Verizon... wow! Palm's earnings... owww!

This was a week with much anticipation. RIMM was the star of Thursday's earning reports. Palm brought up the rear and the stock got pounded the day after. On the positive side, there was buzz about an expansion of carriers (i.e. Verizon) and CES announcement(s). So let's talk Pre and Pixi!

According to notes from Dieter, during the investor conference call, CEO Jon Rubinstein confirmed that webOS 1.3.5 is coming soon and will have a bevy of improvements, including:

• Allowing for installation of more apps
• Enhances WiFi and app performance
• Improved battery life
• Increased speed and responsiveness on the Palm Pixi

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Keep calm, Verizon lovers: despite Sprint's huffiness about the length of their exclusivity, Verizon is stalwart in maintaining that the Pre will hit their network.  Digital Daily listened in to a big V quarterly financials conference call in which the executives state that "they plan to carry the Pre 'early next year.'"

What "early" means in this case is basically up for grabs (hey, at least it's not the dreaded "First Half of" phraseology).  Don't forget, though, that earlier this month the word "January" was tossed about.  We'll be curious to see if Verizon will deign to alter their decidedly more expensive plans to accommodate the Pre -- and by "curious" we mean "shocked and amazed."

Now, Verizon, listen very closely: your plans to not allow Palm's own App Catalog to come preloaded on the Palm Pre are dumb.  Don't do that.

Cleanser in our Pre forums has successfully hacked a Pre to operate on Verizon's network. Voice and text are a go, but data isn't up and working yet:

Only problem is that I can't get data to work. Apparently webOS is checking to see if the device is provisioned or not before allowing a data session to take place. So my next step would be to somehow bypass this provisioning check.

Apparently the difficult part is getting Verizon to take the MEID of the device (its unique identifier), this despite Verizon's claims of being an open network.  It's early days, though, so we won't hold that against big V.

Speaking of early days, that's where we are at with this -- so the important thing is to keep your eyes peeled for further updates rather than go looking to apply this hack yourself.  Nevertheless, we know that more than a few people would be giddy over hearing the dulcet tones of the Verizon activation girl on a Palm Pre, so we had to post this with Cleanser's video.