Mighty Gadget Blog: The latest technology news & reviews in the UK

Business gurus Bloomberg announced that electronics company Palm, makers of the Palm Pre has gone up for sale and early reports suggest that Taiwanese mobile company HTC are interesting in buying the company in an attempt to strengthen its foothold in the mobile market and then hopefully challenge Apple as top dog.

HTC has shown itself to be a great inventor and designer in the new mobile market with top sellers such as the Hero, the Tattoo, the Touch HD and now with the superb HTC Desire and Legend. Now picture them taking over Palm. Palm’s Pre phone and WebOs platform although not met with total success by the public but are great, plus the knowledge they have in the field already after being in it for so long could propel HTC as a frontrunner in the market.

Other advantages is that Palm employs a lot of former Apple employees, their SEO Jon Rubenstein was one of the original developers of the iPod and we all know the success that has seen. Chinese computer firm Lenovo is also believed to be interested in a takeover too, but to be honest I’d rather HTC took the plunge and grabbed it and further produced some cracking phones to take away the dominance of Apple.

We spoke a while back about the Palm Pre Plus and Pixi appearing to get a US release and ot on in the UK and our Yankee cousins have been benefitting from having the two Palm webOS smartphones on sale for a while now. Well it appears the UK might actually be getting them as per usual too long after we should.

Website the :: UNWIRED had seen that the Global Certification Forum had approved two new but unknown Palm made models which would be usable on our 3G networks. However the two model names aren’t 100% going to be the Pre Plus and Pixi however it is strongly believed to be these phones as the model numbers bear a striking resemblance to the model numbers used before they were released stateside, even if it isn’t the Pre Plus or the Pixi then Palm have two new phones coming out.

However if they don’t appaear over here if they support the 3G network as its suggested, there’s nothing stopping you now grabbing one of these 3G enabled versions SIM free and slapping your own SIM in it, but it looks hopeful that no importing will be required.

Palm has announced at CES this weekend gone that it is upgrading it’s Pre/Pixi range of smartphones (by adding a “Plus” at the end). Although the Palm Pre seemed to have come out in America a lifetime ago, it has only just arrived in the UK so I’m pretty sure those who waited and waited to get one, will be a little disappointed to hear this news.

Aesthetically speaking the phones wont be changing too much and will just be losing the navigation button on the front, but it’s inside where they’re ringing the changes. On board memory will be doubled to 16GB(but still no expansion slot). Palm have also said they will be giving a conductor for the Touchstone wireless charger in with every purchase. Palm also announced that the webOS will soon be able to pump out some 3d gaming action to which EA Mobile and Gameloft will be developing for.

The Palm Pixi Plus on the other hand(the original Pixi is still not available here in Blighty) will now be sporting WiFi which is an obvious must have on today’s smartphones.

Palm announced the follow up to the massively popular Palm Pre last week, named the Palm Pixi we previously blogged about it when it was codenamed Eos.

Not much has changed since then it is still a full qwerty candybar running Web Os but now we have some more specific details on it.

It should arrive in the states for Christmas and will not include Wi-Fi, it is EV-DO Rev. A 9(won’t work in the UK) with 8GB of storage onboard, 2 megapixel camera (with flash), and 2.63-inch, 320 x 400 capacitive display.

In terms of the processor etc it will include 2 Arm cores on 1 chips with one being a 600MHz applications processor, and a separate 400MHz modem processor to offload some of the heavy lifting.

The gaming capabilities will be handled by a 200MHz, OpenGL 2.0-supporting GPU and then a 320MHz application DSP to handle multimedia on the device.

So some quite impressive specifications for a smallish phone.

Somebody somewhere was claiming that the Palm Pre was out in the UK tomorrow. LIES!! It appears Palm are having a journo event tomorrow so there may have been some crossed wires.

Palm are still keeping their cards close to their chest and staying put with the “pre-christmas” release. However a source in the Daily Telegraph with a friend in the Palm camp and O2 has also said it will be on our shores for the 30th October.

T3 have got news from websites HandTec and mPhone are offering them Sim-Free for a reasonable £399 and £449 respectively. This is obviously better value than the £499 N97 or the £600 ish sim free 3GS.

Palm have officially announced that the Palm Pre will be exclusively on O2 in the UK, Ireland, and Germany, and Movistarin Spain (all Telefonica companies).

Unfortunately they were not quite as open about specific release dates, only saying that it would be "in time for the holidays". That Christmas and not summer holidays unfortunately.

A nice long press release after the jump.

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Great news for people living in the US. It has been officially announced that the Palm Pre will be available on June 6th and will cost $199.99 after $100 mail-rebate and 2-year contract.

The phone will go on sale nationwide (US) at Sprint stores, Best Buy, Radio Shack, and select Wal-Mart stores. The Pre will be available under Sprint's Everything Data or Business Essentials with Messaging and Data plans.

Accessories include the optional $69.99 Touchstone charging dock kit that includes the $49.99 dock and $19.99 Pre back cover.

Quite a clever move by Palm as just 2 days later is the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference!

Now the question is when will us Brits get the Pre? I’m guessing it could be several more months as the US version is EVDO only so they need to release a separate GSM version!

Just because we love the feeling of disappointment when a rumour turns out to be false we have some more Palm Pre rumours.

The Boy Genius Report is claiming that Palm and Sprint will "make a big announcement in the Wall Street Journal on May 19th."

Unless they are declaring themselves bankrupt I can only imagine the big announcement will be Pre related.