rebate. The first-ever webOS smartphone will sell not only in Sprint stores but also Best Buy, Radio Shack and Walmart. Using the phone will require either at least an Everything Data plan for home users, a Simply Everything plan, or a Business Essentials with Messaging and Data plan.

NYT: Palm Pre to launch in the first week of June

The New York Times claims the Palm Pre is due in the first week of June.  You have to take all these rumors and announcements with a grain of salt, but we can all hope, right? 

Best Buy also likely to get Palm Pre June 7

Sprint’s own stores may be accompanied by Best Buy for an increasingly corroborated June 7th Palm Pre launch based on a new leak. An insider tells BGR that about 4,500 Palm Pre units will reportedly be shipped to Best Buy Mobile stores that day and will guarantee that every store has at least one unit, with some getting several examples to sell. The reason for the small supply isn’t yet clear.

Such an expansion is typical for some of Sprint’s past high-profile launches, including the Samsung Instinct, and may be intended as a means of catching up in distribution and exposure to Palm’s most immediate competitor, the iPhone. Apple didn’t sell the iPhone in third-party retailers until September 2008 and, consequently, is believed to have hurt its potential reach for customers without close access to either an Apple or AT&T store.

Additionally, the same source points to the phone costing the expected $199 on contract needed to challenge the iPhone, though they also indicate that existing customers will be pushed to pay $299. The rumor also has Sprint discouraging customers from buying the phone contract-free by raising that price to $999, or well above even the maximum $699 for a 16GB iPhone under similar terms at AT&T.

source:electronista

AT&T Vs Pre: Internal Document Smackdown - Slams the Pre

Want more evidence that the Pre release is imminent? How about AT&T sending a document around their internal network for employees to bone-up on some anti-Pre, pro-iPhone talking points …and then holding some in-store seminars for employees to make sure they get the message?

There are a few points here that are indisputable, but fans of the Pre might take umbrage at a few of the things here about the Pre (click the image above for the full size):

• The Palm Pre “Touchscreen control gestures not intuitive” whereas the iPhone features “Patented Multi-Touch screen” and “Fast and responsive navigation.” Hokay.
• The iPhone sports a “Thinner, lighter, bigger screen, metal and glass design” while the Pre is “Available in Black only; plastic casing.”
• The Pre gets knocked for not being a GSM world phone and “Limited free Wi-Fi access” because they don’t get to use AT&T Hotpots.
• The Pre has an “Unproven App Catalog app store.”

If this feels familiar to anybody, it should. Same thing happened in the months running up to the launch of the BlackBerry Storm, which caused a small flurry of Duelin’ Documents between AT&T and RIM. Don’t take this lying down, Palm (but don’t hurt your relationship with AT&T either, we’re eager to see the Pre on AT&T ASAP).

source:precentral

iPhone 3.0, Palm Pre to drive phone demand

iPhones running the OS 3.0 update and the Palm Pre are both likely to spur the next wave of smartphone sales in the next three months, according to a new ChangeWave study. Of those looking to buy a device in the 90 days following the March survey, iPhone demand is technically remaining flat at 30 percent; however, about 20 percent of the total group said they would be more likely to buy an iPhone now that iPhone OS 3.0’s features are public. Of those whose interest is sparked by the prospect of iPhone 3.0, demand is evenly split by the theoretical capacities of new hardware. About 9 percent would be willing to buy a 32GB iPhone at the $299 price of the current 16GB model, while 11 percent would want to buy a 16GB iPhone if it was lowered to the $199 price of an 8GB version. If a stripped-down 8GB model were available at $99, 8 percent would opt for that model.

Palm remains a distant third in demand but has seen plans to buy one of its phone spike from just 1 percent in December to 4 percent in March based almost exclusively on favorable impressions of the Pre, which brings a new OS and a more modern touchscreen design.

Conversely, demand for BlackBerries has actually cooled over the past 4 months, dropping from 39 percent to 37 percent. The decline is assigned to a cooldown following the launch of the BlackBerry Storm.

ChangeWave warns that Palm may have trouble increasing demand due to loyalty, as only 1 percent of existing iPhone users and 4 percent of BlackBerry users would consider switching to any of Palm’s phones. Just 1 percent are also willing to switch to Sprint for any device.

source:elecronista

New Palm Pre apps underscore Apple's iPhone limitations

While third-party apps are being trumpeted as the iPhone’s strength, key Palm Pre demos this week were designed to highlight their restrictions by taking advantage of those precise things that Apple won’t allow.

At Sprint’s press lounge during the CTIA Wireless Association’s annual event, Palm stressed the advantages of the new webOS platform at the heart of the Pre by running presentations of carefully selected third-party software live on sample phones.

The most advanced was Pandora’s Internet radio app. On an iPhone OS device, the music service is partly neutered by Apple’s refusal to allow true background tasks, preventing users from listening to streams while they run other chores; on the Palm Pre, Pandora not only runs in the background but hooks into the always-on notification bar to let listeners approve or dismiss songs without having to even switch active tasks.

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Palm also underlined Apple’s refusal to permit interpreting code within tjhird-party apps by showcasing an emulator that does just this. Mobile software developer MotionApps released an app known as Classic that, much as with Apple’s own Classic that was present in Mac OS X until Leopard, recreates the entire working environment for an older operating system. In the case of webOS, it lets Pre users run PalmOS apps near full speed and as just one of any other, native apps that can be running at the same time.

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