Palm announced today that Jon Rubinstein who joined the company in October 2007 as Executive Chairman will be replacing Ed Colligan as a CEO of Palm Inc. Ed Colligan who has been Palm`s CEO for 16 years will be joining Elevation Partners after a short leave.

“I’m very proud of what Palm has accomplished so far,” said Colligan. “We pioneered two major product categories and I believe we are on our way to defining the standard for the mobile web. I’m extremely proud of our team, and grateful to have played a role in turning Palm around. I know that Jon, the Board and the Palm executive team will do an incredible job driving Palm to new heights.”

So there you have it, Jon Rubinstein, who has been in charge of Palm’s research and developement and engineering department, an ex NeXt and Apple empoyee will be leading the company to new glorious ventures.

Brilliant engineer and manager that worked under Jobs will be a great engine that will drive Palm in the future. At least we hope so.

Palm announced “Real reviewer” program just a few weeks ago, for all the social media sites out there. They hope to gain some widespread “organic” credibility troughout the web with it. It is the first time that Palm has opened tis kind of activities to non professionals. it has allways been out there for pro journalists but this time they are counting on bloggers, online journalists and reviewers to get the word on the Pre out.
And we must admit that this tactic is just brilliant, if you are a twitter/friendfeed/facebook user with a large flock of followers (let`s say 5000+) you are an ideal candidate for the “organic reviewer” position. So if you get lucky you`ll get one Palm pre for 6 months to dissect and describe from every existing angle.

So the main story here is a rumor that “real reviewer” program is launching this week, and all who applied and entered will be recieving their copy by the middle of the week. So prepare for buzz whirlpool of Palm pre sightings and news during the upcoming weeks. And it was about time.

It seems that Palm has succesfully mimicked the Apple strategy for initial release of the iPhone. The idea is to announce and heavily demo and show off the device’s capabilities months before the actual launch. Hence the quantity of videos and clips around the web teasing and building up the buzz. That will create the perfect climate for a spectacular launch, hopefully comparable to the one iPhone had.

Now that the WMC is over we can sit back and hand pick the quality material from the conference. So without further ado take a look at the 26 minute demo that will bring you closer to all the fine details of the WebOS and the Palm Pre (via Precommunity)

As you can see the Synergy is working flawlessly and the Calendar function in the new Palm Pre will be as beautiful as it is useful.
Check out the Palm Pre Calendar Gallery ( via Precommunity )

World Mobile Conference in Barcelona has kicked off this morning, and there is already a few interesting stories for Palm lovers. First of all we bring you a few shots from the Palm’s booth @ MWC and later on there will be some more Palm Pre sweetness. So sit back, relax, look at the pictures and imagine you are in Barcelona hanging out with all the cool people from the mobile world. And don’t forget to check out Palm’s Facebook page for more periodic snapshots from Barcelona.

As it was announced the CEO of Palm inc Ed Colligan revealed alot of interesting bits about the new Palm Pre. The main reason for this conference was probably to show off Palm Pre to some of the potentially crucial investors in the upcoming months and to reassure and feed Pre information to the hungry public.

Palm Inc will no longer make Palm OS devices, they are history and they are shifting focus to WebOS and Windows Mobile (shame if you ask me). So WebOS is the new Palm OS of choice.

Pre will have an “Application Store” preinstalled, just like iPhone and Android, but they will also allow users to download and install Palm Pre applications from other sources over the air or via USB cable from your home PC.
This is pretty good news, considering the relationship that Palm had with developers in the past this will hopefully bring quite a lot quality applications to Palm pre, as well as “testing” grounds for applications before they enter the “Pre Market”.

We all knew that Sprint will be the exclusive carrier of the CDMA version of Palm Pre in the US, but they gave no specifics on how long this exclusivity will last. Colligan mentioned North America, since Bell Canada was announced few days before. In Latin America they will release Pre on multiple carriers considering the nature of the market and Europe. The “suspected” carrirer for part of the Europe is Vodafone.

The bad news is that there will be no worldwide launch since they are looking to release Pre on other carriers by 2010. It seems that they are using the “iPhone technique” of one market at a time, a damn shame if you ask me.

The only problem in that plan is that Palm will remain US centric wich negates the possibility of larger market share worldwide.

Colligan also noted that there are no pending legal actions from Apple on the matter of patents, and that Palm has no need to use intellectual property that is not developed by them. Or the whole deal :

We’re very respectful about people’s intellectual property, we believe we’re huge innovators and have been for a lot of years and that this product has an enormous number of innovations in it. If something does happen there, we do have the portfolio, we think to defend ourselves and to be successful doing that. But nothing’s happened to date, so we’re really just focused on getting the product out the door.

Palm announced today that its CEO Edward Colligan will be presenting at the Thomas Weisel Partners Technology, Telecom & Internet Conference 2009 scheduled for Wednesday February 11th.

This is pretty interesting and might be an early sign of touting new blood and support into the company. There will be a live webcast at http://investor.palm.com/events.cfm.

We will be watching closely what Colligan has to say, but it will probably be presenting or spreading confidence on Pre’s behalf.