It’s taken a lot of poking and prodding, but Sprint has finally seen right to drop the pricing of their webOS offerings. According to the latest edition of The Playbook, Sprint’s internal employee newsletter, effective September 12 Sprint will be dropping the new-contract price of the Palm Pre to $49.99 and the Palm Pixi to flat-out free. Right now a Pre will cost you $149.99, while a Pixi costs $49.99 – both prices sadly still include the $100 mail-in rebate.

In addition to the new contract pricing, Sprint is also dropping the pricing for off contract purchases, with $200 slashed from the Pre (dropping it to $349.99 off contract) and the Pixi cut by $50 to $299.99. After a cursory glance at Sprint’s smartphone offerings, that’ll make the Pre and Pixi the cheapest way to get into the smartphone game on America’s #3 network. Unless, you know, you want a Centro ($80 off contract, free with a new subscription).

Thanks anonymous tipster!

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Here’s some of the latest talk in the forums:

• With the PDK Hot Apps promotion set to go live on July 15th, you know an OTA update is inbound for the majority of you Pre and Pixi users out there.  Member AS4K wants to talk best practices in preparing for the next version of webOS with homebrew.
• Revival: Here’s a fun thread from about this time last year that examined how many times you’ve opened the slider on your Pre, and numbers then were generally in the 800-900 range. After following the directions found in the thread, I discovered that I’m currently at a staggering 22,152.
• Unsure what the webOS Doctor is all about?  Good news: knowing P|C forum members are here to fill you in.  
• There’s been much debate about the difference between the battery that comes stock with the Pre and the Pixi and the one that shipped with the Centro.  Many users, against the advice of Palm, continue to use the Centro battery in their webOS powered phones.  There’s a very real difference, as it turns out, and member itsjustme has the scientific proof.

We look forward to seeing you in the forums.  Not already a member?  Come to your senses and join us! 

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While we understand the drive to throw in freebies to entice a customer to buy a product, we as the customer generally prefer that the freebie be somehow useful to the product I am looking to purchase. Case-in-point, Wal-Mart Wireless’s online site (powered by LetsTalk) is giving out free 4GB microSD cards from Kingston with select Sprint phone purchases, including the Samsung Instinct S30, HTC Hero, Palm Centro, Samsung Moment, and the Palm Pre and Pixi. Wait, that’s not right…

In other news, Verizon’s website also has some cleaning up to do, as Hebrew language blog Palm Preacher noticed. Verizon’s fancy try-it-out emulator for the Pre Plus lists the following tech specs: 7630 MB ROM/256 MB RAM. If you’ve been following the news about the Pre Plus at all, you’ll noticed that those numbers are exactly half of what they should be, in fact they’re the specifications of the regular Pre, not the double plus good Pre Plus. At least some other parts of the Verizon website list the Pre Plus with the proper storage and memory. Now if only Verizon would actually show off the Pre Plus on their website…

Thanks to Darrell and avnera for the tips!

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Welcome to Round Table, which is in fact not a table at all. Round Table is a continuing series on PreCentral where we pose a question to the staff and they provide their thoughts and insights. The question could be something simple like “what’s your favorite webOS app?” or something a bit more complicated, like “what do you want from the next Palm device?” Or maybe we’ll just end up chatting about our favorite sandwiches, you never know. This time around we’re looking back at six months of life with the Palm Pre and webOS.

Check it all out after the break: What was the most important event for Palm in the last six months, and what will be the most important in the next six months?

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Saul Hansell of the New York Times recently penned an interesting feature on Palm. Hansell opened the piece by describing Palm as a "mouse" in "a land of cellphone giants" including Apple, Research in Motion, Google, Microsoft and Nokia, then interposes comments by Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein with analyst thoughts to show both Palm’s strengths and supposed weaknesses. At one point in the piece, Tero Kuittenen, an analyst with MKM Partners, describes how opinions have fluctuated since the Pre announcement in January:

“These emotional extremes reflect a handset market in profound turmoil,” said Tero Kuittinen, an analyst with MKM Partners. “Palm soared to $18 when people were expecting Pre to be a blockbuster. American tech bloggers went crazy over Pre and pronounced it to be the St. Paul following the iPhone Jesus,” he said. “Then Verizon started pushing Droid and the bloggers reversed. Now Pre was doomed and Android was going to take over the global handset market.”

There were a few other noteworthy points, including Rubinstein being quoted as saying, "Android, and the droid in particular, are designed for the techie audience…We [at Palm] are doing a more general product that helps people live their lives seamlessly." Given Palm’s strong support for open-source development, easily modifiable code and other tech-friendly features of the Pre in particular, the idea that the Pre was not "designed for the techie audience" seems a bit odd, though Palm has repeatedly stated that they are pursuing customers that aren’t current smartphone owners.

On the prospects for Palm with the addition of the Pixi to its lineup, analyst Kuittinen estimates that "Palm may be able to sell 10 million handsets next year," depending on adding carriers in Europe as well as the United States.

Oddly, notwithstanding the largely positive spin of the piece, The Times’ headline changed between when the piece was first posted (and put into print) and the current online version. The original headline read, "Underdog Palm Takes on Giants in Smartphones," but the current version has morphed to, "Is Palm’s Comeback Losing Steam?" There’s no explanation either in or accompanying the piece for the change, and little indication in the article that Palm’s comeback may be "losing steam."

Setting aside the title change, the article paints a generally good picture of Palm’s current and future prospects, especially with the release of the down-market Pixi to fill the Centro role with which Palm was so successful in the past.

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I’ve been a loyal Palm user for many years. Going back to the old Palm M105 I’ve been a Palm diehard, up through the Tungsten T, Tungsten T3 (best PDA ever), a Treo 650, Treo 755p, and now the Palm Pre. Don’t get me wrong, I really do like the Palm Pre and believe that it is the best smartphone on the market and webOS certainly has more potential than any other platform, but years of observation have left me somewhat jaded on the future of Palm.

This time one year ago I was lost as to what my next phone was going to be. My Sprint contract was close to being up for renewal and while I was still a fan of the old Palm OS, it simply couldn’t compare to the offerings from Apple and Google. Problem is, Android a year ago was still pretty darned rough around the edges and even then I didn’t like the idea of being locked in the Apple iPhone ecosystem. And Sprint, oh poor lowly Sprint, they didn’t have a single new phone that I found really appealing. My Treo was by no means in bad shape – the 755p was a tank, after all – but I’m a self-professed technology whore and I had a bad hankering for the latest.

Thankfully, it wasn’t much longer before Palm revealed webOS and the Pre. I though I was saved, and through the next six months that it took for Palm and Sprint to finally ship the phone I read everything I could about it, jumped back into discussion of the phone and Palm, and eventually came to be a writer and editor for PreCentral. The Pre finally landed in my hands on launch day and I couldn’t have been happier.

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We at PreCentral weren’t the only ones that got our hands on the Palm Pixi for review. All across the intertubes various tech news outlets got to review the Pixi and the general consensus was this: the Pixi is tiny and, at $100, not that bad. With its super slim design, excellent keyboard, and solid build the Pixi won many fans, but its various drawbacks (lack of WiFi, screen size, slowness) led to many comparisons to the big brother Pre. Check it all out after the break…

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It seems that these people on the teletube keep getting dud Pre phones with faulty proximity sensors. Or maybe they just don’t open up the phone app and let the Pre keep glowing for effect. Such is the case on How I Met Your Mother, where Marshall (Jason Segel) was spotted with a new Pre. The character has previously sported a Treo 755p, other characters carry around a Centro or two.

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So over the weekend, Engadget put on the very first The Engadget Show, and all things considered, it went quite well. Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein was the show’s first guest, sitting down for a one-on-one chat with Joshua Topolsky for a good thirty minutes. They discussed Rubinstein’s time at Apple, his prior relationship with Steve Jobs at NeXT, and how Rubinstein guided both the development of the iMac and iPod as part of his helping turn around Apple.

The discussion then turned to Rubinstein’s move to Palm and the similarities – and differences – with what he’s doing in Sunnyvale to what he did in Cupertino. Unlike the Apple turnaround, which was in a low-growth market (computers) against the monolithic Microsoft, Palm views the handheld market as ripe for expansion with the potential for four or five players to share leadership (clearly, Palm wishes to be one of them). When Rubinstein came to Palm, he did what he did at Apple: evaluate all the current products and narrow the company’s focus. In this case, he killed several projects in development (including the Foleo), leaving Palm to focus on the Centro, Treo Pro, and webOS.

There’s much much more in the interview, including plenty of laughs, a Pixi demo (nothing new here, though), how Palm kept the Pre secret, why Palm made the Pixi the way it did (including the insinuation that the removal of WiFi was Sprint’s idea/request), what’s up with the whole Palm vs. Apple brouhaha, and more than a few wonderful out-of-context quotes from Rubinstein: “It’s nice to be the pretty girl at the dance.” (in reference to Verizon and AT&T publicly expressing interest in a webOS phone).

So head on over and give The Engadget Show premiere a download, and soak in the glory that is half an hour of Palm talk.

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In many ways, the Pixi is to the Pre what the Centro was to the Treo. In some ways it’s the same phone, in others it’s a different beast. And a svelte beast this one is. Like the Pre, the Pixi features EVDO Rev. A, the touch sensitive gesture area, a full QWERTY keyboard, GPS, 3.5 mm headset jack, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, 8 GB of storage space (~7 GB user available), a MicroUSB port, proximity sensor, light sensor, accelerometer, ringer switch, the same 1150 mAh battery, and the same complement of Sprint services (NFL Mobile Live, NASCAR Sprint Cup, Sprint TV, Sprint Navigation, etc).

Where the Pixi most obviously differs is in layout. The phone is a slate-style device, featuring an exposed keyboard up front with an 18-bit color 320×400 pixel capacitive multi-touch display measuring 2.63 inches across. For comparison, the Pre’s screen is a 3.1 inch 320×480 screen, while the iPhone’s is 3.5 inches. The below-screen gesture area from the Pre carries over to the Pixi (we can likely expect it on all future webOS phones), though the card view button is not present – you now tap in the gesture area to pop up to the card view. Finally, the Pixi has a 2 megapixel camera with flash, compared to the Pre’s 3 megapixel camera with flash. The Pixi also lacked the Pre’s "extended depth of field" camera functionality.

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