Palm Press — Pre Storms the EU, Grabs Public’s Mindshare, Palm Gets Slammed
Our new daily feature that brings you the latest news of the week for different device platforms continues today with the Palm Press. Palm is rolling out the Pre in the Germany, the UK and Ireland in October. That should be just in time for new Pre owners to snap all sorts of interesting photos during Oktoberfest. The Pre will be exclusive to O2 at launch in these countries, and will be fully subsidized with certain O2 plans. All Pre plans offered by O2 in the UK come with unlimited data, with various voice minute limits determining the monthly service fee. Pre buyers in Germany can find pricing info here, and Irish customers here. The German GSM model should work on the AT&T network in the U. S., too, if AT&T customers just can’t wait to get a Pre from that carrier.
A new study by Interpret ranks smartphones by the equivalent of their public image. The interesting study found, surprisingly, that the Palm Pre ranks second only to the iPhone 3GS in the public eye, as far as how “smart”, “hip/cool” and “productive” the phone is perceived to be by the public. It seems the Pre advertising campaign has been successful in generating this cool public image. Now if Palm could only sell more of them.
We’ve been pretty relentless in calling for Palm to get the Pre App Catalog rolling in apps. The fact is Palm has only recently opened the process for developers to submit apps for submission into the Catalog. The App Catalog opens today for commercial apps, and such apps have a defined approval process to get included in the store. Developers must have been waiting for the store to open as Palm admits it is being slammed with submissions to approve. Palm’s Developer Community Manager put it this way:
We got more applications than we could handle well, which is a good problem to have. Unfortunately, it means we dropped some things on the floor, and that’s bad, but with the impending “stuff” that’s coming, this is all going to get a lot easier for everyone and a lot more transparent.
It sounds like a veritable flood of new apps should be appearing on a Palm Pre near you soon. We can’t wait.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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So, no action happening over here…(Netherlands) and no way of importing a device since they’re all subscription based. Big letdown again, Palm….
I’m starting to look for a non Palm device >.<
Yeah, paid apps were supposed to be available starting today but with the rumored delay of 1.2(.1?) to next week, that looks like it’ll have to wait.
Sound like I need get my Pre out of the box and see if it’s worth using again.
Unfortunately, Oktoberfest is actually on at the end of September every year!
Any excuse for a party. :)
Palm storms the EU? Only that part of Europe? Only 27 countries out of 49? Are you sure you don’t mean EUROPE?!
The EU is NOT synonymous with Europe! It has NOT replaced Europe, and it’s not a federal government of a united states of Europe.
@Andrew The three European countries mentioned in the article (Ireland, Germany and the UK) are all in the EU. You seem to be reading an awful lot into things.