Palm’s 2010 CES Announcements

It was a great CES for Palm. Instead of the major splash that they made last year with the Palm Pre, they've shown numerous incremental improvements. We guessed a lot of them earlier today, but this was still more than we expected. Here's a recap

Countries

Palm started off by announcing that they were going to France. Specifically the alliance with be with SFR who is hoping to get half of it's customers (a total of 10 million) on smartphones. The target for that is the 2nd quarter.

New Carrier

Palm also announced that they'll be on Verizon Jan. 26th with two exclusive new phones.

• Pre Plus - A regular Pre with 16GB of memory, a touchstone back cover included, and Tethering enabled. The tethering also works as a mobile hotspot for up to 5 people!
• Pixi Plus - Looks like the same as the Pixi, but with wifi. Same tethering and mobile hotspot capability. It will be available in 5 colors: green, blue, black, orange, and pink. Finally a beefed up Pixi!

Software

There were a lot of software improvements announced

• 3D Games - There is now lower-level access to develop games in C and C++ via their webOS Plug-in Development Kit. Palm showed off some off Need for Speed which seemed to wow the crowd. You should be able to get it from the catalog today. Other games announced include: The Sims 3, Monopoly, Asphalt 5: Elite Racing, Let's Golf!, Glyder 2, and X-Plane. Personally seeing Electronic Arts involved is huge.
• Video Recording and Editing - It took Apple a long time for video recording and editing. Well it's coming soon. It was also impressive.
• Flash 10 - They showed it working (again), and said to expect it soon.

Most of these improvements come in WebOS 1.4 due in February.

Open Development

Palm announced today that they'll support open development. What this means is that anyone can develop for the device and Palm will give them access through a URL. This is for applications that may not be appropriate for the app catalog itself or just an easy way for someone to promote the product. In theory, I could buy an ad on Google and use that to get people to install my app directly by passing the Palm catalog completely. A big advantage with this is that you won't have the Apple-Google Voice wars that were big in the news last year.

So other than all that, Palm doesn't look like it's up to much . It seems like it's getting closer and closer to the iPhone just having more applications and Palm having multitasking as the key difference between the two. I would love to get my hands on an Android phone to do more comparisons.

This post involves: ... and focuses on:

News

Posted by brian on January 7, 2010 in News. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.