Bell’s history with the Palm Pre hasn’t exactly been a perfect one, but it looks like their new Palm Pre promotion may be a winner. There’s been low sales, very little promotion, and much higher profile launches, especially on their new HSPA network. However, it seems the Pre is back on the front page of Bell’s smartphone section, with this very nice new promotion.

Under the promotion, and a 3-year contract agreement, you get a Palm Pre for $0 (like before), and better yet, there’s now $15 off your monthly bill! That’s a total savings of $180 yearly, plus $300 for the device itself. Oh, and they’re tossing in $75 worth of accessories too.

If that sounds intriguing with you, and the 3-year contract isn’t deterring, then you’ll want to look at the different smartphone plans Bell offers. The lowest is the Smartphone 50 plan, which offers the very basics (with only 500MB allowed monthly), usually for $50/month, but under the promotion, ends up at $35/month.  And don’t forget, Bell allows tethering. Awesome, eh. Prices increase from there, up to the Smartphone 100 plan, so there’s flexibility is what you want out of your device.

Whether this is an attempt at Bell to get rid of lingering inventory, or a renewed interest in Palm now that HP came to the rescue, will remain a mystery. But at these kinds of savings, it doesn’t really matter too much. No details on how long the promotion will last, so if this is what you’ve been waiting for, you may want to act fast.

via MobileSyrup & webOS Roundup, thanks for the tip AdmiralRaptor

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Palm has released several tools for developers to help promote their apps in conjunction with their Hot Apps $1 million promotion. The first bit is that in addition to the previously-mentioned Hot Apps Leaderboard at http://palmhotapps.com/, there the Hot Apps Pride Kit. The pride kit consists of a set of widgets and tools to help developers promote their apps on their own websites to show off your app’s position in the Hot Apps contest – heck, creating the widgets doesn’t look too difficult, so even users will be able to take part. We’ll be adding support for these widgets at PreCentral soon, stay tuned.

Palm has also put together a Hot Apps Marketing Kit to help developers promote their apps on social networks. The kit suggests how to optimize your app’s description, how to utilize Facebook and Twitter, and plenty more. All their suggestions are free and, well, we’ll humbly add our own PreCentral Featured Apps Program to the list.

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You are a Verizon customer using a something other than a 3G smartphone and you’re not eligible for any upgrade discounts. If this describes you, Verizon has a deal for you. Effective April 6, Big Red will be running a nationwide promotion to push the Palm Pre Plus and Palm Pixi Plus into the hands of Verizon dumbphone users (and those that have been hanging on to that Treo 650 for way too long) at the two-year discount price. Most of you, our fantastic readers, probably aren’t in that boat, but chances are you have a friend or family member that is. Here’s what they need to know:

• The early upgrade is only to a Palm Pre Plus or Palm Pixi Plus (shucks, I know).
• You cannot currently be using a 3G smartphone.
• This will reset your upgrade eligibility – i.e. you won’t get another upgrade for a year.
• Your contract end date will be extended to two years past the upgrade date.
• The line must be at least six months old, and you can’t have used an upgrade in the past year.

As always, there’s plenty more fine print, but this promotion should be enough to spurn your living-in-the-past associates into the 21st century with a brand-spankin’ new Palm webOS smartphone on Verizon.

And yes, we have no doubt that this is in response to the lack-luster sales of the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus on Verizon. How this is going to be promoted we aren’t too sure about, but we wouldn’t count on seeing any on-air advertisements for such a targeted promotion.

Thanks, anonymous tipster!

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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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