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So Bell finally has the Palm Pre on board. Wohoo. Of course in continuation of the Palm tradition of making horrid commercials, the Pre is again promoted in a nauseating fashion. This time around, it isn’t some alien-looking woman talking about walking in the park with her Pre, this time the commercial does give the Pre to actually show up.  The problem is, it’s a pathetic rip-off of the iPhone ad. Really! Was that necessary? Taking an awesome device like the Palm pre and degrading to the level of a rip-off commercial. Also, since the App Catalog currently features only 50 something apps, how is there ‘an app for everyone’? Sad, just sad. Here’s the Bell Pre commercial

Good news for both WebOS developers as well as Pre-owners; Palm is now accepting paid app submissions for the App Catalog. Finally developers will have rock solid chance of making money off of their creations and Pre-owners can get to know what it’s like to have an app store with more than 30 apps. So now Palm won’t be the only one trying to bring action to Pre users. Paid app submissions begin as of now.

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Big Brother is dangerously spreading his influence in our world. It seems like everyone is pulling a Big Brother, every chance they get. Newest on aboard the Death Star is Palm. That’s right folks, developer Joey Hess performed a very public examination of WebOS and revealed to us all that your Pre is indeed giving Palm ‘intelligence’ such as;

• Your location
• Which apps you’ve used and for how long
• Your app crash logs
• Which apps you have installed

That’s right, not in the least bit nice. And while questions are being raised about ethics, disclosure, privacy, Palm’s privacy policy, like others in its league is strangely broad enough to cover nuttiness like this. Hesse has suggested a way to disable this information sharing feature, but it requires the use of Linux. Let’s just hope an easier way of fixing the feature comes out soon.

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Finally the App Catalog sees the face of new apps, and very popular ones at that. Most notable of these, one that many Pre users had undoubtedly been waiting for is the Open Tables reservations app. the Open Table service, it allows you to find restaurants in your area and reserve a table at a time of your choice all from within the app. You can even invite attendees with Open Table’s Pre app and it will add the reservation details to your calendar for you. What’s sweeter is that the app is free, Open Tables makes its profits from deals with restaurants, and it’s available in the App Catalog immediately. Other interesting new additions include; Fliq Bookmarks by Mark/Space, a bookmark sync utility that works alongside The Missing Sync to sync your Pre bookmarks with Safari. Now let’s hope the App Catalog keeps getting better at a faster pace.

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While Pre sales have been all good in the United States, the Canadians haven’t had that big a chunk ‘o’ Pre to bite out of. All that changes now of course as Bell is finally offering the Palm Pre for $199.95 on a 3-year contract or $599.95 off contract “with a minimum 500 MB data plan.” Future Shop set up a pre-order teaser for the Pre too, smart move considering that everyone likes to be teased. In all seriousness, let’s hope the inventory plans to hold out and Bell is on better grounds than Sprint was.

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Whenever something great happens, we are compelled to write about it. The same is true for when we something atrocious pops up and gives us nightmares. That’s where the new Palm Pre commercial steps in. I mean don’t get me wrong, the Pre is awesome, but the latest ad on the airwaves is a nightmare. Who exactly wants to buy a smartphone being promoted by a girl who seems a bit out of it, like she’s talking to ghosts over shoulders? WebOS is a great platform, but getting a spirit-talker to promote it is a major bad idea. To further boost the nonsense creativity of the ad, the Pre doesn’t exactly show up on screen till some 20 seconds of the 30 second ad have passed. Palm knows how to make a good phone, now they should learn how to fire a bad ad agency. Watch the video yourself and be honest, would you buy toilet paper of it was advertised like this

It’s always interesting how companies chose their performance reports announcements day to make other product-oriented announcements too. Probably because they know that beyond the average customer, the investors are listening to future outgrowth prospects. And so Verizon announced at its investors call conference that the Palm Pre would be up and available on Big Red in 2010. This was probably the only good news that both Verizon subscribers as well as investors since the company’s dropped by 21 percent to $1.48 billion (though Year-on-Year revenue was up by 11 percent to $26.9 billion). Of course this wasn’t the end of the bad news, Verizon also plans on cutting 8000 employees before the year is over to cut operational costs. So really the Pre news was about the height of that day.

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Every now and then corporate slip ups happen that just make our day. Of recent, we had the Best Buy slip up that many wished would be true, the Palm Pre went up on the Best Buy website for an awesome $99.99. And before we could have our field day, John Bernier from Best Buy sent out a Tweet that it was mistake and was being corrected. That’s life for ya. Of course there may be a few lucky and smart mouth customers out there that did manage to take Best Buy up on its word. Rest assured, if there are any, we shall be hearing them boast soon. It was fun while it lasted.

Alright everybody who was willing to jump off a bridge to get their Palm Pre now has one. The rest of you lot are now allowed to order online by Sprint. You can now order the Palm Pre in your boxers. Just be sure to dress up when it comes time to send in that $100 mail in rebate. So now what are you waiting for?

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The blurry image that you see is from the blurry video put up by PreCentrals’ forum member Cleanser. Cleanser has toiled away to bring something incredibly incredible to Verizon subscribers; a hacked Palm Pre that will work on Verizon’s network. Now the Pre is still exclusive to Sprint, but once you’re pwned, you’re pwned good. At this point, Cleanser has managed to get voice and SMS working just fine but there’s still trouble with data;

“Only problem is that I can’t get data to work. Apparently webOS is checking to see if the device is provisioned or not before allowing a data session to take place. So my next step would be to somehow bypass this provisioning check.”

That’s pretty close, even if it isn’t all the way there. Cleanser also adds that it took a good bit of convincing to get Verizon, now ‘open to all compatible handsets’, to add the device to his account. Sweet talking is still an excellent strategy of course. Enjoy the video.

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