We’ve been expecting that Europe would get ‘parity’ by the end of November, and that doesn’t give Palm much time to get it done. If you follow the O2 Pre closely, last night was a confusing period for Palm Pre owners in Europe, with an official O2 Twitter account stating that webOS 1.3.1 would come last night and then it was “delayed” for unspecified reasons.
While Nexave.de forum moderator Deerhunter couldn’t offer a concrete reason for the delay, he did offer some insight into what may have happened. Essentially, the updates that Palm puts together have to be first verified and approved by the carriers. This is standard practice across the globe and likely the reason we were not supposed to see webOS 1.3.1 on Sprint Pre phones until after the Pixi’s release.
Anyway, back over in Europe the 1.3.1 update was apparently approved by O2 Germany and somebody at the carrier's Bielefeld shop decided to run with it, even though it hadn’t been approved by the rest of the Telefonica network. That’s the trouble with running a multi-headed beast like Telefonica: there are at least four separate entities that need to approve the update (O2 Germany, O2 Ireland, O2 UK, and Movistar Spain).
Either way, the approval was revoked or silenced in some manner and as I’m sure you folks in Europe have noticed, you’re still not running webOS 1.3.1. No matter the cause, we are fairly certain you that the release of webOS 1.3.1 to GSM Pre phones is imminent, and we’ll be sure to let you know when it finally lands.
UPDATE: KarlD89 points us to a new post on the O2 Twitter feed claiming that webOS 1.3.1 will be coming to O2 Pre phones on November 23rd. We shall see.
Thanks to gizmo21 for the tip!