The boardroom drama behind the HP acquisition wasn’t the only Palm news today — the company also launched the AT&T Palm Pre Plus. No surprises here — it’s going to $149, decidedly more than Verizon’s $29 with free Mobile Hotspot service — but hey, at least it’s out there, and you get a free Touchstone in the deal, so that’s nice.
Just a day before the Pre Plus launches on AT&T, current Palm owners are experiencing all kinds of problems related to the App Store and their Palm Profiles. Reports indicate the problems started last night, since then users haven’t been able to download new apps or update existing ones from the catalog, while those unlucky enough to have tried a reset have had trouble signing back into their Palm profile in the cloud, and have lost some information like call logs and had to resync their various accounts in webOS. The Palm Developer Website is also down, tossing a “back in a few hours” sign in the window and going out for a few afternoon mimosas. For now, PreCentral posters recommend taking the device off of network time and resetting it to any day prior to today which will allow apps to install and update without issue. A post on the official Palm blog indicates things should be back to normal “soon” so AT&T customers can hopefully avoid any date/time trickery just to get their Foursquare checkins going.
Facebook is good for something, we imagine. After all, more and more companies are utilizing the social networking site to announce things. Huge things, in fact. For example, today marks the official announcement of the Palm Pre Plus for AT&T and when, for how much, and a little bit of extra goodness thrown in for good measure courtesy of AT&T’s Facebook page.
The premiere webOS handset is all set to launch in just a few short days: May 16th, 2010 to be exact. And, while it may not be going for the cheap, cheap price that Verizon Wireless is currently advertising their own model, it does come with an added bonus. Palm and AT&T have decided to throw in one Touchstone wireless charging device for anyone who picks up the device “for a limited time,” and from an AT&T corporate location.
You can expect to pay $149.99 for the Pre Plus after a mail-in rebate, and a new two-year contract gets signed. Unfortunately, for now it seems that the Pre Plus is the only device getting announced right now, as the Pixi Plus is still waiting to make its AT&T debut. Hopefully we don’t have to wait long. Besides, we’re just happy to see webOS on AT&T.
You’ve waited long enough AT&T customers. So long that the Palm Pre is now the Palm Pre Plus and Palm, well, isn’t even Palm anymore. But you just never mind all that, what’s important is that AT&T subscribers will finally have dibs on the Palm Pre Plus starting May 16th, nationwide. No mention of a free 3G mobile hotspot capability like that offered by Verizon, but you will have free access to AT&T’s 20k-strong network of fixed hotspots. Now we just need a price — an interesting dilemma after VZW lowered the PPP to just $30 on contract.
Our tipster also tells us that AT&T will be rolling out its 3G MicroCell from coast-to-coast on the same day. Makes sense since AT&T already gave us a mid-April date for its little signal boosting wonder.
[Thanks, D.]
Update: We just spoke to AT&T about this whole ordeal; they wouldn’t confirm or deny the Pre Plus situation, but we were told that there’s “no change” in the MicroCell plans — May 16 won’t be a nationwide rollout, and there will be more rollouts in the weeks after.
Looks like Verizon is having a bit of a blowout on the Palm Pre Plus: it’s fallen to just $30 on a two-year contract. That’s the same price as Big Red’s Pixi Plus and a pretty substantial discount over Sprint and AT&T, both of which will charge you $149 — and man, AT&T hasn’t even started selling the thing yet, so someone’s going to look awful silly on launch day. No word on whether this cut-rate pricing will last or whether the Pixi Plus will fall to free, but if you’re looking for a cheap way to get in on the future of HP, well, now’s your chance.
Hardly the most exciting Palm news you’re gonna hear this week, but the company that still owns itself for the time being has just updated its WebOS software on Verizon to the extremely granular version 1.4.1.1. The helpful changelog informs us there are no new apps, but pinch-zoom now works correctly in Doc and PDF views, a lag in the camera shutter sound has been rectified, and forwarding videos uploaded to YouTube on to your friends via email has also been made to work as it should. The most important fix of all, though, is to a keyboard input issue whereby a single key press would generate a letter twice — both Pre Central and one of our readers report that this problem appears to have been consigned to the past. Good stuff, now let’s see it go global, shall we?
We still don’t have a firm date for when Palm’s current wunderphone will be hitting AT&T’s soothingly-colored retail establishments (the site still says “coming soon”), but we do now have confirmation that at least one handset has reached its destination. A tipster was kind enough to send us these photos of an AT&T Pre Plus escaping its creamsicle confines and powering on for the first time. This doesn’t look like a retail unit, likely one of AT&T’s “practice” Pre Plus models that were supposed to ship earlier this month or some other promo phone, but regardless we’re guessing that we’re not far from yet another group of subscribers being able to massage the keys on this slider.
Palm’s news activity doesn’t seem like abating any time soon, as the company has just made the Deutsch arrival date for its Plus-ified phones official as April 28. It matches earlier speculation about late April, but also — very importantly — introduces a new carrier options for our Teutonic brethren in the form of Vodafone. Formerly locked in with Telefonica (whose local representative is O2), Palm seems to have finally seen the error of its ways and started offering choice as a side dish to its delectable WebOS main course. So, forget about who’s buying the company, will you be buying its phones?
Time to get those speculative juices flowing again. Pre Central have unearthed the above O2 Germany promotional poster displaying a Palm Pixi stood in front of such smartphone luminaries as Sony Ericsson’s X10 and Motorola’s Milestone. Given that the Pixi has yet to make the hop over the Atlantic, their supposition is that we’re looking at its Plus variant and that this early flier is indicative of a soon-ish release for the Euro-bound Plus devices from Palm. Can we be any more specific than that? Why yes we can, thanks to Laurent Guyot, a French PR chap, who indicates an April 27th launch date for the Pre and Pixi Plus on the SFR network. Put as much trust into this info as you feel appropriate, though it does look like a resoundingly logical time to get these handsets out into eager European hands.
Looking to harness the real power inside of your Pre (or Pre Plus) — and you’ve upgraded to webOS 1.4? If that’s the case, you’re going to love what a couple of Palm-loving hackers have come up with. Namely, a major overclock kernel patch for the device which boosts the CPU speed from a measly 500MHz all the way up to a finger-searing 800MHz (there’s also a more tame 720MHz variation available). The two phone magicians, unixpsycho and caj2008, had previously tapped into the power of the Pre’s CPU on webOS 1.3.5 with a small file that can be semi-easily installed using WebOSQuickInstall and a tiny bit of Linux command-line activity, and now it’s on for 1.4. So far, it looks like phones being tested with the somewhat risky tweak haven’t experienced too much of the normally expected issues (crashes, freezing, phones exploding). Also a surprise is the fact that the creators of the hack say battery life drain is only an additional 2-4 percent hit… though if you’re already struggling to make it through a day, this could be the nail in the coffin. We installed the patch on a Verizon Pre Plus, and we definitely observed a noticeable bump in app load times and improved fluidity when working with the phone — though we’ve already had one major crash. If you don’t mind possibly destroying your phone and must have a faster device right now, you can check out the patch in action and learn how to get it yourself in the video after the break.
Update: From the looks of things, that crash we experienced early on is likely due to a bug in webOS 1.4 and not related to the overclock. Actually, we haven’t experienced any further problems… in fact, the phone is seeming super speedy, and battery life has not taken a substantial hit, verifying caj2008 and unixpsycho’s claims (so far). Someone at Palm should take note — these guys have some good ideas!
