Sprint Palm Pre Release Date & Pricing Confirmed Sprint Palm Pre Availability Imminent

Sprint have now confirmed the release date and pricing of the much hyped
Palm Pre, which, according to Sprint's press release (featured in full
below) will become available as of June 6th and will set you back just
shy of $200 subsequent to a $100 mail in rebate and subject to a 2 year
contract - now if that's not a date for your diary, we don't know what is.
Sprint Press Release:

Sprint to Offer Palm Pre Nationwide on June 6

Digital-age-defining Palm webOS phone is built for consumers and
businesses alike, powered by America's most dependable nationwide 3G
network, with the best price plan value

OVERLAND PARK, Kan.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–May. 19, 2009–
Sprint (NYSE: S) today announced pricing and nationwide availability for
the highly anticipated Palm PreTM phone, offered exclusively from
Sprint. Palm Pre will be available nationwide on June 6 in Sprint
stores, Best Buy, Radio Shack, select Wal-Mart stores and online at
Sprint.com for $199.99 with a two-year service agreement and after a
$100 mail-in rebate. Running on the new Palm webOSTM mobile platform,
Pre brings together your important information from where it resides -
on your phone, at your work or on the web - into one logical view.

For those who juggle life circa 2009 - bouncing from conference call to
car pool schedule, from doctors' numbers to doctoral thesis data, from
social calendars to social networking - Pre marks a new wireless
crossover standard. Before Pre, you had to compromise when selecting a
wireless phone. To get the business features you needed, you had to
sacrifice the personal entertainment features you wanted. Pre
consolidates your important information - professional, social and
personal - into one revolutionary device using an operating system that
redefines the experience of living and working wirelessly.

The argument that you need one phone for work and another phone for
play, or that you have to make compromises between business and
lifestyle productivity, is over, said Dan Hesse, president and CEO of
Sprint. With Pre, compromises of the past are history.

Palm Pre will run on America's most dependable 3G network and come with
Sprint's industry-leading, value-oriented Everything Data plans that
offer savings of up to $1,430 over two years vs. comparable AT T and
Verizon plans for smartphones and PDAs.

The Palm Pre takes full advantage of Sprint's Everything Data plans,
said Avi Greengart, research director for Consumer Devices at Current
Analysis. The Pre has been expressly designed for multitasking among
multiple web pages and applications. It also builds on Palm's heritage
in PDAs by managing your digital information - whether that's on a
corporate server or on the web.

The Pre's dynamic 'activity cards' approach to handling and navigating
multiple applications is a great advance, but the core breakthrough is
the integration of information across multiple applications on and off
the phone, said Andy Castonguay, director of Mobile Access Devices
Research, Yankee Group. With social networking and messaging being so
important to consumers, the device's new 'Palm Synergy' functionality -
which gives Pre the ability to automatically pull friends' contact
details, messaging addresses and personal calendars from different
applications online and on the phone - will greatly simplify people's
ability to communicate with their friends and colleagues the way they want.

Pre: A New Kind of Phone

The new webOS platform introduces Palm SynergyTM, a key feature that
brings together your personal and professional calendar, contacts and
e-mail into one centralized view, making transitions between work and
personal life smooth and easy to manage.

With Palm Synergy, users get:

Linked contacts - With Synergy, you have a single view that links your
contacts from a variety of sources, so accessing them is easier than
ever. For example, if you have the same contact listed in your Outlook,
Google and Facebook accounts, Synergy recognizes that they're the same
person and links the information, presenting it to you as one listing.
Layered calendars - Your calendars can be seen on their own or layered
together in a single view, combining work, family, friends, sports
teams, or other interests. You can toggle to look at one calendar at a
time, or see them all at a glance.
Combined messaging - Synergy lets you see all your conversations with
the same person in a chat-style view, even if it started in IM and you
want to reply with text messaging. You can also see who's active in a
buddy list right from contacts or e-mail, and start a new conversation
with just one touch.
Palm webOS lets you keep multiple activities open and move easily
between them like flipping through a deck of cards. You can move back
and forth between text messaging and e-mail, or search the web while you
listen to music. You can rearrange items simply by dragging them, and
when you are done with something, just throw it away by flicking it off
the top of the screen.

Finding what you need is also easy with universal search - as you type
what you're looking for, webOS narrows your search and offers results
from both your device and the web.? WebOS crushes the barriers to true
mobile computing.

Pre is truly a new phone for a new web-centric age, said Ed Colligan,
Palm president and chief executive officer. We're a mobile society, and
we want our people, calendars and information to move with us. With
Pre's exquisite design and the unique webOS software, running on
Sprint's fast broadband network, we're changing the perception of what a
wireless phone can be.

Pre comes with a charger in the box, but for anyone tired of plugging a
cord into their wireless phone, Palm introduces the TouchstoneTM
charging dock, the first inductive charging solution for phones,
available exclusively for Pre. Simply set Pre down on top of the dock
without worrying about connection, orientation or fit. Pre is active
while charging, so you can access the touch screen, watch movies or
video, or use the speakerphone. Set Pre on the charging dock when you're
on a call, and the speakerphone automatically turns on; when you take a
ringing Pre off the dock, Pre automatically answers the call. Other
mobile operating systems allow multitasking, but Palm has developed an
intuitive method of switching between cards, which resemble clicking
different tabs on a Web browser. New applications can be launched easily
using the Launcher software button at the bottom of the home screen,
and users navigate between different applications.

With nearly every wireless device today you have to exit one application
completely before you can use another. That's not what people are
accustomed to; think of your PC and all the applications you can have
open at one time.