Bell’s history with the Palm Pre hasn’t exactly been a perfect one, but it looks like their new Palm Pre promotion may be a winner. There’s been low sales, very little promotion, and much higher profile launches, especially on their new HSPA network. However, it seems the Pre is back on the front page of Bell’s smartphone section, with this very nice new promotion.

Under the promotion, and a 3-year contract agreement, you get a Palm Pre for $0 (like before), and better yet, there’s now $15 off your monthly bill! That’s a total savings of $180 yearly, plus $300 for the device itself. Oh, and they’re tossing in $75 worth of accessories too.

If that sounds intriguing with you, and the 3-year contract isn’t deterring, then you’ll want to look at the different smartphone plans Bell offers. The lowest is the Smartphone 50 plan, which offers the very basics (with only 500MB allowed monthly), usually for $50/month, but under the promotion, ends up at $35/month.  And don’t forget, Bell allows tethering. Awesome, eh. Prices increase from there, up to the Smartphone 100 plan, so there’s flexibility is what you want out of your device.

Whether this is an attempt at Bell to get rid of lingering inventory, or a renewed interest in Palm now that HP came to the rescue, will remain a mystery. But at these kinds of savings, it doesn’t really matter too much. No details on how long the promotion will last, so if this is what you’ve been waiting for, you may want to act fast.

via MobileSyrup & webOS Roundup, thanks for the tip AdmiralRaptor

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Bell Mobility wants you to take a Palm Pre off their hands, and they want you to take it real bad. Why do we say that? As our maple leaf friends at MobileSyrup have noted, the Canadian carrier has dropped their pricing for the Pre considerably. You can now get a Pre for free on a two-year contract (previously you had to sign up for three years for a free Pre), or you can buy a Pre off-contract (CDMA, mind you), for just $299.95. Canada: the time is now.

Thanks to everybody that sent this in!

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Tethering has always been a bit of a touchy subject both officially from carriers and even in our forums. The legalities are sketchy for most. Thankfully, for Canadian Pre users, things got a bit easier.

Recently, we’re not sure of the specific date, all of Bell Mobility’s smartphone plans changed. Now, every smartphone data plan has tethering added. For example, the $50 plan now says,

"500 MB of data for personal email, Internet browsing, instant messaging, and tethering"

Pricing goes up from there, with the largest plan at $100 offering a 3GB monthly allotment.  However, as it says, the data amount is shared, so tethering Canadians will need to be aware of bandwith used.

With that in mind, it’s worth reminding fellow Canadians that the homebrew app Netstat is amazing for keeping track of bandwidth used. As for tethering apps, the most convenient one is the paid app MyTether, and lately we’ve been hearing successful stories of Bell users using the free Mobile Hotspot.

Since legality is becoming less of an issue for tethering, it’s not surprising there are rumblings others may be creating competing tethering apps as well.

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This might not be as good as a free Palm Pre, like the offering from PhoneCashBack that we found back at the end of September, but is a great deal anyway. Now the bad news, at least for us here in the USA, this offer is valid only in Canada.

Our good neighbors from the Great [...]

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While Sprint webOS users have long been blessed with all sorts of network-specific fancy apps like Sprint TV and Sprint Navigation, our friends up in Canada have been languishing in a land of TV-less Pre phones. No longer, say the folks at Mobile Syrup, who have caught wind of a new Bell-specific app on the way: Bell TV (or Vu!, we’re not sure).

Unlike Sprint’s app, Bell TV will be an extension of Bell’s current Pay-per-Vu! movie and television service. As such, it requires that you already be a subscriber to Bell’s TV service, and as you might expect it is a pay-per-view system and will charge your account for every show you watch. It’s better than nothing, and nobody’s going to gripe about having to pay for movies.

We’re told to expect Bell TV (or Vu!) in the App Catalog on December 11th, otherwise known as this Friday.

[via: The MX Web]

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If you happen to live in Canada and were for whatever reason turned off by the $49.95 price tag for a Bell Palm Pre at Wireless Wave, we hope that the holiday season at least has you in the mood to spend $24.95 for the same phone. Yup, it’s a sweet holiday sale at Wireless Wave, where they’ve hacked seventy-five loonies off the $100 asking price from Bell. As you would expect, the standard three-year contract is still required, but at this price you’re grabbing a Pre for just about what your Yankee Doodlin’ southern neighbors pay for the Pixi.

[via: Mobile Syrup]

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Canadian carrier Bell Mobility has dropped its pricing of the Pre to $149.95 on a 3 year contract, in the first official price drop since the phone launched there back on August 27th.  This price drop brings Bell’s pricing of the device into parity with that of the other  exclusive North American CDMA seller of the Pre (with exception of that pesky 3 year contract, of course).

[via mobilesyrup]

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So it has been a little over a week since we received the latest update to webOS (1.2.1). We don’t know if the next update will be 1.2.2 or 1.3, and we certainly don’t know the date this new webOS iteration will arrive. But there’s a rumor on a German site pointing towards November.

The German [...]

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We know the Palm Pre has been a hit for Sprint, here in the US. And that our neighbors up north, as well as the ones in Mexico like the first webOS device from Palm. How about the people in the UK, will they receive the Pre as we did back in June. According to [...]

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What do the following have in common? The days over the past month that Palm has added to the App Catalog. The launch of the Pre on Bell Mobility. Palm’s Q1 2010 earnings report. The rumored release date of webOS 1.2 and the ecommerce App Catalog (aka today, we sincerely hope, unless the recent rumor is correct). The pricing and availability announcement for the GSM Pre (also aka today). The unveiling of the Palm Pre at CES.

If you guessed Palm, well, that’d be correct, but the answer we were going for was Thursday. Especially over the past several weeks Palm has had a thing for Thursdays. What gives?

We decided to do some digging, and it turns out that there’s really no rhyme or rhythm to why they picked Thursdays for all the fun – as Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein said during last Thursday’s Q1 2010 conference call, webOS updates are put out on a web schedule (i.e. when they’re ready), not the traditional structured scheduling that most computing platforms deal with.

But we’re not content with that. There had to be more. Our hunches:

• According to the Thai solar calendar, the color of Thursdays is orange. The Romans named Thursday after Jupiter. Palm’s old logo: Orange like Thursdays, round  like Jupiter. Coincidence? I think not!
• John Steinbeck’s sequel to Cannery Row was titled Sweet Thursday (with Wednesdays being Lousy and Fridays Waiting), so far Thursdays have been rather sweet, though we wouldn’t go so far as to call them succulent.
• As Arthur Dent once said, “I never could get the hang of Thursdays.” Ford Prefect handled them just fine, so perhaps Palm employees are aliens. Somebody check to see if one of those Hoopy Froods is carrying a towel.
• The English word for Thursday came (originally) from the Old Norse "Day of Thor." Palm decided that Thursday will be the day that they "Bring the Hammer."

There are plenty of other possibilities.

Or maybe Thursdays were picked for App Catalog updates to give Palm’s staff time to get the new apps in order, do some testing, and fix bugs on Friday without having to worry about the weekend, and everything else is sheer coincidence. Clearly, there’s plenty to counter the Palm Thursdays trend, given that the Pixi was announced on a Wednesday, the Pre launched on Sprint on a Saturday, and Palm’s new circle-free logo isn’t really all that Jovian anymore.

Update: Palm chimes in via Twitter, it’s definitely the Thai solar calendar.

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