Palm Pre Base

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.