We’re pumped to see the Palm Pre 2 made available in the United Kingdom in a delicious unlocked flavor, but that’s only from Palm. Even in GSM-friendly unlocked-happy Europe, most customers still get their phones direct from the carrier, complete with hefty subsidizations. The carrier is where you won’t be able to get the Palm Pre 2 in England, Scotland, Wales, or anywhere else in the British Isles. Pocket-lint has confirmed with UK cellular carriers Orange, Three, Vodafone, and O2 that none of them have plans to carry the Palm Pre 2. We can’t say we’re stunned – support for the phone from carriers has been weak at best. In fact, the only announced carriers are Verizon and SFR, and they were known at launch. Here’s hoping their all holding out for something new, maybe in January…

Source: Pocket-lint; Thanks to Ben for the tip!

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Announced at MWC was yet another partnership between the world’s cellular carriers that will end up resulting in, well, very little. Networks around the world have banded together to create the Wholesale Applications Community, which in essence will be a global cross-platform app effort. And here’s why it’s going to fail: manufacturers, particularly the ones that are invested in an operating system (such as Apple, Palm, and Nokia), will have no interest in participating. Especially those that have created an app store, Apple in particular.

The Wholesale Applications Community (WAC) will end as a failure, at best withering away as a token gesture to interoperability. There are a million political reasons why it won’t work, but the biggest hurdles to overcome are the technical ones: programming languages and APIs. While we can see feature phone manufacturers rallying around the WAC, nobody buys a T9 flip phone to run apps. They lack the hardware to properly execute – that’s why they’re feature phones.

App developers too aren’t interested in feature phones, because the meager hardware will limit what they can do. Not to mention the varying screen sizes, processors, radios, keypads, and everything else. App developers are interested in smartphones, and that’s where the WAC starts to fall apart.

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Ziarul Financiar, a daily financial newspaper based in Bucharest (think The Wall Street Journal, but in Romanian) is citing Apcom/I.R.I.S, the national distributor of Apple products in Romania, as saying that the Palm Pre will be launching in Europe by the end of September. Exactly which carriers or which countries, well, that’s not been determined just yet. Ziarul Financiar did state that the Pre in Europe will be priced somewhere along the lines of the off-contract Pre here in the states, so at current exchange rates US$550 = ~€400. Presumably that will be the unlocked price, which hopefully will not be something like the ridiculous €749 (US$1050) that Orange is charging for an unlocked iPhone in France. Still, with no independent verification, we’d take this with a grain of sare.

[via: Softpedia]

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A lot of excitement today since the US release date has been announced, which necessarily led us to the question – what about us in the UK? We have been at it and have some …

Related posts:

1. Round 2: First Palm Pre UK release date rumour on O2
2. Vodafone denies Palm Pre exclusive deal in the UK
3. Vodafone admits negotiation of Palm Pre release

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