You have always wanted a Palm Pre but you didn’t want to leave your current network, well now you can as the video above shows European customers can now unlock their Palm Pre’s with the Rebel Simcard II. The Rebel II sits between the simcard and the phone allowing you to use any carriers simcard. The phone in this case a Pre thinks it has got an O2 / Telefonica simcard slotted into it.
The question is where do you get your Palm Pre from as going on an O2 contract will mean that you are paying monthly and I am not too sure that O2 are doing phone only deals at the moment, well last time I was in there they said they weren’t. So paying £35 a month and then unlocking to another network is a little pointless as data access will cost even more for using other networks. As a purely academic exercise this is great but how many actually unlock their phones won’t be that great in number.
You could however use the alternative which is that you could buy a German Palm Pre fully unlocked, only issue is the QWERTZ keyboard . If you can get over the keyboard layout then you can get hod of a Plam Pre for £499 over at Expansys.
Tagged as:
O2,
rebel II,
unlocked
Palm really needs to drive App development there is no doubt about that and although there has been a steady increase in the number of App’s of late there is still room for improvement. So what is needed is a bit of creative thinking and this is exactly what has happened in the UK with Palm giving away Free (yes that is right Free) Palm Pre’s to lucky developers in a bid to encourage them to develop App’s for the Pre.
The giveaway took place yesterday at an O2 Palm event organized by O2 Litmus which is a website dedicated to helping App developers create and deploy their new App’s. Developers can also sell their App’s through the website, read here for more details on this. I wasn’t at the event , and to be honest I only learned of the O2 Litmus website today.
But this to me is great news as it embodies the open distribution channels Palm has always talked about not going down the route of Apple and compelling people to sell App’s via iTunes only. So well done Palm and O2 for this rather clever idea. I will take my free Palm Pre in the colour black .
You can follow all the chat on twitter on #O2Palm.
Some notes from one of the attendees of the event can be found here, make very interesting reading.
Tagged as:
App Development,
free pre,
O2,
WebOS
The one thing that has always frustrated developers of apps for smartphones is the lack of distribution channels available to them other then the one offered by the device manufacturers. Palm have always been a little more open to change and new ideas in this area then the likes of Apple.
To this end O2 in the UK have come up with a beta website called O2 Litmus which acts as a resource for app developers wishing to distribute their apps via the O2 Litmus website. There are many other resources available to the app developer beside a simple site to sell your applications. Working alongside O2 gives the developer access to O2 customers to test their apps before they go live (there is an attached cost for this) , also it gives you the option of accreditation. If accredited O2 will give you access to it’s users across the globe to sell your apps. There is also business support and events organised by O2 Litmus to encourage development of apps.
Tagged as:
App Development,
O2,
o2 litmus
Seeing the Plam Pre spread further across the globe is great. Where there is a Palm Pre there has to be an unboxing video and here is one of the Palm Pre in Ireland on the O2 network.
[via Wildeasy]
Tagged as:
ireland,
O2,
unboxing
Good and bad news sometimes come at the same time and it is one of life’s wonders how and why this happens. Just a day or so after the Palm Pre was ranked at 14 in PC Worlds (US) top 100 products of 2009, came the news that Palm shares (or stocks as they are known in the US) lost significant ground, in fact you could say the ground swallowed them up.
Palm shares lost a whopping 23% in the month of October 2009 and lost 6.3% on Tuesday October 27th alone , this isn’t good reading by any measure. To Rub salt into the wounds of all Palm lovers a leading analyst Tim Long at BMO Capital Markets said the company would not meet expectations (I don’t think anyone will be rushing to buy Palm stock now) he said “Android will step up in importance at many operators, which, ex-Sprint, would put PALM in the position of fourth OS (AAPL, RIMM, Android) and sometimes even lower.”
He basically means that Palm will not and cannot compete with the likes of Apple, Blackberry or Android, something I wrote about just yesterday and the argument is right for a number of reasons. The other companies are well established Apple and Blackberry have the customer base already , Android has the uptake of many phone manufacturers who are willing to install the Android OS onto their phones. Palm well all Palm has at the moment i one phone out on the market (Palm Pre) and one ready to launch very soon Palm Pixi, so it is a case of 2 phones against the rest of the smartphone industry.
The new trend of exclusivity of new devices on mobile networks is also something that will strangle growth, in the US Palm is Sprint obsessed and will not launch a product with any other provider. Sprint by all accounts is small fry compared to AT&T and Verizon. In the UK Palm went for O2 which is not a bad bet but there are millions of customers on the other networks, Orange, T-Mobile and Vodaphone who do not want to switch providers for a phone. Palm really does need to broaden it’s brand quickly and begin to touch and appeal to many more customers.
All is not doom and gloom because the Palm Pre continues to impress the industry this time PC World has ranked it in it’s top 100 prodcuts of 2009, the Palm Pre was ranked 14th which is a great result. It was the highest ranking smartphone with the HTC Hero at number 21, these were the two significant smartphone releases of 2009 thus far. The Apple app store was ranked at #1 which does take some gloss of the Palm’s rank but not too much.
Things are not going to be easy for Palm in 2010 that is for sure but onwards and upwards they must go.
Tagged as:
O2,
pc World,
Pre Awards,
Sprint