Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the PreCentral.net Best of 2010 Awards. We received more than 27,000 votes for this year’s awards, and the wide array of winners reflects the variety and ingenuity of the webOS developer community, both official and homebrew. Dozens of apps to choose from, made by dozens of skilled developers, but in the end, there can be only one Best of 2010.

So, without further ado, the winners are... listed after the break. Yeah, such a tease.

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After receiving more than 3,600 nominations, we’ve sorted through them all and picked the best to be put to the vote for the PreCentral.net Best of 2010 Awards. There are seventy-two separate apps up for the awards, along with a dozen developers, and some themes and patches for good measure. It’s a veritable smorgasbord of webOS goodness, and it’s now up to you to pick the best of the best. After the break you’ll find the polls to crown the Best App of 2010, Best Developer of 2010, and many others.

Oh, and did we mention the prize for the homebrew crowd? Thanks to the awesome folks at WebOS Internals we’ll have a developer Palm Pre 2 to give to the winner of the Best Homebrew Developer of 2010 award (assuming that he/she doesn’t already have one).

You’ve got until Midnight Eastern Time on December 17th to get in your vote.

Update: it's the last day to vote - get it on after the break!

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CES 2011 is just a few weeks away, and we’re all assuming (and hoping) that Palm announces some awesome new devices to replace the aging hardware that’s out there right now. At this point, given the current marketshare numbers, what might be needed more than the new hardware is a new consumer mindset pertaining to Palm.

According to the latest numbers from Nielsen, Palm’s marketshare stands at a paltry 1.3% in the United States, and we’d reason that international marketshare is around that, if not lower in countries where Palm products are even available.

With Palm’s market penetration so low, the question weighing heavily on our minds right now is how do Palm and HP turn around their fortunes with webOS - especially if we need to wait some time for new hardware? The answer lies not with rebuilding marketshare. No, the answer is to reboot the public perception and start over. webOS is a fantastic operating system, but it was already fighting an uphill battle against iOS when it launched, and has since been eclipsed by Android and is facing competition for the bottom rung from, of all companies, Microsoft with their turn-the-smartphone-OS-on-its-ear Windows Phone 7.

In this mess of smartphone operating systems, how is Palm to differentiate itself and make the case for why Joe Consumer should buy a webOS phone over an iPhone or Droid? Reboot, reset, and start over. Palm needs to be aggressive with their advertising. It can’t be “We’re still here.” No, the message must be “We are here. This is why we’re awesome.”

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There’s lots of goodness going around in the Palm world, and we feel like making sure it all gets recognized. Thus, the PreCentral.net Best of 2010 Awards were born. Think of it as the Emmys, but for webOS apps. Unlike the award shows of Hollywood, we want your participation in the Best of 2010 Awards. So we’re opening the awards to nominations - your nominations.

After the break you’ll find a list of the categories in which we are seeking your input. We want to know what apps you think are worthy of consideration for a Best of 2010 award. To make it even better, once we’ve got all the nominations in, the balloting will again be done by you, the loyal webOS community. Nominations will be open until Friday, December 10th, midnight Eastern time. Voting will begin on Monday, December 13th and will run until midnight Eastern on December 17th.

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Five hundred twenty eight days after first landing in the hands of thousands of eager customers across the world, Sprint is done with the Palm Pre. The launch may not have been the blockbuster iPhone-matching success that Sprint and Palm had hoped it would be, but Sprint soldiered on with the Pre as their flagship device for quite a while.

Today we’ve received word from a trusted Sprint source that the end is here for the original Palm Pre, with Sprint marking the device as EOL (End of Life). It's not a surprise after it already disappeared from their site, but it's still a blow: we still find that the largest and most loyal webOS contingent lives on Sprint.

Quantities of new Palm Pre phones in Sprint warehouses are very low (we’re talking hundreds of units here), so it shouldn’t be too much longer before the phone is completely sold out.

Those interested in picking up a webOS device on Sprint will be left with the diminutive, underpowered, and Wi-Fi-lacking Palm Pixi. There is no word yet whether or not Sprint will carry the Palm Pre 2, but webOS-fans filling Sprint's Facebook page (at Palm's behest, no less) and official forums with requests for the device haven't appeared to make a dent in Sprint's decision not to carry the device.

Sprint sat out the Pre Plus, Pixi Plus, and appears primed to sit out the Pre 2. Maybe we just don’t want all our Sprint readers (and staff) to be left out in the cold, but we’d like to think Sprint and HP/Palm won't make Sprint users wait until next year for another webOS device on their network. In the end, only time will tell.

Thanks Anonymous!

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 use for the Pre’s mirror?” or something a bit more complicated, like “why are you sticking with webOS (or are you)?” Or maybe we’ll just end up discussing our sandwich workflow. Today, however, we’re diving into the latest version of webOS. While few have been able to handle webOS 2.0, the veritable cornucopia of videos, screenshots, and reviews have made it easy to draw some preliminary conclusions. After the break, see what the crew has to say about HP webOS 2.0.

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The votes are in and we’ve got a winner. In the week voting was open we received more than 7000 votes, but it came down to a dead heat right to the very end, with the top two entries separated by a scant 46 votes. But there can only be one winner (okay, there are three). Of the top ten finalists, the top vote getter will get a Palm Pre 2 (SFR, an unlocked device, or a Verizon device when available), while numbers two and three will receive $50 for the PreCentral Store.

Without further ado, the winner of the PreCentral Mock-Up The Next Palm Device Contest is the Palm Pre HD, by bhughes719! Coming in at a very close second was Jose Barajas’ Palm Superior HD, with Virox’s Pre 2, Palm Pad, and Palm Watch trifecta slotting in at third.

Congratulations to all entrants, finalists, and winners - there was a lot of great work submitted and we wish everybody could have won. And Palm, take note, as popular as the portrait slider keyboard is, there’s clearly also demand among the electorate for horizontal sliders and slate devices.

Check out the winning entries again after the break, and feel free to take a gander at all the other entrants in the original entries post. Congratulations again to our winners!

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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 RSS reader?” or something a bit more complicated, like “where do you see Palm in a year?” Or maybe we’ll just end up chatting about how we miss the cartoons of our childhood. Today, however, we’re going to take a look at the latest hardware from Palm: the Pre 2.

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Well folks, the time has come for the next phase of our fun little contest. After receiving several dozen entries of varying caliber, we’ve finally whittled the options down to pick ten finalists. The winner, however, is up to you and your voting skills (i.e. you ability to click with a mouse). The most excellent mock-up that receives the most excellent votes will net the winner the next Palm device, which as it turns out will be a Palm Pre 2, in which ever flavor the winner prefers (Verizon or unlocked AT&T band developer phone (or SFR if you’re feeling French)). Vote getters number two and three will received a conciliatory prize of $50 to spend at the PreCentral Accessory Store, while everybody else gets a slap on the back and a job well done.

After the break, check out all the entries, including our ten finalists and ten honorable mentions, and place your vote!

Update: The voting ends at midnight, eastern, tonight, so we're giving you one last chance to vote if you haven't yet. We won't say who's ahead in the poll, but we will say that it's a virtual dead heat between the top three - so tell your friends to get their vote on!

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More of an evolutionary update to the Pre Plus than a revolution, the new Palm Pre 2 does a lot to bring the aging Pre line of smartphones up to modern standards. First up is the obvious physical change: the curved plastic screen has been replaced by a flatter and tougher glass screen surrounded by a new bezel design with an integrated and cover-free Micro USB port.

The Pre 2 also packs in a 1GHz processor and a new 5 megapixel camera. Apart from those updates, it’s largely the same phone as the current Pre Plus, even packing the same 512MB of RAM. To be fair, that’s been found to be plenty of RAM for the operating system and a few dozen running apps, which you'll be able to manage better with webOS 2.0. Most accessories, with the exception of form-fitted cases, should work just fine with the “streamlined” design of the Pre 2.

What might not work is your network. The Pre 2 is launching first on France’s SFR, and is doing so Friday at the rumored cost of 99€ on contract and 449€ off. Verizon is due to get the phone in “the coming months,” as is Canada. Any other carriers or countries were not discussed by HP. Same deal with pricing, though we do expect it to be reasonable give how the Pre 2 does lag behind in some features compared to other modern smartphones (though that extra processor oomph should help considerably).

Update: Palm has posted up the official specs, we got 'em after the break!

Read the Press Release

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