CES 2010: Palm Announces Two New Handsets and 3D Gaming on WebOS

CES 2010 has Palm announcing the availability of two new handsets come Jan 25th 2010 – The Palm Pre Plus and Palm Pixi Plus with Verizon Wireless. Both handsets will of course feature Palm’s Web OS, the likes of which we haven’t yet seen. Palm also has another little surprise for their consumers as they’ve also introduced several graphics-intensive game titles for webOS, from leading game developers EA Mobile, Gameloft, Glu Mobile and Laminar Research.

Pre Plus also comes with the Palm Touchstone Back Cover, making the phone compatible with the inductive Touchstone Charging Dock (sold separately).  Verizon Wireless Pre Plus customers will also get 16 GB of storage (approximately 15 GB user available) for applications and media. In addition, the all-new Palm mobile hotspot, a webOS app that can be downloaded from the Palm App Catalog, gives customers the option of creating a personal Wi-Fi cloud capable of sharing the reliability and high-speed Internet connectivity of the Verizon Wireless 3G network with up to five Wi-Fi-enabled devices such as notebooks, netbooks, cameras, gaming devices or portable media/MP3 players.

Customers have a host of options as well for personalizing their phones with the separately-sold Palm Pixi Artist Series Back Covers (www.palm.com/artistseries) and new color Pixi Touchstone Back Covers, which will be available in pink, blue, green, orange and black. 

Following are key features and specifications available on both Pre Plus and Pixi Plus:

• Palm Synergy – Brings customers’ information from the many places it resides into a single, more view
• Palm App Catalog – Currently offers more than 1,000 webOS applications for download
• Gesture area – Enables simple, intuitive gestures for navigation
• Full QWERTY keyboards – Slide out on Pre Plus, Fixed on Pre Pixi
• Wi-Fi
• Integrated GPS
• Messaging support combining IM, SMS and MMS capabilities
• E-mail, including EAS (for access to corporate Microsoft Exchange servers) and personal e-mail - -- - support (Google Gmail push, Yahoo!, POP3, IMAP)
• 3 megapixel camera on the Pre Plus and 2 megapixel camera on the Pre Pixi with LED flash on both
• standard 3.5 mm headset jack
• Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR with A2DP stereo Bluetooth support
• Charger/microUSB connector with USB 2.0 Hi-Speed

Palm also announced that video recording, editing and sharing capabilities will soon be available for users of webOS phones. This new video capability will be delivered automatically to current and future Palm Pre and Palm Pixi products via an over-the-air update.

Palm also demonstrated Flash content in the browser on a Palm Pre and expects a free Adobe Flash Player 10.1 plug-in to be posted to the Palm App Catalog in the coming months. Palm expects webOS to be one of the first mobile platforms to support the full Flash Player in the web browser.

In the new gaming section, seven 3D games were introduced as part of the Palm App Catalog for Palm Pre customers:

• Need for Speed Undercover (EA Mobile)
• The Sims 3 (EA Mobile)
• MONOPOLY (EA Mobile)
• Asphalt 5: Elite Racing (Gameloft)
• Let's Golf! (Gameloft)
• Glyder 2 (Glu Mobile)
• X-Plane (Laminar Research)

Five other mobile games were also introduced: EA Mobile's Tetris, Sudoku, and SCRABBLE, and Gameloft's The Oregon Trail and Brain Challenge.

"We are very excited about the potential of webOS as a platform for mobile 3D gaming," said Katie Mitic, senior vice president, Product Marketing, Palm, Inc. "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."

The developers introducing titles today have had early access to the Palm webOS Plug-in Development Kit (PDK), which extends the Palm webOS Software Development Kit (SDK) with a set of tools, documentation and APIs that let developers write plug-ins for their webOS applications. The PDK lets developers easily integrate C and C++ code into their webOS applications, enabling new functionality, including immersive 3D games. A public beta version of the webOS PDK is scheduled to be available to all developers in March.