Considering how tight of a lid Palm and HP have been keeping on details about the next Palm device, we were surprised to see it pop up on the website of French carrier SFR (who recently disappeared the Pre Plus). It’s official: the Palm Pre 2 is coming.

Yeah, you’re interested. Here’s what details SFR dropped:

• 1GHz processor
• 512MB RAM
• Same design as the current Pre series, but with a “flatter screen” (we’re supposing glass) and “more refined design.”
• Update: as arthurthornton notes in the comments – if you look closely that finicky USB door has been removed and replaced with a simple, exposed MicroUSB port. Looking more closely the finish on the edge is matted – so it looks like that crack-prone plastic we’ve been dealing with is a thing of the past.
• Update 2: PreCentral member thomas92 notes via email that SFR also says that webOS 2.0 will bring a faster boot time. We really need to work on our French, it seems.

Additionally, our rusty French translation yielded this until-now unannounced webOS 2.0 feature: push. Specifically, SFR is talking about Facebook push integration (touting it as “the great innovation of 2.0”) with messages, events, wall postings, and chat. We’re not going to read too much into that, as we would hope that Palm would integrate push into more than Facebook. So either SFR is overreaching, or they’re not telling us everything about push and instead are focusing on what customers want to hear about, i.e. Facebook.

Of course, there are battery life and performance improvements, but if the way SFR is writing it, these might be better than the usual negligible bumps. And if you were wondering what the device codename could be, SFR’s given it away in their unedited image name: Roadrunner.

And, before you ask, no mention of price or release date.

Source: SFR; Thanks to JMM for the tip!

UPDATE: SFR wised up and pulled the page down, but we’re the crafty evidence-preserving types. Screenshot after the break!

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 In what has to be one of mobile tech’s more extreme ironies, users of Microsoft’s Hotmail email service have been suffering without proper Exchange support on most mobile devices for some time while Google has been offering ActiveSync for months now. Hotmail users haven’t even able to use proper IMAP for syncing folders and read status.

That indignity will soon end, CNET reports, as Exchange ActiveSync will finally be available next week for Hotmail users.

What does this mean for you? Well – mainly it means that if you’re a Hotmail user you will be able to re-set-up your email account as an Exchange account and get the benefits that brings: push email, sync’d read / unread / deleted statuses, folders, and the like.

Source: CNET; Thanks to Brett for the tip!

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Even in these days of instant communications through text messages, instant messaging, and Twitter, there’s something to be said for the robustness (and openness) of email. Thus, when email goes wonky you can be assured that there will be noise made of it. While this blogger’s Gmail-not-pushing issue managed to magically resolve itself, other users have noticed a different problem with their email: push simply doesn’t work over WiFi, and for some in that group their email pushes very late (10-15 minutes) over EVDO. And of course, there are those who simply can’t get push email to work at all.

We feel your pain, and even though signs point to the issue not being a widespread one, we would be remiss if we didn’t ask around. So here we are, asking, with the preferred mass data gathering method of politicians and the media alike: the poll. And as an added bonus, you can also comment on this article (like any other). In particular, if you’ve had this sort of issue and figured out how to resolve it, we’re all ears.

Are you having troubles with email?(polls)

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More good news out of the Pre camp as a tipster at PreCentral confirmed that IMAP IDLE is used to push Gmail- and presumably any other service that uses the technology- to the device nearly instantenously.  The tipster went as far as to say “It actually comes in faster than my Blackberry,” which is just [...]

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We’ve just confirmed via an anonymous tipster with an emulator that the Palm Pre does, in fact, fully support IMAP IDLE on Gmail.  What on earth does that mean?  It means that if you’re using Gmail, your email gets pushed out to your Pre nearly instantly.  So says our tipster:

It actually comes in faster than my blackberry.

This, friends, is stupendous news.  We strongly suspect that any IMAP email account with IDLE support will push to the Palm Pre.

The backstory, for those that are curious, is that IMAP IDLE is a sort of push system that isn’t nearly as robust as either BlackBerry’s system or Exchange Active Sync, but gets the job done.  Longtime Treo faithful will fondly recall (and currently fondly use) ChatterEmail, a PalmOS email client that does a great job supporting IMAP IDLE push.  The developer of ChatterEmail worked at Palm for a time and, as we dearly hoped, he apparently spent his time there teaching Palm how to properly implement IMAP IDLE for push.

Thanks Anonymous Tipster!

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If you haven’t taken a quick look at Michael Abbot’s Web 2.0 video, here’s something you may have missed: the Mojo Messaging Service.  As we mentioned last week, Palm is jumping into cloud services and their Mojo Messaging Service looks like it’s going to be a sight better than MobileMe and Apple’s push notifications.  This could be more than just push, folks; don’t believe us?  Here’s the big man himself:

The first service that we’re going to be launching [...] is the Mojo Messaging Service.  This provides a simple, XMPP-based pub-sub frame work where you can send events, or push events, into applications in real time that are running on webOS.

Why is this interesting?  Well, let’s say for example if you’re a developer and you want to build an application around the fact that I want to target a particular set of users in an area because there’s traffic congestion and I want those folks to know about that — you as a developer can build such an application.

We don’t know about you, but that sounds like a location-aware push, as in "Push this alert out to all users whose devices happen to be in South Chicago." 

Now, it’s theoretically possible that the iPhone could do this someday — the app on the iPhone would just need to periodically report its location back to the developer (though, of course, you’d have to have the app open to do that, whereas on the Pre the app could sit quietly in the background, updating your location on a pre-set basis).  It’s also theoretically possible that we’re reading a little too much into the above paragraph.

Here’s one thing that isn’t a theory: however robust these webOS push notifications are, they are going to be a lot more useful and a lot less annoying than the pop-up/modal style notifications the iPhone will pick up this summer.

Oh, and if you’re wondering what all that "xmpp pub-sub" stuff is about, here’s the short version: standards-based XML for formatting, receiving, and sending data.  Here’s a bit more info, but what you need to know is that it’s literally not much more complicated than developing webOS apps themselves.

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