If you’re not familiar with Spotify, that might be because it’s the best music streaming service around that’s not available in the US. Spotify for the iPhone has been quite popular, but as-yet we haven’t seen a hint of it for webOS. Until now, that is, when PreCentral reader Michael spotted the above print ad for the Pixi in the Daily Telegraph in the UK. The ad reads:

When she smashed through to her highest level yet on Angry Birds, Laura briefly paused the new Brandon Flowers album on Spotify, rang her friend Abby for some major gloating, put Brandon back on, then let everyone else know by changing her Facebook status.

Amazing what you can achieve when your boyfriend’s running late. Again.

While it’s likely that stateside we’ll have to wait for HP to make something of their Melodeo acquisition, Spotify for UK webOS users would be a nice thing indeed. What do you think: overzealous copywriter or sign of another top-tier app making its way to webOS in the near future?

(p.s. we’re also amused that in the UK, Palm’s tagline "Life moves fast. Don’t miss a thing" has been changed to "Life moves fast. Don’t miss out on anything." What, so bitter that Stephen Fry is spending his time in the US that you can’t take his advice on being persnickety about language?)

Thanks, Michael!

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Sprint Pre users are the founding fathers of the great webOS community. Yet they have been left out in the cold while everyone else (i.e. Verizon, AT&T, and O2) has gotten a better version their beloved hardware. As they watch in envy as everyone else can open more than a couple cards without getting a too many cards error, they have been chomping at the bit for any morsel of news; something, anything about new hardware. Sales reps in the stores are notably forthcoming with the information. The trouble is the news they dish is like snowflakes; no two are ever alike. The release dates they provide range from never to just around the corner to a year from now.

PreCentral Forum member Idudiaz reported that a "high level Sprint person" told him a new phone would be introduced the first or second week of September. Obviously, that hasn’t quite panned out, but we’ll give him an extension to the end of the month. An HP marketing person allegedly told teejay69 that the Windows 7-running Slate would be out very soon, with the Palm tablet following just a couple weeks after that. Moderator Blaize said her trusted Sprint rep told her the release date will be the beginning of the new year, meshing with what we’ve heard out of HP. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Socoot1 was told that Sprint rejected the new Palm phone. And Mikeydcomment said a Sprint rep recently told him not to expect any new Palm devices on Sprint until third quarter 2011 at the earliest, and probably not until fourth quarter.

These are just a smattering of the rumors we have heard about Palm devices, mostly from Sprint reps. There are also reports of Verizon mall kiosk and big box retail reps telling customers all manner of blatant misinformation to sway them toward a Droid, including DoobieDoo who was told that Palm did not exist anymore and there would be no updates for the Pre.

Just how credible this information is really depends on a lot of things. How much inside information is a retail sales rep privy to? Probably not much. We all know salesmen will say whatever they feel is necessary to get you to buy what they want you to buy (yes, there are plenty of good and honest salespeople out there – but it only takes one bad apple). However, people do like to brag when they have special access to insider information that everyone wants. It’s human nature. So it is always possible that some of this information borders on accurate. The only safe bet is to believe none of it and be pleasantly surprised when the truth finally comes from Palm.

We do know for a fact that there is some fantastic hardware coming our way thanks to Rahul Sood. While it would help us make some buying decisions if we knew an approximate date, for the time being there’s so little clarity in the webOS rumor space that Palm newness could be later than most of us would like.

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It seems like we’ve been waiting for webOS 1.4 for some time now, but according to PreCentral the much-anticipated update will begin to roll out come February 25th.  That new date comes from a Verizon source, suggesting at the very least Pre Plus and Pixi Plus availability; there’s no word on when Palm Pre and [...]

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It appears that Verizon Wireless is planning on doubling its current early termination fee (ETF) for smartphone customers from $175 up to $350 beginning as of 11/15/09. The prorating-per-month will stay: $10 for each month of service completed, which still means that a subscriber completing almost 2 years (23 months) would still owe an ETF of $120.

What makes this of particular relevance to the PreCentral community, beyond the near-certainty that Verizon Wireless will begin marketing the Pre and/or other webOS devices in January 2010, is that this increased ETF will reportedly affect "customers purchasing an Advanced Device." We’re fairly confident that the Pre will fall under that category, so buyer beware.

Hopefully, to the extent that Verizon Wireless is making it harder to leave the service, it will also make it easier to join, with significant subsidies on webOS devices when they hit its network. Dare to dream, friends.

Read: BGR

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Try as we might, we simply couldn’t track down the source of this any further than “Europe”, but rumor has it that Finnish smartphone maker Nokia is considering making an acquisition bid for Palm. Nokia, which like Palm, has fallen behind in the smartphone market as Research in Motion and Apple made considerable market share gains. Unlike Palm, Nokia has failed to recapture many hearts, minds, or wallets with its recent releases. James Faucette, an analyst at Oregon-based Pacific Crest Securities, said that a takeover of Palm would help Nokia to “close the gap” between it and the market leaders. Such a takeover would also likely give Palm a much larger research and development budget, Faucette said that Nokia’s $3 billion R&D budget is more than 10 times larger than Palm’s, which is no surprise. Neither Palm nor Nokia would comment on the rumors.

Faucette also claims that while Palm stock is trading around $17, to Nokia it may well be worth $25 to $30 a share. Looking at the outstanding stock currently on the market, that would put the acquisition value at $3.96 billion – $4.75 billion (including the impending 16 million share secondary stock offering). If we were to factor in the ~1/3 of Palm owned by Elevation Partners, the hypothetical bid would balloon to $5.94 billion to $7.13 billion.

Palm stock was buoyed significantly by the news, rising 7.02% ($1.12) to close at $17.07, a new 52-week high for PALM. During the day shares traded as high as $17.50. Yesterday Palm surged 14% in a perfect storm of trading and news. Monday and Tuesday combined, Palm has risen 21.8%, and from the December 2008 lowest close of $1.42, at the close of trading today Palm was up an astounding 911%.

read more

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The latest to be churned out by the rumor mill concerns the new App Catalog for the Palm Pre (and soon, the Pixi). According to a tip to PreCentral from an anonymous source, the new App Catalog will be unveiled on September 24th. The significance of the new App Catalog is that users can set [...]

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We have seen the price for the Palm Pre drop before, either by mistake or for a legit special sale. But in this occasion, a tipster at Precentral brings news about the new pricing for the Pre starting tomorrow Sep. 8th. Now, like any other tip, this should be taken with a little grain of [...]

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An anonymous source has provided PreCentral.net with information that appears detailed enough to be worth reporting.  The gist: shipments of the Palm Eos to Palm are indeed set to begin in October, which increases the chances for a 2010 release.

Earlier this week an analyst had speculated that the Eos would be delayed until 2010, only to be rebutted by a DigiTimes report that Palm would receive 400,000 units of the Eos in October. Based on our source, it appears there’s a little grain of truth in both reports.

Apparently, Palm is set to receive 80,000 units or so in October, an order size that is reduced by two or threefold from the original order. Palm is set to receive similarly-sized shipments in the months after.

The Eos has yet to appear in two more traditional pre-release sources – the FCC or carrier testing leaks, so guessing at a release date is still difficult. The device is still expected to hit AT&T first (although we’ve heard from people claiming to have seen the Sprint version).

In addition, we are told that to-date, Palm has received shipments of around 800,000 Palm Pre phones — though of course how many of those have made their way to consumers is an open question.  The good news is that Palm has been steadily ramping up production month over month, and so the coming months should see unit shipments to Palm increase.

As always, take silly-season, pre-release rumors with a grain of salt (or more). The Eos, if you don’t recall, is rumored to be a slightly lower-end device running webOS, with 4 gigs of internal storage and a slightly smaller screen than the Pre.

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The wait for the Palm Pre in Canada continues. The latest is that MobileSyrup snagged an internal document showing that Bell employees have began their training on the Pre and will continue to train throughout the month.

Good news, that, but our understanding is that the hold up for Bell isn’t training, it’s inventory.  Palm won’t release to Bell until they’re confident they’re meeting demand with Sprint.  How goes that?  Well, recently in HowardForums, a user named Profets posted:

just came to post some news i heard from inside.. and that they’re preparing for a public launch of the Pre on friday/saturday of July 31/Aug1. but a lot of the time they keep referring to August 1 as the official launch date. Or at least what they’re preparing for unless some kind of delays occur

Sounds like another one of those friend-of-a-friend rumors, right? Maybe not.  A few posts later user MacD posts:

My sources state a release date between July 29th and July 31st, which would make sense to me.

That brings some credibility to the rumor.  MacD, for those who don’t know, was the user who leaked all the Blackberry Storm release information and has a knack for being right about these things.

And yes, it does seem to contradict our earlier speculation of a September 1st release and it does seem to be coming awfully quickly.  Then again, competing carrier Roger’s has a data plan promo ($30/6GB) which ends on July 31st, perfect timing for Bell to impress those data hungry folk with the latest and greatest.

Just a reminder, you can still enter Bell’s Palm Pre contest on this page.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in.

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Paterick in our forums took the initiative to mosey on over to the device settings on in the device emulator that came with the Mojo SDK that was just released. If the impending release of webOS 1.1 wasn’t confirmed enough for you before, how about now?

When we first broke the 1.1 story, we pointed out that the majority of the improvements would be related to Exchange security and compatibility.  Well, kwbunn in our forums confirms that if you set up the emulator to talk to Exchange servers, it does indeed have the tasty ability to work with servers that enforce more stringent PIN requirements. So take heart, Exchange users at locked-down companies, life is about to get better.

Now for some tasty rumors.  We’re hearing that July 22nd is a date to watch for the release (but don’t hold us to that, these things change).  We’re also hearing that in addition to the EAS improvements, we should see some battery performance improvements, smoother and nicer UI animations, a fix for entering symbols in web page forms, and perhaps even emoticons in the messaging app, among other random fixes.  We were also told free ponies, but we don’t put much stock in that last one.

Still no confirmation on new apps, but we’re anxiously awaiting the release of the NFL Live app for the Palm Pre. webOS 1.1 is a definite lock and the updates are decent but certainly not splashy. 

We already have a pretty good bead on what people want for the big fixes (more on that soon), but what other "little fixes" are you hoping for from Palm in the near future?

Thanks to Cid for the emulator tip!

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