To round off our coverage of Palm’s slamdunk of announcements at this year’s CES 2010 show, we’ve listed all the key points and posted up their video presentation so you can get the full story direct from the head honcho.
Here’s the key announcements:
- Palm Pre Plus will be carried by Verizon in the States and comes with a cleaner design (the central nav button has vanished). Its internal memory has been doubled to 16GB and the Pre ships with the cool wireless Touchstone charger and inductive back cover.
- The Pixi Plus will have Wi-Fi added, and come in a range of primary colours. Oh pretty!
- A new over-the-air update for webOS will add Flash 10 Beta browsing and the long awaited video recording, which comes with built-in editing software.
- Palm has opened up an app database to all developers, backed by a plug-in development kit and dangled a large carrot in the shape of a million-dollar bonus scheme for the most popular apps downloaded
- A slew of top, graphics-intensive 3D games have been released from big name developers such as EA Mobile, Glu and Gameloft. Need for Speed on the Pre? Win!
- A nifty new app called Mobile Hotspot lets Pre users turn their handsets into a Wi-Fi hotspot supporting up to five devices.
Palm’s new handsets will go on sale in the US in April, pricing TBC.
Wirefesh comment: The Pre may not be able to match the iPhone’s cornucopia of apps or its vast wads of cash or advertising budget, but it is substantially cheaper (this is a BIG thing), it’s physically smaller, has a physical keyboard, a better operating system and is now getting games as good as the best on the iPhone. Crucially, it’s also now appearing on one of the US’s biggest carriers.
We’d say that all this might be enough for it to keep its head above water in a very crowded marketplace, although it’s always going to be a different story in the UK, where Palm remains a minor player, burdened with only being available on a single network.
The video
The full video of Palm’s presentation runs to 50 minutes so grab yourself a coffee and soak up all that Palm goodness.
The problem with Palm presentations (apart from the guy fluffing his lines through out) is they keep telling you how great the product is (‘it’s really awesoke’ or ‘phonomenly good’) rather than showing us they are.
Compare with the Apple key notes and you see why Apple are masters not just of brilliant UI design but of the experience…