Pretty good deal to say the least, as you may already know HP had just bought Palm couple of months ago, and today we see that HP is selling Palm Pre and Pixi on its website (Wireless Central).

Sprint hasn't been able to meet up ATT's pricing when comes to the Pre and Pixi, which they are selling sell the phone for $49 dollars with a 2 years contract.

Sprint charges significantly less each month for the bill, so most phones will cost more up front, simply because they can't afford to subsidize them as much.

but that being said, it may also have more to do with pushing to get the ATT/VZW stock dwindled down to Sprint levels before announcing the new hardware.

source: precentral

Looks like Palm pretty desperately want to get more Palm App developers that they are offering some pretty sweet deals to spice these developers to help them expand the App catalog.  Here's the message from Palm Developer Center:

• These are exciting times for Palm and our developer community. The Hot Apps promotion that we kicked off back in February is about to end with over 400 developers receiving a share of a million dollars. We recently launched the Summer Half Off promotion-a 50% discount for nearly every app in our U.S. catalog, funded by Palm. And we're just getting started.

• In July, we're launching the new PDK Hot Apps promotion-another million dollars to developers, this time focused on the C/C++ apps that were excluded from the original Hot Apps promotion.

• And we have one more program change that will benefit all developers. When we launched the developer program, we introduced a $50 per app fee to submit apps to our catalog. Effective immediately, we're waiving this fee and refunding to all developers any $50 fees collected in the past. If you're one such developer, you will see a credit in your PayPal account in the near future.

• Thank you for being part of the webOS community. We're excited to continue to evolve the Developer Program as together we build an incredible application catalog for customers.

Pretty sweet in my opinion, I sure hope they will be able both maintain and obtain more app developers.

source: Palm Developer Center

After all the speculation, HP has agreed to buy Palm for $1.2 billion, or roughly 5.70 dollars a share. (Here's the release.)

Palm, which was running short of cash and struggling to compete against the Apple's and Google's of the world, will now have HP's deep pockets and worldwide scope. While HP is no stranger to the mobile phone world-with its line of iPAQ phones-it has a lot of catching up to do and could benefit from branching out to phones and tablets from its a laptop and PC driven line-up.

Generally, Palm's technology is viewed as solid, it was just poor timing that hurt the smartphone-makers' chances. Of all the rumored potential acquirers from Dell to HTC and Huawei, HP was never considered a likely candidate. Palm's current chairman and CEO, Jon Rubinstein, who received a bit of flak for Palm's recent poor performance, is expected to remain at the company.

In a brief statement on Palm's web site, they point out that HP is one of the largest technology companies in the word, adding: "Can you say "webOS acceleration"? We're pretty excited, and pleased we surprised the world again."

source: finance.yahoo.com

China's Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. is the latest company to be linked to an acquisition of struggling smartphone manufacturer Palm Inc. , which has called in Goldman Sachs & Co. and San Francisco-based Qatalyst Partners to look for a buyer, according to reports.

And Huawei is far from the only Asian vendor believed to be involved in talks with Palm, which has been hard hit by growing competition from rivals such as Research In Motion Ltd. (RIM) and Apple Inc. after its Pre and Pixi smartphones failed to sell as well as hoped. Taiwan's High Tech Computer Corp. (HTC) and China's Lenovo Group Ltd. are also rumoured to be interested.

But the list of potential suitors goes further, with even Apple and Intel Corp's names thrown into the rumor melting pot.

full story is at light reading

Both the Pre Plus and the Pixi Plus will be released in Germany on April 28 2010. We don't know how much it will cost.  But since Palm is selling itself to someone (Potential Buyer would be Lenovo and HP)  We will wait to see what fate it is for Palm.  

But we surely hope WebOS will stay alive, the market needs this competitor for sure.

Shares of Palm Inc. jumped 20 percent Wednesday on reports that Lenovo Group might be interested in buying the company.

Kaufman Bros. analyst Shaw Wu told Marketwatch that he wasn't sure Lenovo could pull off a ourchase of Palm, suggesting that other possible buyers include Hewlett-Packard Inc. (NYSE:HPQ), Dell Inc. (NASDAQ:DELL) and Cisco Systems Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO).

source:bizjournal

So it looks like Palm might dump the ad agency after all.   A lot of folks weren't too happy to see this creepy lady introducing the Palm Pre.  I personally didn't think it was that bad, but my opinion is reserved for myself.

Little wonder then that Palm is rumored to be cutting the agency loose, evidently having finally realized that launching a bet-the-company smartphone with an advertising campaign that says almost nothing about it was unwise, if not utterly foolish-almost as foolish as choosing as a lead for that ad a female character far better suited for a role in "The Exorcism of Emily Rose."

We are hoping to see some cool ads from Palm in the future.

Source: allthingsd.com

webOS update 1.4.1 starting to pushing itself to folks in Europe, specifically Netherlands, Germany, UK, Ireland and couple of other countries.

If you are wondering what the 1.4.1 update does, here is it.

* You can now purchase paid applications outside the US
* Bluetooth Audio now works with BMWs
* Pinch to zoom is back in the document viewer
* Shutter delay on the camera has been tweaked
* The volume slider bug appears to have been fixed
* The bug where YouTube links on outgoing emails weren't working has been fixed
* The forward gesture is back in the browser

It's a pretty small update, here's the original link to the story

A lot of folks who own a Palm Pre or Pixi were pretty excited when Precentral.net revealed a way to overclock their pre and pixi to get the maximum horsepower from the devices.

Well, Palm just announced today that it's not recommended or endorse by them, if you chose to do it anyway, it will Void your Warranty, so play with your own risk in other words.

Palm is working hard to improve the speed and performance of webOS, as shown in our recent 1.4 update. While we appreciate the effort the webOS community has put forth to try and help us along that path, the use of this application is neither endorsed nor recommended by Palm and will likely result in a voided warranty. Palm encourages webOS users to let Palm release official updates that provide safe, reliable, over-the-air features that improve their device in a number of areas, as we have in the past at a rate of approximately once per month.

source: precentral.net

PalmPreForum.org

This is a short video demonstrating the performance enhancement capabilities offered by the new 800Mhz WebOS Kernel Patch for the Palm Pre (GSM and CDMA versions). The new OS1.4 800 MHz Palm Pre Kernel Patch, developed by unixpsycho and myself (caj2008) of PreCentral, will be released for general distribution the day after tommorrow at www.precentral.net.

This video features general operations of the Palm Pre and shows a "how to install patch procedure" using WebOS Quick Install program developed Jason Robitaille. This video, the second of two in a series of videos, is dedicated to this video's primary videographer SqyArc, as well as to Shadow-360 (the first video videographer), and his sister Clarissa who we hope will make a speedy recovery from a terrible automobile accident.

Clarification: an even simpler ipk install system will be utilized in the deployment so the .sh patch install procedure of this video is now outdated (a good thing).

Fore more info: see the following threads:

http://forums.precentral.net/palm-pre...