The battle of the heavyweights has officially been staged – the Apple iPad 2 is the successor to the original iPad, which dominated the tablet segment in the last year, but the new contenders appear with an equally mighty dual-core muscle and tailor-made Android Honeycomb not breaking a sweat under its power.
The iPad 2 comes [...]

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A leaked Quick Reference Guide shows off some of what Verizon has up its sleeve for the fourth quarter of this year. Besides the Motorola DROID 2 Global, Motorola DROID Pro and the Palm Pre 2, the carrier plans on dropping some models made precisely for the Young Adult Teen market including a comeback for [...]

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One of our friends sent us Verizon’s newest rebate form showing a bunch of new phones that should be out between November 1-24, just in time for Thanksgiving and Black Friday. On the list is the LG Cosmos Touch ($50 rebate) that will be similar to the current Cosmos with a full QWERTY keyboard, but [...]

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The tall portrait touchscreen has become a mainstay of the modern smartphone. When manufacturers wanted to add a keyboard, they made it a slider, either vertical like the Palm Pre and BlackBerry Torch or horizontal like the Motorola Droid 2, T-Mobile G2, and all manner of Android devices. But mixing the keyboard in without a slider was a recipe for a smaller/shorter screen, like the Palm Pixi, all manner of BlackBerry devices, and a smattering of Android phones.

That changes now, with the introduction of the Motorola Droid Pro. As you can guess from the Droid branding, this new phone resides on Verizon. There’s nothing particularly special about that (except for Verizon’s special and somewhat corrupted love for Android), what’s different is the form factor: tall portrait screen with attached non-slider keyboard. This sucker comes with a 3.1-inch screen (same size as the Pre) overtop a keyboard that looks like it was lifted off of a BlackBerry.

Stuffed inside is a 1GHz processor, 2GB storage (really, that’s it?), a 2GB microSD card, and a 5 megapixel camera with dual LED flash. Otherwise it’s a fairly typical Android 2.2 phone, if you can get your head (and hands) around the shape – it’s right around 4 ½ inches tall. There’s one spot where we are jealous: this sucker’s a world phone. If you’re not familiar with what that means, we won’t fault you, as it’s not something we’ve heard a lot of in webOS land: a phone with both CDMA and GSM radios. The idea is that you can use it on your CDMA network in the US of A, and then when you head out to places where CDMA roaming doesn’t happen (i.e. the world outside of the United States) you can slap in a SIM card for some international calling and internets.

If that’s not to your fancy, Motorola’s got another phone in line for you, so long as you (1) like Android and (2) live in Brazil. The GSM-powered Pre-sized vertical slider smartphone is called the Motorola Spice, and was designed and built in Brazil, with that country as the target market for the phone. It runs Android 2.1 with MOTOBLUR (yay.) and is packed with fairly ho-hum hardware: a 528 MHz processor, 512MB storage plus whatever you can fit via microSD, a 3 megapixel camera, and a 3-inch 240×320 screen.

So, two new portrait keyboard-toting Android phones, one with hardware outclassed by the aging Pre, the other with hardware that handily outclasses the Pre, plus some goodies we don’t yet have on our webOS devices. Anybody tempted, or is the promise of new webOS phones enough to keep you in the Palm camp

Source: Android Central [Droid Pro, Spice]

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You know and love @MrKal_El on Twitter, now know and love him here as he gives us his opinion on how Palm and HP need to make a splash, and soon.

Recently I’ve been engaged in a bit of a debate (on Twitter, naturally) regarding Palm and HP at CES 2011 and potential for the reveal of the much-rumored PalmPad. If you were to ask me, I’d say that January of next year is too late to reveal the PalmPad in what is fast becoming a crowded tablet market.

So I’m going to take a moment to expand a bit on what I feel would be a agressive (but possible) release schedule for webOS hardware and software to succeed in the current market.

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More than anything else we find ourselves clamoring for new hardware from Palm. The Pre and Pre Plus are getting to be incredibly long in the tooth (the base hardware was revealed more than 18 months ago). We all knew that something new had to be coming, and at the developers webinar hosted by AT&T today, Palm let it slip that new stuff is on the way. Asked if there were plans to release new devices this year, Palm’s rep said:

“I’m not allowed to talk about future roadmaps, especially because we’re in the process of being acquired by HP, so I can’t say. But yes we have a road map. We are working on future devices. And [a] new version of the OS. So I think, you’re going to find the next year very exciting.”

Very exciting indeed. Watching what’s been coming out of Apple, HTC, and even Motoroa, we’re aching for new hardware in webOS land. Of course, “the next year” means that we have a approximate twelve-month timeframe in which to be excited, though our hope is that the excitement can be spread out over the entire period instead of one big pop. That said, he did say devices, not device, so hopefully the next year will bring more than one or two new launches.

One of those spread-out excitements we hope to see at some point is Flash. While all the delays have made us more than a bit jaded, the tip we got from sepherous isn’t helping. After asking about the continuing delays with getting Flash onto web-friendly webOS, the response boiled down to Palm simply not being able to say what the hold up is.

Update: for completeness’ sake, here’s Palm’s official statement on Flash:

‘Adobe and Palm continue to work together to bring Flash Player 10.1 to WebOS as quickly as possible. At present, the integration work between the Player and WebOS is undergoing extensive testing to ensure we deliver a high quality implementation.’

The full video of the webinar is due to be posted on AT&T’s developer site sometime in the mystical next week. Until then, we’ll just savor the transcripted bit and dream of a brighter future.

Thanks to Gerorne for the transcription!

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It was a hypothetical question we floated a few months back for a Round Table session, but recently it seems that our hypotheticals are moving more towards the realm of reality. Our friends over at Engadget beat us to the punch on this one, and put together a fantastic list and summary of the companies thought to be considering a bid for purchasing Palm, but we thought it’s something that we should ask to our more targeted webOS audience: who do you think should buy Palm? Poll after the break, as are those comments in which you so want to sound off.

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As they say with patent lawsuits, you throw everything you’ve got at all the defendants you can find and see what sticks. Today we’ve got defunct chip maker MicroUnity (stopped making chips more than a decade ago) leveling a patent lawsuit against twenty-two companies [pdf] involved in the mobile tech industry. MicroUnity is targeting Acer, Apple, AT&T, Cellco, Exedea, Google, HTC, LG, Motorola, Nokia, Palm, Qualcomm, Samsung, Sprint, and Texas Instruments in the suit. The allegation is that all of these companies (and some of their subsidiaries) are involved in the production, sale, and/or marketing of MicroUnity patent-infringing Qualcomm’s Snapdragon or Texas Instruments’ OMAP-3 and OMAP-4 processors.

In our case, the Palm Pre and Pre Plus use the TI OMAP 3430 processor and is sold and marketed by Sprint (as well as Verizon, Bell, O2, and Telcel, but they apparently don’t matter). We would say that there’s likely little to worry about as far as Palm and Sprint are concerned – Texas Instruments is the one infringing on patents here, Palm only bought the chips.

Even though MicroUnity stopped making chips more than ten years ago, they still have a hefty patent portfolio that they’ve leveraged in the past. In 2005 Intel settled a patent-infringement lawsuit brought by MicroUnity to the tune of $300 million. At the time, MicroUnity had a grand total of eight employees. We won’t call them patent trolls, but we will at least point out that MicroUnity also has pending lawsuits against a number of other tech companies, including Intel (again), AMD, Sony, and Dell.

[via: EETimes]

Thanks to Lemstil for the tip!

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Too often it’s seemed like a Bluetooth headset could be tiny, or it could sound good, but few headsets have blurred those lines like the Motorola H790 Bluetooth Headset. This silvery thin headset not only looks great, but it sounds great too. Combine that with a surprisingly comfortable design and none-too-high price tag and you’ve got a winning combination of a headset.

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Obviously we’re going to be the types to tell you that the Palm Pre is one of – if not the – best smartphones of 2009. This is PreCentral, after all. But we’re not alone in out praise of the first webOS phone, as it has landed on several of those year-end “best of” lists that every website is obligated to put out. Since we only have two phones to choose from, our best webOS smartphones of 2009 list would be awfully short, so instead we’re going to give you an overview of how the Pre has landed on best of lists elsewhere on the web. We’ve got the round-up, waiting for you after the break.

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