The analysts said they expect Palm to have a stockpile of around 375,000 units at the device’s debut (the figure is the median number of units the six analysts surveyed predicted).

A smartphone pioneer with its Treo, Palm has fallen on tough times against rivals such as Research In Motion’s BlackBerry and Apple’s iPhone. When Pre launches with exclusive U.S. carrier Sprint in the first half of 2009, it will be the first phone to run Palm’s new operating system, called WebOS, under development for well over a year. No pricing for the hardware has been set. “We’re extremely enthusiastic about this device,” Sprint CEO Dan Hesse says.

Pre is a handsome, curved, 4.8-ounce device that’s more compact than the iPhone. Like the iPhone, it uses sensors and touch gestures to enlarge photos and Web pages. It also has a hidden, slide-down qwerty keyboard to complement the vibrant 3.1-inch touch-screen. There are other features that the iPhone doesn’t have, including support for Bluetooth wireless stereo devices and a removable battery.

You can also run several applications at once. For example, you’ll be able to listen to music in the Pandora Internet radio application while surfing the Web. You cannot do that on the iPhone.

Facebook was one of the partners to join Palm on stage at CES. Other partners include Google, Yahoo and Amazon. But Palm was not specific about the number of applications that will be available for the phone at launch.

Pandora chief technology officer Tom Conrad says it took days rather than months to develop the Pandora app for the new Palm. The operating system “is really solid,” he says.

Palm Chairman Jon Rubinstein, a former Apple executive instrumental in producing the iPod, says, “We’re just getting started.” A big early goal: “It had to be mostly usable with a single hand and minimize the number of button-presses.”

Palm CEO Ed Colligan scoffs at critics who think the Pre arrives too late to compete against BlackBerry, iPhone and other competitors. “I don’t even remotely feel like it’s too little too late. It’s a big, big space.”

Samsung I7500 expected June 2009.

With a launch of I7500, Samsung became the first company among the global top three mobile phone manufacturers to unveil an Android-powered phone. This starts heating things up for all Android team and making a viable challenge to WindowsMobile.

“Samsung is among the earliest members of the Open Handset Alliance and has been actively moving forward to introduce the most innovative Android mobile phone,” said JK Shin, Executive Vice President and Head of Mobile Communication Division in Samsung Electronics. “With Samsung’s accumulated technology leadership in mobile phone industry and our consistent strategy to support every existing operating system, I believe that Samsung provides the better choices and benefits to our consumers” he added.

The Samsung I7500 is a cutting-edge smartphone, featuring a 3.2″ AMOLED full touch screen and 7.2Mbps HSDPA and WiFi connectivity, giving users access to Google™ Mobile services and full web browsing at blazing speeds.

The Samsung I7500 offers users access to the full suite of Google services, including Google Search™, Google Maps™, Gmail™, YouTube™, Google Calendar™, and Google Talk™. The integrated GPS receiver enables the comprehensive use of Google Maps features, such as My Location, Google Latitude, Street View, local search and detailed route description. Hundreds of other applications are available in Android Market. For example, the application Wikitude, a mobile travel guide, allows consumers to access details of unknown sights via location-based Wikipedia articles.

Based on Samsung’s proven product leadership, Samsung I7500 comes with latest multimedia features. The large and vivid 3.2″AMOLED display ensures the brilliant representation of multimedia content and enjoyable full touch mobile experience. Along with supporting a 5-megapixel camera and various multimedia codec formats, the I7500 also provides a long enough battery life (1500mAh) and generous memory capacity up to 40GB (Internal memory: 8GB, External memory: Up to 32GB) to enjoy all the applications and multimedia content. The phone also boasts its slim and compact design with mere 11.9mm thickness.

The Samsung I7500 will be available in major European countries from June, 2009.

Nice comparison of the Blackberry Bold against the iPhone from the iPhoneBlog

“When everyone else does it I guess it must be a good idea…” That seems to be the reasoning behind the frenzy to make apps stores these days. Of course Apple is leading the way with their flawed but successful iPhone Store with Microsoft and Google Android playing catch up through a similar stores of their own.

Research in Motion (RIM), maker of the BlackBerry, is set to launch its own one-stop shop for add-on applications.

Third-party applications have long been available for BlackBerrys, RIM has decided to follow in Apple’s footstep by creating and operating a central store. The goal is to cater to those who like their TV, music and MySpace. RIM is clearly going after a demographic that’s different from the executive road warrior who carried the real-time e-mail device around from meeting to meeting years ago. Today’s Blackberry phones come in a number of shapes, sizes and colors.

BlackBerry App World will be available for download from RIM’s website, with a thousand programs initially available at launch.

Unlike Apple’s App Store, BlackBerry App World will share revenue with cell phone carriers and allow them to profile themselves by setting up their own stores-within-the-store.

A smooth move will be that users will also be able to charge application purchases to their cell phone bill.

RIM’s hopes are also based on their touch phone answer to the iPhone being a success. If you like to know more about the touch based Blackberry Storm here is a good video demoing it :