Palm Pre 2 gets UK release date: Monday 15th November

Hewlett Packard has announced that the Palm Pre 2 will be available SIM-free in the UK from Monday 15th November.

Hewlett Packard has announced that the Palm Pre 2 will be available SIM-free in the UK from Monday 15th November.

If, like us, you’re rather keen on a physical keyboard, then Palm are hoping to entice you into their hardware QWERTY keyboard’s world of joy with their latest blog post bigging up the ‘option’ key.

Written the day before HP announced their intention to buy Palm, this article reveals the kind of mountain that their new owners are going to have to climb.
In the UK, Palm sales have been disastrous, with their Pre webOS device failing to gain the traction it deserved – something not helped by the company’s frustrating inability to communicate.
The filmiest of rumours are circulating that the Palm Pre Plus and Pixi Plus could be heading in the direction of a European carrier next month.
Advert-bedecked UK tech blog Tracy and Matt are reporting that an anonymous tipster contacted them to say that o2 will start carrying the Pixi Plus and the Pre Plus.

After baffling consumers with the Spooky Woman (see below), Palm has put out a far more accessible advert which we reckon does a pretty good job selling their innovative webOS.

Palm will be strutting their stuff at the Game Developer’s Conference next week and their presentation will focus on their Plug-in Development Kit (PDK) – a set of tools designed to help developers create graphics-intensive games for Palm’s webOS.
The PDK is said to let developers rewrite mobile apps designed for other platforms in double quick-time, with iPhone apps reputedly ported over in “a matter of days,” with no degradation in performance.
The original Facebook app for the Palm Pre was a seriously underwhelming affair, so Palm webOS users so should be whooping with social networking-related joy at the news of a substantial update.
The slick new app offers an enhanced Inbox and the ability to view photo albums from all your friends, not just the photos in their news feeds.

Finally, Brit Palm Pre users can enjoy having their phone as up to date as their American cousins, with the v1.4 webOS update being rolled out across Europe and the US.
The update adds adds video capture to the Pre handset with the ability for users to edit and upload them directly to YouTube, Facebook, or share them via an e-mail or an MMS message.

The news from across the Atlantic is looking grim for Palm, with sales well down on initial estimates, and a profit warning issued – and if things are bad there, it’s hard to imagine how much worse they must be in the UK.
Put bluntly, you’re more likely to see a juggling polar bear unicycling down the High Street than see a Palm Pre being used in the UK.
So what happened? Why did such a great phone not get the attention it deserved in the UK?

The collection of apps available in Palm’s App Catalog store in the US has now risen to an impressive 1,500 apps, and is growing at a rate of more then 10 apps a day.
On top of the 1,500 officially available apps there’s also nearly 450 ready for downloading from the Homebrew catalogue, giving Palm Pre and Pixi users a wide range of apps to play with.

The guys at PreCentral managed to bag some hands-on time with a GSM Palm Pre running an early version of Flash, and have shared the video with the world.
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