Attention Canada: you might be getting a Palm Pre 2 on Rogers sometime soonish, but if you’re looking for an original Palm Pre, Bell Mobility has a deal coming on December 10th that just can’t be beat: $149.95 for an off-contract. Of course, it is a CDMA phone and can only be used on Bell in Canada (unless you’re willing to engage in some serious hacking), but if that’s your carrier of choice, you aren’t going to find a better deal than this.

Bell has over the past year had significant difficulty getting users to pick up the Pre, repeatedly slashing prices and offering deals to get customers on board. We suspect they were counting on the Pre being a smash hit on Sprint in the United States and riding the wave of consumer enthusiasm like competitor Rogers did with the Apple iPhone 3G. This final price drop appears to be Bell’s last ditch effort to get their remaining original Pre inventory out before Rogers starts selling the Pre 2, which hopefully won’t be too long from now.

Source: All Things Mobile

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Life was so simple with the new clock app…

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Nielsen has released their latest survey numbers on the smartphone market, and it seems that the pace of smartphone adoption is quickly accelerating, with 29.7% of US mobile phone owners having a small computer in their pockets. That shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Also not a surprise: the iPhone, BlackBerry devices, and Android phones are dominating the smartphone space, snagging 27.9%, 27.4%, and 22.7%, respectively. Even Windows Mobile devices (yes, we’re talking old school Start menu Windows Mobile) stand at 14% in the survey, while Symbian accounts for 3.4%, generic “Linux” for 3.3%, and bringing up the rear is Palm (webOS and old school Palm OS) with a paltry 1.3%.

To put that into perspective, for every one Palm owner there are 21 iPhone users, 21 BlackBerry addicts, 17 Android owners, and even 11 Windows Mobile users. Heck, there are 2.5 times as many Symbian users in the US than there are Palm, and Nokia has notoriously struggled in North America.

All this begs the question: what is HP going to do to turn this around? CES is around the corner, and we’re hoping that Palm manages to pull out all the stops with the new hardware releases really needed to prop up the awesomeness that is webOS 2.0 (and maybe some wishful thinking, but we’d like to see a big splash with a feature-packed webOS 2.1 too). At this point HP and Palm are going to need a big splash, essentially rebooting the consumer mindset as it pertains to webOS and Palm. It’s becoming clear that Palm isn’t even in the conversation for most people.

Source: Nielsen; Via: Android Central, Engadget

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In what is hopefully a turning point in Google’s attitude toward webOS, they have finally included the best mobile OS in one of their products; an update to the functionality of Google News for mobile.

The update is enabled for IOS and Android devices as well and makes the interface much easier for your fingers. In the list of articles, the entire text of the preview is now clickable, not just the headline. So it is much easier to click the article you want to read.

There is also now a ‘more sources’ link that will take you to more articles about the same topic. It is sort of redundant in the screenshot above because I searched for webOS and clicking more sources just takes me to more webOS articles that are already in the list. So this feature is only useful if you are browsing the day’s headlines, not necessarily searching for something in particular it seems.

This is quite a surprise since Google has left webOS out of nearly all of its new product and feature launches, most recently Google Instant. It did, however, enable Google Suggest on webOS devices, so their standpoint on supporting the OS is confusing.

Source: Download Squad; Via: WebOS Roundup

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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!

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The original webOS handset, the one that started it all, appears to be headed the way of the dodo, or at least Amelia Earhart. The Sprint Palm Pre, on sale since June 6, 2009 (522 days ago) has vanished from Sprint’s website. While there are still plenty of references to the phone in various pages (it still shows up in a search for Palm), the phone itself cannot be selected for viewing, purchase, or reminiscing. With no new webOS handsets yet announced, or even rumored, for Sprint, any potential webOS conversion will have to pick up a Wi-Fi-less Palm Pixi if they want to be on Sprint. With how much focus Sprint has been putting on Android handsets and their growing 4G WiMax network, we can’t say we’re too surprised to see the original Pre fading quietly into the sunset. But it still makes us sad.

Non-Source: Sprint.com, Thanks to Dan for the tip!

Update: The Pre Plus is gone from Verizon Wireless as well, several readers tell us. That situation is less dire: we’ve seen the Pre Plus popping on and off Verizon’s site for some time now and (more importantly) we know for sure that the Pre 2 is hitting Verizon soon.

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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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Again the awesome power of webOS is demonstrated by others’ desire to emulate it, this time by hacking a Nokia N900 running Maemo to play webOS PDK apps.       

 A video posted on YouTube shows The Sims 3 running silky smooth on an N900. Other users in a Maemo forum said Need for Speed Undercover and Let’s Golf with great success as well, and without much effort. Check out the video after the break.

It is not too surprising when you consider the specs of the Nokia N900 and the Pre are almost identical. Both have an OMAP3430 processor, both have a PowerVR SGX and OpenGL ES 2.0 libs, and both run a Linux based OS. Native apps for the Pre are written with SDL 1.2, which the N900 supports.

The only problem for an N900 user running one of these games is that the N900 does not support multi-touch, which would render some games unplayable unless a hardware work around could be devised, as one user suggested using the keyboard.

The Pre is one of the best gaming devices around. It is rivaled only by the iPhone and porting iPhone games to webOS can be done fairly quickly so there is not much of a disparage between the two devices. The games run just as smoothly on webOS as they do on the iPhone (with the exception of too many cards errors on a Pre minus). So after years of hearing about ‘iPhone envy’, it is nice to see some Pre envy out there.

Source: Maemo.org; Via WebOS Internals (Twitter), PreCentral forums

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As you all know by now, Hewlett Packard (HP) is the new happy owner of Palm and the great webOS. Many rumors on the web give us indication that HP plans to use webOS not only on smartphones, but other devices as well.

On this latest commercial from Hewlett Packard we cannot see any webOS magic [...]

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Current Pre, Pixi, and Plus variant owners: relax, you’re getting webOS 2.0 too. Same “coming months” line as before, though hopefully we won’t have the same debacle that we had with the super-long webOS 1.4.5 roll-out. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

Speaking of updates, @webosinternals noticed that "the fine print" on HP’s massive webOS 2.0 / Palm Pre 2 Press release makes it clear that the Pixi and Pixi Plus are not compatible with Flash:

(6) The Adobe Flash Player 10.1 Beta is compatible only with Palm Pre devices; not compatible with Pixi or Pixi Plus.

That’s a situation we’d like to see fixed but, deep down, don’t think will be.

Source: Palm (Pre, Pixi); Thanks to everyone that sent this in.

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