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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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Back at the CES it was announced that a GSM version of the Palm Pre would also come out and soon. Now with the Pre out on Sprint and Bell for a while, it was a painstaking wait to see if the U.S. 3G bands would be part of the deal or not. And a recent bit of info given out by the Wi-Fi Alliance reveals that indeed U.S. 3G bands are indeed on board the new GSM version of the Palm Pre. Yay! So this means with 850/1900MHz UMTS/HSPA we may hope to see the Pre on AT&T after Sprint\s exclusivity period ends. As for Canada, probably either Rogers or TELUS may get it after Bell’s exclusivity ends. Looking good.

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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 carriers are announcing their quarterly results and making them a day for more or less key announcements about future plans, we’re not all pleased by everything we hear. Sometimes the news is just surprising, like how does Sprint manage to lose 1 million postpaid subscribers despite having the Palm Pre (the.most.anticipated.handset.this.year.), how does that happen? As things currently stand Sprint is down 257,000 subscribers net in the quarter, up from 187,000 in Q1. Its subscriber count now stands at 48.8 million. Sprint lost 991,000 postpaid subscribers this past quarter, which means the carrier is still in a danger zone and the alarms are still ringing. Sprint also hasn’t said a word about how many Palm Pre units it’s sold so far, a number we’re anxious to hear. As for other profit related facts, since we’re on the subject; operating revenue came in at $8.1 billion, down by 10 percent Year-on-Year and it posted a net loss of $384 million or $0.13 per share, down 12 percent from $344 million in the same quarter last year. Jeepers.

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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.

And finally Palm has finally gone public with it Mojo SDK. Till now the Software Development Kit had been available to only a select few, and Palm has taken its pretty time going public with it, but now everyone can get into the action. The small developer group that originally had access to the Mojo SDK is the reason the Pre came with only 30 apps. Of course that’s all about to change. Just to keep things from getting too bright, Palm still won’t be accepting developer submissions until the fall. Boo. Go developers.

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How Sprint manages to mess up every launch is amazing, and the bane of Sprint subscribers’ existence at the moment is the mess that is the BlackBerry Tour 9630. Ok, given that a decent number of people got their Tour delivered to them, while many were also able to get one from retail outlets, but for those who haven’t yet gotten a Tour, the future looks bleak. And the number of these unhappy subscribers is a staggering 75 percent (roughly speaking) of Sprint’s Tour would-be customers. Sad. The most annoying issue would be the inventory shortage. A lot of vigilant folks, who ordered the Tour within 15-20 minutes flat of its online availability, and despite the website showing an ‘in-stock’ position, were greeted by an immediate email showing lack of inventory. Here’s an email that a Sprint user got within half an hour of the Tour going live on Sprint’s website;

Product ID: SP9630RIM Description: Blackberry Tour 9630 Qty: 1 Order Date: 2009-07-12

Status: Your order or a portion of your order is in backorder status. If you would like to select an alternate product or cancel your backordered item, please call 866-789-8292 between 8:00 a.m. EST to 11:00 p.m. EST Monday to Friday or 9:00 a.m. EST to 9:00 p.m. EST on Saturdays and Sundays.Please note that cancellation requests may not always process successfully due the speed of warehouse processing. If you cancelled your backordered item but still received a shipment, please refuse the shipment or call us to process a return within 30 days of receipt.

Seriously, how hard is it to get it right once? The Pre was a disaster and Sprint told us all about that. And now it’s the same case with the Tour. Maybe Sprint shouldn’t be trying to match launch timings with Verizon until it can make absolutely, positively, no-chance-in-hell sure that half of the users who want the new handset won’t be snubbed.

Don’t act surprised, we all knew this was coming since day one. Rumor has it that Apple is going to make good on its ‘threat’ about non-Apple devices not being compatible with iTunes as gradual updates keep a coming. And those ‘gradual’ software updates are here in the form of iTunes 8.2.1, which will effectively kill all Palm Pre Syncing. Palm said in its statement that users should consider holding off on upgrading and if out-of-the-box iTunes syncing is what you want, that’s probably a good idea. Now let’s just see how long this cat and mouse game is going to play out, and how long Palm is going to find ways around Apple’s every subsequent fix. Of course Pre users need not despair, there are other options.

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