Over at treo8, fvbhyt has posted some screenshots from the ROM that looks destined for China Telcom – we were expecting the Pre to launch on that network this very month. Interesting bits: we’re seeing an icon for QuickOffice who hopefully were convinced by our voting and are jumping in where DocsToGo feared to tread) and another screen showing Handwriting IME input. The slightly updated look of the menubar is also notable, as is some Chinese character interface bits on the memopad.

Hit up the source link for a few more shots, that handwriting input screen is after the break!

Source: Treo8; Thanks to Brrrr for the tip!

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It’s a small blurb in a Reuters article mainly about BlackBerries in China, but here’s the important part for us:

"China Telecom aims to sell BlackBerry handsets and Palm smartphones in China by early next year, as it tries to gain share from its two larger mobile telecom rivals, a source familiar with the situation said on Monday."

China Telecom is China’s smallest major cellular network (though the largest Chinese CDMA network), trailing behind rivals China Unicom and China Mobile. China Unicom recently launch the iPhone in China, though its high price has apparently limited the iPhone’s success. China Mobile, on the other hand, will be launching Dell’s new smartphone offering, the Android-running Dell Mini 3i.

This also is not the first time we’ve heard of China Telecom pursuing Palm. It was reported back in August that the carrier was in talks to carry Palm devices.

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Sure, webOS has basic Chinese character support, but as any Chinese speaker will tell you, it’s pretty darned basic. Not to be deterred by such things, Brunic set out to localize his Pre in Chinese (localization changes the user interface language, as well as number and date/time formatting). And, well, you see the results above. Apparently the process was a mostly manual one, though Brunic estimates that he was able to switch about 99% of the UI to Chinese, which is no small feat. Hopefully soon we won’t have to worry about users localizing the Pre themselves, with this big international roll-out coming up (with a possibility of China getting in on the action). Swing on over to Brunic’s blog to read how it was done, assuming you can cut through the garbled Google translation.

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The Palm Pre now has a home in Canada besides the US, and we know is coming to the UK, Ireland, Germany and Spain in Europe. And lets not forget Telstra in Australia will have the Pre before the end of this year. Now China appears to be getting ready for the Palm Pre as [...]

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It is one sentence in a Financial Times article about Chinese telecoms, but it says a lot:

“And China Telecom is planning to offer the Palm to its subscribers.”

Presumably, ‘the Palm’ means the Palm Pre. It works out well for China Telecom, as they are the country’s largest CDMA carrier and are in the process of rolling out an EV-DO network, while competitor China Unicom looks likely to score Apple’s iPhone. Getting the Pre in China would be a win for Palm, as adding the nation of 1.33 billion to distribution channels would increase Palm’s addressable market by nearly 150% over currently announced partnerships (with approximately 540 million possible customers in markets covered by Sprint, Bell Mobility, and O2/Telefonica). Of course, there’s no telling what sort of government requirements Palm may have to meet in adjusting the Pre such that it will be allowed to be sold in China, so it may be a while.

[via: Engadget]

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Palm’s been teasing it for a few days now, and they’ve finally posted their first ad for the Palm Pre, titled “Flow” and directed by feature film director Tarsem Singh (The Cell, The Fall).

The ad was put together by ad agency Modernista!, who has done work for Cadillac, BusinessWeek, Converse, Napster, and Product(RED) amongst others. Flow was shot in and around the Chinese cities of Beijing, Zhengzhou, Dengfeng, and Kunming. The guys in orange you see are over 1,000 martial arts dancers from the Shaolin Kung Fu School in Dengfeng. Used here to show how your life and the Palm Pre experience ‘flow’, these talented young dancers previously performed in the opening ceremony of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. The woman we see here – ‘Anima’ – will be a recurring character in Palm’s Pre ad campaign, which will focus on the phone’s ability to anticipate the user’s needs.

Check out Palm’s making-of video after the break, plus get the exclusive first details on Palm’s upcoming Pre ad campaign.

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As you may recall, the ad campaign kicked into viral mode a week ago with Palm issuing an invitation via their Facebook and Twitter pages to watch the yesterday’s premiere of the ad, along with a series of behind-the-scenes and making-of videos about the ad. Flow will go live today on Palm.com, as well as on various social-networking and video-sharing websites.

Even though the Pre is going on sale on Saturday, June 6, Palm’s ad campaign won’t kick fully into gear for a full two weeks after that on June 21 with an expensive homepage take-overs of YouTube (the #3 website worldwide, serving up more than 100 million video views a day), AOL.com, and Wired.com. Palm will also produce exclusive content for YouTube and will advertise its content integration on websites like the New York Times and Pandora.

June 22nd will mark the Pre’s first foray into television advertisements, outside of the brief un-credited appearances in Sprint’s Now Network commercials. Palm will focus on “in-season” primetime broadcast and cable shows such as Southland on NBC, Numb3rs on CBS, USA Network’s Burn Notice, and Mad Men on AMC, among others. Palm is also planning on making extensive use of outdoor digital advertisements, including ad space in airports, coffee shops, and various high-traffic office buildings.

So there you have it, the Palm Pre ad campaign in a nutshell. Be sure to check back with PreCentral regularly for more on the Pre’s release, marketing, and other developments surrounding Palm.

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As promised, Palm has started releasing videos about the making of their Palm Pre ad campaign. These first two videos, released on Facebook, give us some blurry stylized shots of the woman who looks to be the face of the Pre (as opposed to disembodied iPhone voice) and her hand holding a Pre, and glimpses of the large scale of the commercial interspersed with images of the Chinese locations where Palm shot the ads. The first video contains one important quote from, well, somebody with Palm: “What we’re doing here is nothing short of re-launching our brand, re-launching our company.”

According to Palm’s description of the first video, the ads were filmed in three locations in China: a studio in Beijing (where hand lady was hanging out), the Shaolin Kung Fu School in Dengfeng, and the mountains outside of Kunming. Presumably the mountain backdrop from Kunming will be used with the bluescreen shots from the studio – we’ll find out for sure come Wednesday. Also sighted: a few glimpses at the story-boards for the ad campaign, but the super-narrow depth-of-field blurs out most of the text accompanying them. In the meantime, we’ve got at least three more videos on the way. Either way, the graceful shots of the martial artists are sure to make for a captivating commercial.

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