Palm Pre Available June 6
The highly anticipated Palm Pre's official release date and pricing has finally been announced. Available exclusively from Sprint the Pre will be in Sprint, Wal-Mart, Radio Shack and Best Buy stores nationwide starting Saturday June 6. The Pre will retail for $199 with a two year service plan and after a $100 mail in rebate.
The Palm Pre is designed to bring your professional, personal and social information together on a single device - according to Sprint president and CEO Dan Hesse "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... With Pre, compromises of the past are history.” The Pre operates on the new webOS platform which introduces Palm Synergy, a feature designed to bring work and personal life together smoothly in a centralized view. For example, if you have the same contact in multiple applications (i.e. Outlook, Facebook, etc.), Synergy will recognize the contact as the same person, link the information and present it as one listing. Synergy also offers layered calendars, which allows you to view your various calendars individually or all at once simply by toggling the ones you want to view. Another nice Synergy feature is combined messaging - any conversations you've been having with someone via IM or text messaging will be combined into one chat-style view. The Palm webOS also features an "activity cards" interface that allows the user to keep multiple applications open and navigate through them as if flipping through a deck of cards. According to Andy Castonguay, director of Mobile & Access Devices Research, Yankee Group, "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... 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."
Aside from the webOS and Synergy features the Pre phone itself is a slider with a full QWERTY keyboard. It works on a 3G EVDO Rev A network. It features a 3.1 inch touchscreen (24 bit 320x480 HVGA display), built-in GPS and a 3 megapixel camera with an LED flash. It has 8GB storage and supports USB mass storage. It measures 2.3 x 3.9 x .67 inches and weighs about 4.8 ounces.
The Palm Pre phone will be available from Sprint on June 6 for $199.99 after a $100 mail-in rebate with a new two-year service agreement on an Everything Data plan or Business Essentials with Messaging and Data plan. Several accessories will be available that day as well, including the Touchstone Charging Kit, which includes the Touchstone charging dock and Touchstone back cover for $69.99. These are available separately for $49.99 and $19.99 respectively.
[via Sprint]
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