Palm Pre Still On For First Half Of 2009, No Multi-Touch?

Sprint and Palm held a Webinar yesterday where I was fortunate to get invited to, it was like 20mins presentation and another 20mins of Q&A, sadly I was left wanting.

The main speakers were David Owens, Director of Consumer acquisitions at Sprint, and Matt Crowley, Product Line Manager at Palm. Both men spoke a great deal about the Pre and what it has to offer along with why Sprint was chosen as the sole network provider to see the Palm Pre through. One of the good news that came out of the Webinar was that the Pre is still on track to be released within the first half of 2009, good news for all the Palm die hards and those foaming at the mouth just to own this sexy toy.

Not much has been revealed about availability and pricing, the only thing I could gather is some Sprint callings which I can't quite remember the costs right now, but the one that did stand out was the $99.99 per month unlimited plan. With this plan you get unlimited voice, text, mms, and data for a whole month, just for the same $99.99, pretty cool huh? If you are planning to invest in a Palm Pre handset then take my advice and go for the unlimited plan, the Pre is all about the syncing with the web so with the unlimited plan you will get better satisfaction with your new found love.

Now let's talk a lil about the Q&A, I wasn't quite pleased as many of my questions went unanswered, come to think of it, only one got answered and that was when I asked if there will be other choices apart from HTML, JavaScript, and CSS for developers to use and create significant applications. David Owen answered saying no, or not at this time, Palm is focusing more on the web with WebOS v1.0, in later versions developers might have other choices so until then, HTML, JavaScript, and CSS is the way to go.

You might be wondering why the hell Palm chose not to include an SD Card slot in the Pre, apparently doing that would have ruined the design, for some reason I fail to believe that but let us wait and see if other Palm WebOS devices will come along with such an obvious shortcoming. For the many Windows Mobile fanboys here, you would be glad to know that Palm will continue to dish out Windows Mobile handsets even though have what appears to be a better mobile OS, I'm not quite sure how they came to this decision but who care? More Windows Mobile handsets for everyone.

OK finally, I went as far as to ask whether or not the Pre would ship with Multi-Touch available, I asked that because there was some squabble about Apple owning the Multi-Touch Patent and since the Pre was demoed with Multi-Touch active, we could be witnessing the beginning of a showdown in the courts between Apple and Palm. Well guess what? That questioned went unanswered, even when they were having problems finding questions to answer, that particular question was obviously ignored, so my question is, is it possible Palm would strip Multi-Touch from the Pre to shove off legal woes from Apple? The first half of 2009 will tell, Hooah.