HP surprised everyone this week and announced the Palm Pre 2, the first Palm handset after Palm was acquired by HP earlier this year. The Pre 2 comes with beefed up specs, including a faster processor and some other basic hardware bumps. From PC Mag:
The Pre 2 is a curiously low-key upgrade for a Palm line that needs to aggressively expand to stay in the game. It looks and works almost exactly like the existing Palm Pre, though it has amped-up specs: a 1-GHz TI OMAP 3630 processor, a 5-megapixel camera, 16GB of storage, 512MB of RAM, and a flat, glass 320-by-480 screen. The Pre 2 will come out “in the coming months” both on Verizon Wireless and in an unlocked, 3G GSM version that’s compatible with AT&T’s network.
The bigger news is the unveiling of WebOS 2.0, which its widely believed HP saw as the true value at Palm. WebOS 2.0 rolls in true multi-tasking and support for Adobe Flash. The new OS will also support apps like Skype, peripherals like Bluetooth keyboards, and more. The back-end of the new mobile OS has a number of open APIs that just might make it more attractive to developers than the previous WebOS version, which looked great but was largely criticized because of Palm’s slow pace in opening the OS up to developers – no apps, no customers, it seemed.
Still, the new Palm Pre 2 and WebOS 2.0 don’t have official launch dates just yet, but it’s natural HP and Palm will, as a newly combined company, try to push it through as quickly as possible, as long as they don’t get in their own way.