Attention Canada: you might be getting a Palm Pre 2 on Rogers sometime soonish, but if you’re looking for an original Palm Pre, Bell Mobility has a deal coming on December 10th that just can’t be beat: $149.95 for an off-contract. Of course, it is a CDMA phone and can only be used on Bell in Canada (unless you’re willing to engage in some serious hacking), but if that’s your carrier of choice, you aren’t going to find a better deal than this.

Bell has over the past year had significant difficulty getting users to pick up the Pre, repeatedly slashing prices and offering deals to get customers on board. We suspect they were counting on the Pre being a smash hit on Sprint in the United States and riding the wave of consumer enthusiasm like competitor Rogers did with the Apple iPhone 3G. This final price drop appears to be Bell’s last ditch effort to get their remaining original Pre inventory out before Rogers starts selling the Pre 2, which hopefully won’t be too long from now.

Source: All Things Mobile

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Tell us, what colors does the Palm Pre come in? If you answered “black,” then you’re today’s lucky winner of a pat on the back. But perhaps the new honchos at HP will see fit to note the joy on actress Agam Darshi’s face when she pulls a pink-cased Palm Pre out of the box. Presumably it’s an original CDMA Palm Pre on Bell, as that’s where the show Dan for Mayor is based, so we know she’s getting a good deal as far as her service plan is concerned.

There is the matter of the phone apparently coming with features we hadn’t been told about, namely a digital compass, haptic feedback, and Street View in an unnamed mapping application. Of course, the digital compass can’t be faked if you don’t have the hardware, but if you want it, you can get haptic feedback on your Pre through patching, and Street View is available in the work-in-progress BFG Maps app. Oh, and the pinkness? We’ve got cases for that. Video of the whole deal after the break (thank goodness for region agnostic YouTube).

Have you recently spotted the Pre, Pixi, or other Palm device on your favorite show? Drop us a note at pretips@precentral.net with the show and a few relevant details like air date, time in the episode, and an online video link if you’ve got one!

Source: CTV

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If you’re in Canada and you’ve been waiting for the most ridiculous deal ever before you’d jump on the webOS bandwagon, Bell is doing their best to ensure that you run out of excuses. Previously Bell had implemented a discount that brought the price of monthly service for a Palm Pre down to a starting rate of $50 a month. Now they’re throwing an additional unadvertised $15 a month on top of that, cutting the minimum monthly commitment to a paltry $35 a month on a three-year contract.

That’s a paltry $1.15 a day for 200 talk minutes and 500MB of data, with an additional option of doubling those minutes, having unlimited texting, unlimited calls and texts with five preselected numbers (your Unlimited Five), or free nights starting at 5 PM. A good deal, no? Oh, and the Palm Pre is free on Bell. Still.

Source: Bell.ca; Via: RedFlagDeals.com; Thanks to Rob for the tip!

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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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In Canada? Waiting in line?  Already got your Pre? Giddy as a schoolgirl? Feeling the sting of a brand new 3 year contract? Is that contract offsetting the joy of not having to hassle with a mail-in rebate? We really, really want to know because we’re happy for our Canadian readers (we just wish more of them could feasibly use Bell).

Hit us up in the comments, email your photos into news@precentral.net, let us know what you think!

If you’re still on the fence about the Pre, be sure to hit up our insanely comprehensive full Palm Pre Review and Guide. Toronto’s Globe and Mail (thanks tipster who for some reason wanted to be Anonymous) has an article up on the launch and why it’s good for Bell as a network:

“There’s no doubt the Pre will have a positive impact on our market share and there’s no doubt the Pre will have a positive impact on ARPU [average revenue per user] because it’s so easy to use, so our data revenue will grow,” said Wade Oosterman, president of Bell Mobility and chief brand officer of Bell Canada.

Don’t you wish you lived in a world where you didn’t know what APRU meant? Also, and we say this gently, why do you think Palm decided to start their Pre launch with two smaller (some might say struggling) networks?

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