Palm is gearing up to launch the Pixi on November 15 on the Sprint network in the U.S. The Pixi is Palm’s second phone running webOS, and uses a candybar format with exposed QWERTY keyboard. The Pixi is Palm’s “budget” phone, and will be offered for $99 to Sprint customers signing a new 2-year contract. This price is after a $50 instant rebate and a $100 mail-in rebate.

The Pixi will be available through Sprint directly, as well as Best Buy, Radio Shack and Walmart stores nationwide. Palm is excited about the addition to their new phone line.

“We are excited to offer the new Palm Pixi to our customers in time for the holiday season, and it’s a great addition to Sprint’s industry-leading device portfolio,” said Kevin Packingham, senior vice president – Product Development, Sprint. “Simply put, this phone is fun and easy to use; with its multi-touch screen and full QWERTY keyboard, it’s a great device for messaging and social networking at a price everyone can enjoy, and delivers so many of the great features people love about Palm Pre™ in a fantastic new form factor, making it a huge hit for consumers.”

It is Windows 7 launch day but more importantly it’s time for another Palm Press. Palm Press is our weekly look at the world of Palm. The Palm App Catalog is getting more stock quickly, now that paid apps are getting approved by the company. As good as the Pre is at accessing the store, Palm has wisely seen clear to open a web site to showcase the Catalog. The site is nicely put together, and makes it an enjoyable experience to visit and check out the wares. It’s pretty easy to find that perfect app for the Pre using the site.

The Palm Pre was successfully launched in the UK, and O2 claims a lot of the phones were sold immediately. They refrain from clarifying how many Pres were actually sold, but did say that they “sold more Pres on Friday than it normally does all other phones.” O2 stated that most customers also bought one or more Touchstone chargers with the Pre.

A tweet from Verizon “verifies” the Pre will be coming to Verizon early next year. Verizon officials stated they would be carrying the Pre after the Sprint exclusivity ended around the end of this year. Rumors appeared recently that Verizon would not in fact be dishing up the Pre for their customers. This tweet has now laid the issue to rest, as you can’t get more official than Twitter. That’s as official as it’s going to get until we see the Pre in Verizon stores.

Contrary to previous rumors that Verizon Wireless wouldn’t carry the Palm Pre, a simple tweet confirmed the opposite, says BGR. The official Verizon Wireless twitter account posted the update on Friday morning, stating that the Pre is coming “early next year.” That info pretty much jives with the assumed six-month exclusive deal that Palm has with Sprint, as the Pre launched in the U.S. back in June. I remember sitting in line early on a Saturday morning with Tyler and then posting early impressions.

After sitting on the superphone sidelines for nearly a year — the BlackBerry Storm was probably the biggest launch for VZW in the last 12 months — the landscape is about to change. With what’s arguably the best network in the U.S., Verizon is about to bring some top handsets into play: the BlackBerry Storm 2, the Motorola Droid, and now the Palm Pre. This situation reminds me of something my math teacher used to tell me: Good handsets plus a good network equals great sales and increased market share.

All jokes aside, I’m looking forward to what a Verizon Palm Pre will do for sales. I’ve said before that from an application standpoint, the Pre is a chicken-and-egg situation that needs quick resolution. Developers are targeting devices and platforms with a larger audience. If a handset is selling like hotcakes, you want your app on it because your potential audience is larger. But consumers may pass on devices with a limited application catalog, so the cycle continues. My hope is that with the Pre on Verizon, as well as other carriers around the world, sales cross over the 2 million unit mark by mid-2010. I think that’s the point we’ll start to see a strong interest in webOS from developers.

It is Thursday and that can only mean it’s time for another Palm Press. Palm Press is our weekly look at the world of Palm. Palm Pre owners have been embracing the new apps appearing in the App Catalog, along with those in the Homebrew App Gallery. There may not always be an app for that, but there are apps for many things, and more appearing every day. Many Pre owners have hit the dreaded app limit, an error that appears when the Pre app memory is full. Palm made a silly decision to install apps on a hidden partition, and once that partition is full no further apps can be installed on the phone. It’s not a big partition, either, and it has irritated many Pre owners. A rumor that the next big WebOS update in November will address the dreaded limit and banish it to the hinterlands. Now that’s a rumor we can live with.

That limit is affecting more Pre owners than ever, with the word from Palm that over 8 million apps have been downloaded since the phone launch. That number is significant, not only because the Pre has only been out for a short while, but also due to the scarcity of apps in the Catalog. It shows that as the number of apps go live in the Catalog, downloads will ramp up quite a bit. The launch of the Pre outside the U.S. will also play a big role in app downloads.

The book Palm Pre for Dummies by Chris Ziegler from Engadget Mobile is now available for those wanting to know everything about the Pre. I had the pleasure of meeting Chris at the Mobilize 09 conference recently, and he’s a nice guy, so buy his book. If you want to, of course. There is a Kindle version for the geeks among us.

As we were recording our podcast this morning, Matt Miller said that the HTC Hero has him thinking about a Sprint plan. The only problem is that Matt lives in an area with limited Sprint coverage. The carrier does have a roaming agreement with Verizon Wireless, which could help Matt. But when James and I traveled to Northern California this summer for a GigaOM event, we had no data coverage on our Palm Pre handsets. At least that’s what we thought.

In a “duh!” moment on the podcast, I finally found the data roaming settings on the Pre. I’m sure many of you have already found them, but neither James nor I knew where to look. Now we do! To enable data roaming — which is off by default:

• Open the Phone application
• Tap the Preferences option in the top left menu.
• Scroll down to the Network preferences and choose “Enable” or “Disable” as needed on the Data Roaming option.

I wish I had known where to find this in July, when I needed it, but better late than never! Bear in mind that Sprint’s data roaming with Verizon is limited. You’re generally allowed up to 300MB of off-network data roaming per month, according to Sprint’s FAQs on its web site. That might explain why this setting is off by default. Now the only question remaining is, will Matt add a Sprint device based on this info?

I’m in agreement with James that WebKit is arguably the best basis for a mobile browser today. Apple, Google, and Palm have embraced it, while Research In Motion appears to have “bought” it for future BlackBerry builds. But why then does the browser on my iPhone 3GS offer such a different experience than the one on my Palm Pre? I’ve pointed out some flaws in the Pre’s browser — no scrolling indicator nor do hyperlink bookmarks work — but if they’re both WebKit-based, why the big variance?

QuirksMode answers the question about my two phones — and most every other WebKit browser out there. In a test comparison of 10 mobile browsers based on WebKit, they found that no two are alike. Since the code base is open sourced, there are bound to be various forks but the breadth of differences is staggering. Other summary results include:

• The best WebKit available is Safari 4; the worst is S60v3.
• The Android G1 and G2 WebKits score rather badly; it’s the worst mobile WebKit except for S60.
• Regressions are fairly common: iPhone 3.1, Android G2, and S60v5 all (partially) dropped support for something their predecessors did support.
• The closest relation of a desktop WebKit to a mobile WebKit is between Safari 3.0 and S60v5.

Bear in mind that “best” and “worst” were determined by an arbitrary point scale for this effort. Points were assigned for usage of standard functions, ACID scores and such. Speaking of ACID scores, the Palm Pre actually scored the worst — on a scale of 1 to 100, it earned a measly one! Have a look at the various tested function for each WebKit browser and see what works and what doesn’t.

It is Thursday and that can only mean it’s time for another Palm Press. Palm Press is our weekly look at the world of Palm. The smartphone race is going full blast and every competitor is pressing every advantage to get ahead of the pack. Palm CEO Jon Rubenstein said in an interview this week that Palm, Apple and RIM are the three companies that have an advantage over everyone else in the space due to deep hardware and software integration. His comments were obviously a dig at Microsoft given the launch of Windows Mobile 6.5 this week.

Adobe is talking up the newest Flash player for mobile browsers, and went on video to show off Flash 10.1 running on a Palm Pre. They even stated on the video that the Pre will be one of the first phones to get the new Flash technology, and that is pretty darn exciting. The coolest demo was showing multiple instances of Flash in the browser running side-by-side.

Palm and Apple are still going back and forth with iTunes synchronization with the Pre, a situation that is getting a bit ridiculous at this point. Apple released a new version of iTunes that killed off the Pre’s ability to sync with that program’s music library. Palm then released WebOS version 1.2 that did not restore the syncing ability; pardon us for thinking the slapping contest was over. A few days later Palm released another update, 1.2.1, that restored the iTunes sync capability. Can’t these two companies just grow up, already?

I finally got homebrew apps working again on my Palm Pre after my unintentional system rebuild. I’m glad I did, as I’ve been having a lot of fun with today’s app of the day — Mediafly Mobile. Mediafly is an audio/video podcast app that makes it a breeze to keep up with the topics of the day. It works in tandem with the free mediafly.com account to let me customize the podcasts to which I want to listen. It works well on the Pre and really shows off what the phone can do. Shows can be streamed over Wi-Fi or 3G for ultimate portability.

Source: Gartner

With all of Apple’s iPhone buzz, you’d think that Symbian, the global smartphone marketshare leader would be looking at Cupertino over its shoulder. Not so, says Gartner via a Computerworld posting. Google’s Android is emerging as a big challenger over the next few years. By 2012, Gartner estimates Android will hold a 14% share globally, up from the 2% it owns today and a tad more than the 13.7% expected from Apple. That means that Apple will hold a good chunk of the market, but Android’s growth isn’t likely to come at much expense to Apple. Instead, Symbian’s loss is Android’s gain. To round out the other expecations, here are the estimates for the remaining platforms:

• Windows Mobile / Windows phone = 12.8%
• BlackBerry = 12.5%
• Various Linux = 5.4%
• webOS = 2.1%

Several factors play into Gartner’s estimations. The number of choices for Android handsets is gaining speed — it seems like everyone is getting in on the Android game these days. The more open nature when compared to Apple is appealing. And while not everyone has embraced Google services, they do offer a compelling option when paired with an optimized smartphone platform.

The recent video where James showed of the HTC Hero certainly has me more interested in Android than before. When the platform first arrived, it felt unfinished in terms of software, there wasn’t a wide assortment of apps and the hardware was more like 2006 than 2008. But the Android Market now boasts over 10,000 apps. And handsets like the Hero and Cliq look far better than the original G1. Although I don’t think I made a mistake with my Palm Pre — Gartner figures 11 million webOS devices sold in 2012 — I’m admittedly more intrigued by Android as each day passes. Not enough to add a third phone line, but intrigued nonetheless.

One bit that I’m wondering about in terms of Gartner’s estimates — have they accounted for Maemo, Nokia’s new mobile operating system that debuts on the N900? It could be that Maemo is lumped under the Linux share, but that would overestimate the overall impact that Google is having on Nokia.

The Palm App Catalog is fully open for business and is growing by leaps and bounds. We have previously concentrated our “App of the Day” feature for the Pre on the homebrew scene, as that was where all the developer action seemed to be concentrated. We’re going to open it up to the real App Catalog as there’s a lot of good stuff appearing regularly there, too. Today’s free app is a nice speed dialer that uses contact photos on a clean interface.

PhotoDialer is in the App Catalog and makes it a breeze to add contacts to a speed dialer screen for easy access. You can have a contact on the screen multiple times with different phone numbers, and the app puts a distinctive icon in the corner of the contact photo to make it clear which phone number will be dialed. The screen background is customizable, and the speed dial screen can be either a grid view or a list of apps. The contact’s name can be indicated over the icon if desired.

The developer, CardinalPeak, has a nice article about the development of PhotoDialer for those interested.