Ever since it was revealed that the P102UEU had gone through the wireless certification battery of the FCC, PreCentral’s forum members and the fine folks at WebOS Internals have been digging through the documents to find more details about the phone. Here’s what’s been uncovered:

• The processor is clocked at 1GHz. Rod Whitby of WebOS Internals speculates that the processor may be the TI OMAP 3630 (1GHz, single core), which is software- and footprint-compatible (uses the same pins) with the TI OMAP 3430 in the current Pre. Additionally, Texas Instruments claims that the OMAP 3630 provides twice the performance as the older 3430, while sipping half the juice. Battery life gains, anyone?
• The phone comes with a 1150 mAh battery, exactly the same as the Pre and the Pixi.
• It is a slider device (as indicated by the SAR ratings for “open” and “closed”).
• There appears to have been some internal antenna juggling: on the current Pre design all the antennas are hidden behind the battery cover (they’re the yellow-orange strips around the edge of the inside). The documentation notes a difference in distance between the GSM antenna and the Bluetooth/Wi-Fi antenna when the phone is open and closed. Specifically, it’s a movement of 3.5 cm, which is almost exactly how far the current Pre opens.
• The phone is not only Touchstone compatible (no surprise), but is uses the same back currently available for the Pre and Pre Plus. This means that the phone will have a very similar, if not identical form factor, though we have heard unsubstantiated rumblings that there may be difference on the face of the device.
• Palm has requested 180 days of confidentiality from the submission to the FCC testing on September 8, 2010. Covered by the confidentiality granted: external, internal, and testing photos and the user manual. Shucks. One hundred eighty days gives Palm confidentiality until March 7, 2011, though we would expect to see this device on shelves and in hands sooner rather than later.
• As this is FCC testing, the P102UEU is certified to not boil your brains.

With all this we can all but assume that this is going to be called the Palm Pre 2, in fact we’d be willing to bet money on it if we weren’t squirreling it away in anticipation of off-contract purchasing.

UPDATE: As many have pointed out, the FCC label reads 08F-ROAY. The original Pre was the 08F-CASC, as in the "Castle," so it stands to reason that this may be the Roadrunner device we saw pop up in August.

Source: FCC; Via: PreCentral Forums, WebOS Internals on Twitter

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As they say with patent lawsuits, you throw everything you’ve got at all the defendants you can find and see what sticks. Today we’ve got defunct chip maker MicroUnity (stopped making chips more than a decade ago) leveling a patent lawsuit against twenty-two companies [pdf] involved in the mobile tech industry. MicroUnity is targeting Acer, Apple, AT&T, Cellco, Exedea, Google, HTC, LG, Motorola, Nokia, Palm, Qualcomm, Samsung, Sprint, and Texas Instruments in the suit. The allegation is that all of these companies (and some of their subsidiaries) are involved in the production, sale, and/or marketing of MicroUnity patent-infringing Qualcomm’s Snapdragon or Texas Instruments’ OMAP-3 and OMAP-4 processors.

In our case, the Palm Pre and Pre Plus use the TI OMAP 3430 processor and is sold and marketed by Sprint (as well as Verizon, Bell, O2, and Telcel, but they apparently don’t matter). We would say that there’s likely little to worry about as far as Palm and Sprint are concerned – Texas Instruments is the one infringing on patents here, Palm only bought the chips.

Even though MicroUnity stopped making chips more than ten years ago, they still have a hefty patent portfolio that they’ve leveraged in the past. In 2005 Intel settled a patent-infringement lawsuit brought by MicroUnity to the tune of $300 million. At the time, MicroUnity had a grand total of eight employees. We won’t call them patent trolls, but we will at least point out that MicroUnity also has pending lawsuits against a number of other tech companies, including Intel (again), AMD, Sony, and Dell.

[via: EETimes]

Thanks to Lemstil for the tip!

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Sweet mother of whatever you find holy, I thought that 400,000 was bad! If Ashok Kumar of Collins Stewart investment bank is to believed, Foxconn manufacturing of Hong Kong is having major problems building the Palm Pre. He was quoted in Barron’s saying:

“About two weeks ago, Foxconn was having problems with the flexible printed circuit board for the Pre and having trouble getting adequate yields for the capacitive touch-screen display. Now, it appears Foxconn has found more hardware problems, and it’s not clear if the problem is with Texas Instruments’s OMAP application processor, or with some basic design issue.”

Apparently the problems have forced Foxonn to check each Pre by hand instead of running the devices through an automated testing process as normally be done for such a high-volume production run.

It is worth noting that Mr. Kumar does not officially cover Palm as part of his duties at Collins Stewart. One of his areas of concentration is Qualcomm, which manufactures the radios for the Pre, and Kumar does not expect that any problems the Pre may be facing will have an appreciable impact on Qualcomm’s shares.

Thanks to rbcmd in our forums and everybody else that sent this in!

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Actually, really, truly new information on the Palm Pre is hard to find, even here at Mobile World Congress 2009.  Palm’s here and showing off the GSM Pre (see our full run down), but it’s running the same ROM we saw at CES, Palm’s sticking to the same talking points, and they won’t let folks get their mitts on them for real (hey, at least Palm is open and chatty on Twitter).  One of the bits of information we’ve been trying to track down: just how fast is the processor on the Pre.

We already knew that the Pre sports the Texas Instruments OMAP3430 processor and that said processor is a speed demon.  The question about how many MHz it runs at is actually sort of moot  – the webOS is all new and whatever the number is, it won’t mean the same thing that number means on other platforms.  Still, it would be nice to know, hey?

Well, I stopped by the Texas Instruments booth today (find out more at WMExperts) and it turns out I missed my chance to see Palm and TI talking jointly about the processor.  I spoke to the TI rep and he said that, no, he wasn’t positive about the Pre’s clock speed, but that the OMAP3430 is typically clocked around 600 MHz and he was fairly sure the Pre wasn’t boosting it up beyond that, though the proc is capable of 800GHz and 1GHz if you want to push it.  (For what it’s worth — and that may not be much — Wikipedia also pegs the OMAP3430’s default clock speed at 600.)

Now, some of you (especially you Windows Mobile folks) may balk at that number, but as I said clock speed doesn’t mean as much as you might think.  First of all, a lot of the heavy lifting these days is done by a graphics processor.  Secondly, although this processor is technically an ARM processor, it’s the new "ARM Cortex-A8," which basically means it’s a beast and it can scale its speed depending on the need to save battery life.  Thirdly, again, we have no idea whether the webOS is heavily dependent on processor speed or not.

So… there you have it.  We still don’t know, but 600MHz doesn’t seem like a completely crazy guess.

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