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.

Here it is boys n` gals, after months of anticipation, exhausted by rumors it is offical. Palm Pre will be available on June 6th, Spint has just released a press release. All you european Palm lovers before you get too excited, there is a bit of bad news. Palm Pre will be selling only in the US for the time being, and there is no info on the EU launch at this moment. This is pretty dissapointing that Palm decided to take this path. We are still hoping that they will at least give us a rough estimate.

So Palm pre will go for 199$ (after a mail in rebate and a two year contract with Sprint), we are guessing CDMA/EVDO version with a special “Palm Pre only” plan with data & messaging included. It will be available at Sprint, Best Buy, Radio Shack and some Wall-Mart locations. Optional TouchStone inductive charger will be 69,99$ (charger + back plate)

The launch date is on collision course with WWDC and possibly new iPhone demo, so we guess people at Palm calcualted their ods pretty carefully and decided to go for the prize :) . Since we are euro centric Palm Pre blog we will be on the lookout for any kind of info on the EU launch date so stay with us.

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.

Hello World :)

It is time that we introduce ourselves to the world. First of all let me explain the motivation behind Palm Pre Base. Most of us were and still are Palm users, we were saddened by the way that things were going with Palm for the last few years. Once a great company that was the ultimate innovating leader in the PDA and Smartphone segment started sinking to the bottom. From 51% of worldwide share in 2003 it sunk to 1-2%. The company that almost single-handedly created the PDA and smartphone market and introduced one innovating product after another was slowly slipping into oblivion.

We cannot describe how we felt when we first heard of Palm Nova that is today known as Web OS and the introduction of Palm Pre. To make a comeback they needed a superior device that will light up the peoples imagination, and we believe that Palm Pre is exactly that. So the things you can expect from us at Palm Pre Base is to give you news around the web on Palm Pre and Web OS with a enthusiastic but objective voice. We plan to build a large, friendly and live community so stick with us and you will not regret it. Subscribe to our RSS feeds for daily fresh news and articles.