LAS VEGAS – Palm has announced it will sell smart phones through top U.S. mobile carrier, Verizon Wireless, a deal that could mark the beginning of a turnaround for the handset maker.
Palm and Verizon’s new Palm Pre Plus and Pixi Plus, announced at CES, become available on January 25. The touch-screen Pre Plus has double the 8GB memory of the original Pre, a more streamlined design, and has a new backplate which allows users to wirelessly charge the device on the Touchstone inductive pad without needing to swap the phone’s cover. And the Pixi Plus, which features a QWERTY keyboard, similar to a BlackBerry, now supports web browsing over Wi-Fi.
A downloadable app in Palm’s App Catalog lets users take advantage of Verizon’s 3G network and turn the new handsets into mobile hotspots that let you share a "personal Wi-Fi cloud" with up to five Wi-Fi-equipped devices, notebooks, cameras, and portable media players.
Pricing for the new handsets will be announced closer to the day they become available, Palm says.
Palm also announced that it is bringing 3D gaming to its webOS platform. The company unveiled several titles from developers such as EA, Gameloft, Glu Mobile and Laminar Research.
There are a total of seven games, which include "Need for Speed Undercover", "The Sims 3", "MONOPOLY", "Asphalt 5: Elite Racing", "Let’s Golf!", "Glyder 2" and "X-Plane". The games were demonstrated at CES and are already available in the Palm App Catalog for Palm Pre users.
"We are very excited about the potential of webOS as a platform for mobile 3D gaming. This is a key application category, and we’ve worked closely with some of the leading game developers to deliver a great game experience for our customers," said Katie Mitic, senior VP of Product Marketing at Palm.
Palm’s App Catalog currently holds around 1,000 apps (whereas market leader Apple counts fully 100,000 apps in its own digital storefront) but Palm expects that to grow even more, and faster.
Palm’s developer program splits app revenues 70/30.(The membership-based program has a $99 annual fee, which the company said will be waived for developers who opt to distribute open source Palm webOS apps on the Web.
– John Bugailiskis
