The GSM Association, the worldwide mobile device trade group that runs the Mobile World Congress (set for February 14-17, 2011 in Barcelona, Spain) has just announced some of the schedule for the App Planet portion of MWC. Among the features will be App Development Conferences, including a full-day event being sponsored on Wednesday, February 16th by Palm (joining similar tracks for RIM and iOS development). As always, it’s great to see how strongly Palm supports webOS Development, especially outside of the U.S., and we look forward to bringing you coverage of MWC and Palm’s App Conference next February!

Source: GSMA (Thanks to akitayo in our forum for the heads up!)

Full release after the break.

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HP’s PC division head confirmed in an interview that it will show the fruit of its marriage with Palm early 2011 in the form of a tablet, running webOS. HP put on the shelf its plans for the Slate – a Windows 7-powered tablet, but it is no doubt using the hardware expertise acquired on [...]

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Ever wondered what smartphone users are searching for from their handsets? Chitika Research has got you covered with a study revealing the top five search queries from each mobile OS. The sample was based on more than a million impressions across its advertising network in the past week. If we leave out common searches like  [...]

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Our friends at CrackBerry.com are all over the big announcement at WES 2010, having just finished up a Liveblog of the keynote and posting details on the upcoming operating system out of Waterloo: BlackBerry 6. RIM is really upping their game with this release: they’re making their OS more touchscreen-friendly, revamping the entire UI to be a lot prettier and more user friendly, making notifications easy to get to, adding a webkit-based browser, and even changing their app launcher up by adding clearer categories.

Of course, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention the latest buyout rumor du jour – RIM.  This time it’s from the Toronto Globe and Mail, who cite analyst speculation but rightly smack it all down. Now that we’ve seen that RIM is aggressively working on improving their own OS instead of looking for a from-scratch jumpstart, we think it’s safe to say that the chances of RIM being interested in Palm are rapidly approaching zero.

Combine that with the rumored BlackBerry vertical slider and Palm definitely is going to have some strong competition on their hands. What do you think – How does webOS fare against this upcoming BlackBerry OS?

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Watch the latest business video at video.foxbusiness.com

Adobe President and CEO Shantanu Narayen, recently spoke to Fox Business about the launch of Adobe CS5 and Apple’s resistance to putting Flash on the iPhone OS and banning of Flash-compiled apps. That’s all good and fun, but what we care about is this quote:

We have a number of excited partners who are working aggressively with us to bring Flash to their devices, whether they be smartphones as well as handsets, and so companies like Google or RIM or Palm are going to be releasing versions of Flash on smartphones and tablets in the second half of the year.

The first release date Adobe gave us: October 2009. Sigh.

This does line up with what PreCentral Forum member deesugar heard from Adobe employee Antonio Flores: "As Mark indicated, we’re holding Palm to strict ship criteria but they are close. We expect that a public beta should occur in a similar timeframe to that of Android – May/June. At this time, we’re not doing a wider pre-release program."

[via: Business Insider]

Thanks to coasterer for the tip! Also: the irony of having to post a Flash-only video on this story is not lost on us.

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It was a hypothetical question we floated a few months back for a Round Table session, but recently it seems that our hypotheticals are moving more towards the realm of reality. Our friends over at Engadget beat us to the punch on this one, and put together a fantastic list and summary of the companies thought to be considering a bid for purchasing Palm, but we thought it’s something that we should ask to our more targeted webOS audience: who do you think should buy Palm? Poll after the break, as are those comments in which you so want to sound off.

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A bunch of readers have let us know that Palm’s stock is jumping up right now – as of this writing it’s up 15% over yesterday’s close.

The reason? More takeover chatter which appears to stem from a report from Next Inning Technology Research, who put out a newsletter suggesting that RIM would be a good candidate to acquire Palm.

Update: as Phantom_Pain notes in the comments, the bigger rumor might be Lenovo. You may recall that they purchased the ThinkPad Laptop division from IBM and did a pretty good job with it after the acquisition. Lenovo could potentially be more interesting than the earlier contenders – but then again they are also looking fairly focused on Android right now.

Of course, we’re still down on the RIM prospect, original reasons why after the break.

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Investors in Palm aren’t going to look back on October 2009 with glee. For the month, shares in Palm are down 23%, closing today at $13.38 (down 6.3% for the day), after ending September at $17.46. Last month Palm’s stock was run up by a short squeeze, upgrade talk, and rumor of a takeover from Nokia, but since then the stock has been almost nothing but down, including more than 10% just yesterday and today.

For the past year Palm has traded violently, often outpacing the market in gains and losses (thankfully, the market’s been more up than down recently). The stock was hit hard today by analyst Tim Long at BMO Capital Markets, who downgraded Palm to “underperform” (the company will not meet expectations). Long stated that he believes, “Android will step up in importance at many operators, which, ex-Sprint, would put PALM in the position of fourth OS (AAPL, RIMM, Android) and sometimes even lower.” Additionally, Long also thinks that the Pixi, due to be released in less than a month, will only provide a modest bump in Palm’s numbers, and at the expense of Pre sales at that.

So is Long right? He has a valid point, and that is that Palm is one underdog company with their one OS and two phones competing with Android from multiple manufacturers on carriers worldwide, not to mention the powerhouses that are RIM and Apple. So how can Palm ever hope to gain larger dominance? By breaking pursuing an open relationship with Sprint instead of the sometimes boggling commitment that they have with the carrier.

For years Palm’s biggest launches have been on Sprint and devices have taken several months to migrate to other carriers. By the time they get there, it’s yesterday’s news. We get that Sprint has been good to you Palm, but we all know they’re small potatoes compared to the customer base of Verizon and AT&T. Future webOS phones need to land on bigger networks first or sooner if Palm wants to have a shot at a significant share of the smartphone market.

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Bono, the U2 lead singer, managing director and founding partner of investment firm Elevation Partners, which has invested heavily (more than $400 million) into resurgent handset maker Palm, Inc. Seems to be the latest pitchman for BlackBerry. His band’s latest album release, No Line on the Horizon, features prominently on blackberry’s home page. The company [...]

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The Palm Pre has proven to be a successful smartphone for Sprint, depending on which analyst you want to believe. The handset has sold an estimated 300,000 units in the first few weeks it was available. Some analysts say now that the Pre is meeting supply and demand for Sprint.

ZDNet reports that RIM took a [...]

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