There’s no getting around it, we love O2 Germany, and we don’t even live anywhere near Germany. Our love for O2 Germany comes mainly in form of their advertising, which has been worlds better than what we’ve seen on the North American continent, and tends to peak out early. Let’s not forget Palm fans in Germany, we love you too, especially when you take pictures of these peaking-out-early ads. In this case, it’s a rather large O2 Germany poster, with the Palm Pixi, QWERTZ keyboard and all, standing front-and-center before devices like the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10, the Motorola Milestone (known as the Droid stateside), and devices from Nokia and LG.

Looking at the ad, there’s no indication whether or not this is a Pixi Plus or the Wi-Fi-less Pixi as seen on Sprint (there’s no Wi-Fi icon in the top bar, but this is stock imagery here). The folks at German phone reseller 7mobile.de may have the answer and then some. They have a listing for a Palm Pixi, complete with UMTS data and Wi-Fi. Then again, they also say it will support video calls and T9 predictive texting. Either way, we would be stunned if the Pixi Plus was not the device that made it oversees, as that’s the device that AT&T is getting (albeit with different radio bands). 7mobile.de also claims an amusing "hours" of standby time and "minutes" of talk time.

At this point we have little doubt that the removal of Wi-Fi from the Pixi was Sprint’s idea, and not something that Palm wanted to do. While releasing the Plus on every other network is little consolation to Sprint Pixi owners, it’s still better than nothing. And it is worth noting that when and if the Pixi hits O2, it’ll be the first time it’s been available outside the United States, some six months after the Pre first hit European shores.

Thanks to gizmo21 and Jens for the tips!

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UPDATE: In the end, it was no contest. The Pre Plus struck out an early lead and never let up. Even with four days of voting and more than 32,000 votes cast, the Pre held a commanding 65% to 35% lead over the Motorola Droid from the opening bell. Congrats to Palm, and big ups to the webOS community for rallying like you did. It’s over now – and the Pre Plus is the champion!

***

It’s been a grueling challenge that’s seen more than it’s share of upsets (BlackBerry Tour topping the iPhone 3GS, Palm Pre Plus trouncing the Nexus One (and BlackBerry Bold (and HTC HD2))), but now it’s all come down to one final match-up. For the championship. Of the world.

Laptop Magazine’s March Smartphone Madness has come to the finals, with the Palm Pre Plus taking on the Motorola Droid (hot off of crushing the iPhone-beating BlackBerry Tour). In many ways, it’s unsurprising to see two Verizon phones going head-to-head for the championship, but we have to admit that the groundswell of support for the Pre Plus has been overwhelming. Now it all comes down to this – after handily trumping the heavily-favored Nexus One during the first round, the Pre Plus is gunning for the next-best Android phone on the market today. It’s guaranteed to be a good fight.

For this to be a good fight, we need everybody to play clean. If it’s not a fair win, it doesn’t mean much, now does it?. Voting is open from now until 9 AM Eastern April 5th.

(And before you ask, no, we’re not going to pin this – but we’ll toss it up in the sidebar, which makes the poll appear on darn near every page on the site.)

Thanks to everybody that has sent (and will send) this in.

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In two independent tests conducted by CNET and MOTO Development Group (not to be confused with Motorola) pitted the screen of the Palm Pre against several competitors, and we ended up with a mixed bag of results for the flagship webOS handset.

We’ll start with the good, and that’s CNET’s test of color accuracy. CNET tested maximum brightness, black level, and contrast ratio electronically, displayed test pattern screens to check for errors and 24-bit compatibility, and then tooled around with games, photos, and the sun for some anecdotal evidence. The top-ranked screen came from the Motorola Droid, which had great colors, an impressive contrast ratio, and sharp text. Number two was the Palm Pre Plus (the Pre and Pre Plus have identical screens), which came in right behind the Droid. Color-wise, the Pre was spot on, with fuller tones than the iPhone 3GS, but not oversaturated like the Nexus One. While the Pre’s extra-bright backlight to produce some clouding, the Pre’s screen was hands-down the best outdoor sunlight performer.

MOTO Development Group took a different aspect of screen testing: touch accuracy. Previously, they had a tester trace a diagonal grid across a number of smartphone screens to test their tracking accuracy. The results for most, with the exception of the iPhone, were disappointing. But we like consistency, and consistency goes hand-in-hand with robots. So MOTO rigged up a robot with a false capacitive finger and went about tracing a test pattern on the same phones again, this time with uniform speed and pressure. While the Palm Pre performed quite well under medium pressure (with the exception of the bottom and bottom right corner), once the robot eased up to the “light” level (narrowing pseudo-finger), things started to fall apart. Granted, tracking was nearly as bad as the Motorola Droid or the BlackBerry Storm 2, but to call the light results good would be quite the stretch. General rule: More finger contact = better tracking accuracy.

[via: Engadget]

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Adobe’s been teasing us with Flash 10.1 on webOS for what seems like ages now. In fact, the first news about webOS and Flash came from Palm and Adobe more than a year ago. It’s been five months since we first saw Flash demoed on a Palm Pre and in the intervening months we’ve seen it shown off on all manner of Android devices as well. What we haven’t seen is Flash 10.1 on more lowly hardware, such as the Palm Pixi or HTC Hero. Now we might know why.

An Adobe employee, after revealing that they were not working on getting Flash 10.1 to work on Windows Mobile 6.5 (little surprise) recently declared that Adobe was only working to get Flash for Android working on ARMv7 processors. Processors that fall into that category include the Qualcomm Snapdragon powering devices like the Google Nexus One (and HTC Desire) and the TI OMAP3430 inside the Palm Pre, Pre Plus, and Motorola Droid/Milestone.

What doesn’t have an ARMv7 could be a problem for some webOS users: the Palm Pixi and Pixi Plus run off the Qualcomm MSM7627 processor, which is an ARMv6 chip. The MSM7627 is a beastly little chip, with two processing cores (600 MHz for processing, 400 MHz for the modem) and a 300 MHz graphics-core with Open GL 2.0 support – all packed into a tiny thumbnail-sized package. Has Adobe come out and said that they’re not working on Flash for the Pixi? Nope, but they haven’t said that they are. Even our man Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein, when showing off Flash 10.1 at CES 2010, was careful to say that Flash 10.1 would be coming to “all Pre phones.” Note the lack of Pixi in there.

[via: Engadget [via: Gizmodo]]

Thanks to Shadow-360 in the forums for the heads up!

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Today both Vivek Arya of Merrill Lynch and Phil Cusick of Macquarie Research downgraded their analytic opinions of Palm, with Arya moving Palm into the sell column, while Cusick took a more cautionary approach and advised not buying any more shares. What worries investors, however, is the reasoning behind their downgrades: sales of the Palm Pre Plus and Pixi Plus at Verizon have been less than stellar so far (though we do admit it is rather early in Palm’s life on Big Red).

While sales of the Pre on Sprint were okay, they were clearly less than what Sprint CEO Dan Hesse had hoped. And the Pixi, well, how many Palm Pixi phones have you spotted in the wild? Verizon, meanwhile, is fresh off the launch of the Motorola Droid and HTC Droid Eris. From reports in our forums and the word of Arya, Verizon employees are pushing those handsets over the exclusive Pre Plus and Pixi Plus. All that in spite of the large marketing push from both Verizon and Palm.

The news has pummeled Palm’s stock, with shares down a painful 9.99% for just Tuesday, while the NASDAQ technology index dropped 1.28%. So far through February shares of Palm are down more than 21%; and down nearly 55% since hitting a high of $18.19 just five months ago. As a company, Palm is now worth $2.51 billion less than it was at the end of September, which is not so great when that leaves your value (including Elevation Partners’ 1/3 stake) at $2.08 billion.

The only way for Palm’s stock to hope to recover from this decline is for sales at Verizon to be spectacularly better than expected. While most Palm users don’t care about the stock price, it does matter. A higher stock price is indicative of investor confidence in Palm, and while some may think Palm stock isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on, investors and analysts do still seem to have some expectations for the company. Just not lofty ones. That lower stock price makes a takeover a much more appetizing prospect for any company looking to expand their mobile offerings or jump into the market. For stable companies like Apple or Microsoft, the stock price matters very little. For a company on increasingly shaky ground like Palm, every little thing matters – the value of their stock included.

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It wasn’t that long ago that Merrill Lynch analyst Vivek Arya was all gung-ho about Palm, placing the stock in the buy column with a $20 price target. But Arya’s optimism seems to have faded, and he has not only moved Palm into the underperform (i.e. sell) column, but has slashed the price target in half to just $10 a share.

While Arya believes that Palm’s webOS is better than most mobile operating systems, he said that “Palm’s superior platform features have not translated into sufficient carrier support and consumer demand, and we are concerned the window of opportunity may be closing as Google’s Android ecosystem gains ground, {Research In Motion] revitalizes its portfolio, iPhone increases its presence, and as Microsoft reboots its efforts with Windows Phone 7.” Additionally, he is concerned by Palm’s cash resources – at the end of the last quarter Palm had just $590 million on hand – money that Palm is burning through incredibly fast.

Arya has also noted something that we have heard a lot of: while Verizon staffers are generally knowledgeable about the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus that their stores carry, they are tending to push the Motorola Droid, HTC Droid Eris, and BlackBerry devices over the newer Palm smartphones. Even if Palm manages to add AT&T and T-Mobile to their carrier partners list, Arya doesn’t expect a significant boost in unit sales. With all that in mind, he has cut his prediction of how many units Palm will move in the coming quarter to 900,000 (down from the 1.1 million previously expected). Arya doesn’t expect Q4 to be much better for Palm, anticipating 1.2 million units shipped in the quarter, a cut of 300,000 from previous estimates.

There is one positive note, and it’s that the heavy advertising campaign that Palm has put on seems to be paying off with stronger sell-through (presumably at Sprint and Verizon stores). But amongst all this doom and gloom, it’s just a glimmer of hope as the expensive campaign is being supported by Palm’s diminishing cash pile.

Read: Barron’s

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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 “where does Palm go from here?” Or maybe we’ll just end up chatting about our favorite movies, you never know. This time around we’re dispensing thoughts on something that has puzzled and eluded us for months: the Palm C40.

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Our friends over at tech blog Engadget have assembled the votes and put together the nominations for the 2009 Engadget Awards, and Palm is recognized in every category (five!) in which it ought compete. There’s some tough competition out there, but you know that we think that the Palm Pre and webOS indeed are the gadgets of the year. Despite the fierceness of the competition, the Pre and (surprisingly) Touchstone are holding their own in the polls. While we have no doubt that Palm is the tops, the only opinion that counts here is the mass opinion: your vote.

What’s Palm up against?

See? Tough competition there. As you can imagine, if the Pre and Touchstone are to stand any chance of remaining in the fight, they’re going to need your vote. Voting is open until February 20, 2010.

May the best gadgets win!

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While we’re learning more and more about the Palm Pre Plus and Palm Pixi Plus as we get closer to their January 25th launch, what we haven’t had an inkling of until now was how much they would cost. According to an anonymous tipster at Phone Arena, Verizon is planning to match Sprint’s pricing on the Pre and Pixi, but with the faster, stronger, WiFi-ier models. That would put the Pre Plus at $149.99 on a new two year contract, and the Pixi Plus at $99.99 on contract, though both do come to that point after a rebate of some amount (familiar territory for Sprint customers).

What could really drive sales, though, is the hint that the Pixi Plus may also be included as part of Verizon’s ongoing Buy One, Get One Free promotions. In the past the “BOGO” deals have been available with BlackBerry devices and received due credit for vaulting the BlackBerry Curve to the top of monthly best-seller lists. Verizon is currently running a BOGO promotion for the Motorola Droid and HTC Droid Eris, where buying one of either handset will net you a Droid Eris for free. If such a promotion were to be put into place for the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus (with the Pixi Plus being free with a Pre Plus or a Pixi Plus), we can see this as being a huge boon for Palm’s sales numbers.

Of course, no matter how much sense this rumor may make, it is still a rumor of the unconfirmed variety (as all rumors are), so take this with the requisite grains of salt.

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Looks like the pundits may have been right on this one, as the latest smartphone survey from ChangeWave shows that Android’s mindshare has surged in the last quarter, with 21% of potential customers eyeing Android as their future platform of choice. In September 2009’s survey, Android was tied at 6% with webOS. In the past three months, new releases like the Motorola Droid have catapulted Android’s mindshare over Palm, Windows Mobile, and BlackBerry, leaving only the iPhone in its sights.

So what about Palm? According to ChangeWave’s numbers, Palm’s potential buyers were cut in half to just 3% of respondents. Windows Mobile and iPhone also dropped, but their losses were 33% and 13% respectively.

The operative word here is "Ouch." We’ll break down a few more numbers after the break.

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