Sprint users, say goodbye to the NFL app: Sprint has lost their contract with the National Football League. The Wall Street Journal notes that Verizon users have reason to celebrate (if you are into such things), as Big Red has signed a new four-year contract with the NFL to bring all the coverage and the popular RedZone Channel to Verizon phones. The new deal is valued at $720 million, a 50% premium over what Sprint was paying the NFL. And that’s not all: Verizon users are getting more from the NFL than Sprint did: they’ll have access to live footage of every NFL game and plenty of additional content.

Football fans on Sprint need not fret, though you may find yourself disappointed. With the NFL contract gone, Sprint’s football app will cease functioning at the end of March, as was posted on SprintUsers.com. A new Sprint Football Live app will replace the NFL app, but all that exclusive video won’t be coming along with it. Apparently Sprint Football Live will provide all sorts of live coverage of the NFL draft, games, and more, but in the form of raw data, news, and commentary - not the official stuff with live audio and video that Sprint users have gotten used to.

Sprint Football Live is expected to be available before the end of the month, and we wouldn’t be surprised to see it mixed in with the next webOS update for Sprint devices. Verizon webOS users may be disappointed for a while, though, as Verizon marketing chief John Stratton noted to the Wall Street Journal that their new NFL service will be available for Android and BlackBerry devices. The equally capable webOS devices like the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus? Not mentioned.

Thanks to mu7efcer for the tip!

Scenario. You're gearing up to take a quick 20 minute nap.  You lay down, and just as you're about to fall asleep, the inevitable happens: the phone rings, an important email hits, or some other distraction pops up to rob you of your well deserved rest.  Blast!  Now you've got to open the clock app, and reset the alarm for another 20 minutes away using the sometimes cumbersome number pickers.

Rinse, repeat, and soon enough you'll just give up on napping and move on with the rest your day.  One solution to this rather inconvenient cycle comes in the form of PowerNap ($0.99 in the App Catalog), an application that allows you to quickly set the desired duration of your nap using a cleverly implemented dashboard control.  Tapping the plus or the minus instantly adds or subtracts 5 minutes from the duration of the alarm.  You can also select the duration of your nap by using a slider as opposed to the drop down pickers you'll find in the clock app, making the  process of getting back to sleep even faster.  Custom alerts can of course be selected, and the program even randomizes the vibration pattern so you don't confuse your nap alarm with other vibration alerts if you run with your phone on silent.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm feeling a little sleepy...

So here's a rundown of what went on this week in the world of Palm. Big thanks to Mike of balloongeek.com for the Pre image above!

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You got most of the deets yesterday on the news on Palm's Plug-in Development Kit: it's coming to the Pixi, regular developers will have to wait for a couple of months before they're able to distribute PDK apps, and you'll be able to mix and match the PDK with the regular SDK.

Rene from TiPb spoke with Joe Hayashi from Palm yesterday, detailing the PDK in broad strokes in a way that the rest of us non-developers can make sense of. Palm's main message is a subtle dig on Android and iPhone: if you're on Sprint or Verizon and want cool 3D games right now, your best bet is the Palm Pre.

What interests us the most is how much thought Palm is putting into integrating 'native' PDK stuff with the standard webOS web-app architecture. It will be pretty cool to see apps that utilize a combination of quick-to-code standard elements with the fancier and shinier PDK elements. Right now PDK apps are just games - but we're excited to see utility and productivity apps.

We'd say we're pretty bummed that developers won't be able to release their PDK apps right away, but from how we understand how the PDK works right now, basically it looks like PDK apps completely un-sandboxed and able to do whatever they'd like to webOS' linux underpinnings - potentially very bad. So a future update to webOS will definitely be necessary (and welcome, as it always is) to get a wider distribution for PDK apps.