expansys is now selling the Palm Pre for £239.99 unlocked. This is a good price and shows that a profit can be made at this price point (I presume?) so why doesn’t Palm do a similar thing with the Pre through networks? Sell it for £199 and it might gain some traction.

The Palm Pre offers an alternative experience to the raft of Android, Apple, Blackberry and Windows smartphones available today. Featuring a touch screen and a full slide-out keyboard, the Palm Pre runs WebOS, and has 8GB of storage memory built-in so you can sync DRM-free iTunes music, podcasts, photos and more to your phone.

The biggest selling iPhone game of the moment by far, Angry Birds, is now available for webOS. It is priced at $1.99 and if you haven’t played it yet, you simply must download it. One of a few games that thoroughly deserves the hype. Thanks to Peter.

“Lemme tell ya, these ain’t no ordinary finches we’re talkin’ about. These here are the Angry Birds, the ones that’s gonna kick you in the ‘nads. And they’re the ones on your side. They must be from Galapadapados, or sumptin’.” – Col. Angus, Bird Expert. The survival of the Angry Birds is at stake. Dish out revenge on the green pigs who stole the Birds’ eggs. Use the unique destructive powers of the Angry Birds to lay waste to the pigs’ fortified castles. Angry Birds features hours of gameplay, challenging physics-based castle demolition, and lots of replay value. Each of the 150 levels requires logic, skill, and brute force to crush the enemy. Protect wildlife, or play Angry Birds!

The title is slightly misleading, but the idea is the same. While looking in a second hand mobile shop called CEX I spotted a Palm Pre for £110. It was in grade C condition, but a closer inspection showed that the phone itself was fine. The headphones were missing and everything else looked OK to me. With a 12 month warranty this is an exceptional price. It would need to be unlocked from O2 if you use another network, but the comparison was stark compared to other phones available in the same store-

A grade C BlackBerry 8320 was £100

A first generation iPhone locked to O2 (also grade C) was £210

An HTC S740 (grade C) was £100

My point is that these three phones are quite old now and none of them are spectacularly good, but they have held their value much better than the Pre.

Also of note was the sheer volume of Palm Pres available in this one store- they had twelve in stock, one HTC Desire and no iPhone 4’s.

Astraware has entered the webOS field which makes sense considering its long Palm OS history. Here’s the full press release-

Staffordshire, UK – August 24, 2010 – Astraware® is excited to announce the release of its first games for Palm® webOS™. The first two games, Astraware Sudoku and OddBlob, will initially support Pre™ and Pre Plus devices with support for Pixi™ to be added later.

Astraware has a long and successful history of working closely with Palm. Zap!2000 was the first color game released for Palm OS and for several years Palm smartphones offered at least one Astraware game bundled along with it. Now that Palm has released their PDK development kit, which allows developers greater access to some of the core functions of webOS, Astraware is able to continue that relationship by bringing some of their best-selling games to the platform.

Astraware Sudoku is a multi-award-winning version of the worldwide smash puzzle game. It is packed with features that avid Sudoku players love, including the unique Puzzle of the Day feature, which sees in excess of 20,000 users regularly downloading the daily puzzles and uploading their times on the global leader board. First released for smartphones earlier this year, OddBlob is a cute puzzle-arcade game entirely created from modeling clay, and featuring online leader boards for players to post their high scores in both Strategy and Panic modes.

“We’re delighted to be re-establishing our long-term relationship with Palm, and supporting the new platform with a range of great casual games,” said Howard Tomlinson, CEO of Astraware. “Our experience at supporting well-featured devices in a range of sizes and resolutions has helped us to make our first webOS games a pleasure to play, and we look forward to bringing many more titles to the platform.”

Astraware intends to bring a number of their own-IP games to the webOS platform as well as working with their premium licensor partners to add to the range of quality casual games available in the Palm App Catalog.

“Palm has a rich history with Astraware, and we’re excited to see that relationship continue with the webOS platform,” said Ben Galbraith, director of Developer Marketing, Palm, Inc. “Astraware’s popular titles are a welcome addition to the breadth and quality of webOS games in the Palm App Catalog.”

Astraware Sudoku and OddBlob are available now on the webOS App Catalog, priced $4.99 each. For more information visit http://www.astraware.com/webos.

HP has confirmed that it will release a webOS slate (for consumers) and a Windows 7 slate (for corporates). You have to look at webOS and think that it will do very well on a slate, very well indeed. No mention of Android though…

From ITPRO- “The statement reads: “HP plans to use webOS from its recent Palm acquisition, as well as Windows 7 from Microsoft, for this category. WebOS products will span across smartphones, slates, netbooks and printers. Deployment of the Windows 7 slate will target the specific needs of select enterprise markets.”

The statement confirms that webOS will be a major platform for HPs hopes to reinvigorate its mobile devices. Its move from iPaq PDAs to iPaq phones faltered when the Microsoft Mobile operating system was surpassed by Apple’s iPhone.”

KillinItLLC has posted a couple of intriguing images on Twitter. They show a Roadrunner HD resolution quoted and 640 x 960 pixels as the magic number. Some sites are reporting this as a Retina Display which I guess is possible, but it could also be the resolution of the HP Slate running webOS which is also planned. This would then cease to be a true Retina Display.

Phone Arena has scooped some interesting news regarding a possible successor to the Palm Pre coming in October. It comes from a Verizon roadmap and the news can only reduce the sales of the current Pres further. Let’s be honest though, a successor is needed to increase interest.

Another possible October launch would be the Motorola A957, possibly named Sick. We sure expect this to be one “sick” handset, if you know what we mean. However, further info is still unavailable on it. *UPDATE*: Our source has updated us with new info, going the so-called Sick would probably be no other handset but the Motorola DROID Pro.

Finally, the Casio Ravine should come to refresh the line of PTT rugged phones of the carrier.

Peter Skillman has left Palm / HP. This is not a high profile move like Mark Hurd’s, but he was largely responsible for the design of the Palm Pre. More at TechCrunch. You can read a profile of Peter and the design team here- “Perched on Peter Skillman’s desk for the past year has been a white ostrich egg, about as long as a DVD case. It is a talisman for Skillman, vice president of design at Palm: the inspiration for a novel smart phone, the Pre, slated to be available in early June. It hints at the phoenixlike rebirth Palm hopes to achieve in the smart phone business.”

From David at Hexage- “We are a small game development studio dedicated to make quality mobile games. We develop and publish games for Android, iPhone & iPad, and Samsung Bada. All our titles have been very successful especially on Android. One of our titles, Radiant, is currently the top 4 best selling game on Android worldwide. You can find more information about us on our web site: http://www.hexage.net

We have recently published all our games on Palm App Catalog. We’re very excited to see how great they look and play on Palm Pre. We also like the webOS platform from the game development point of view.

Screenshots and additional information about our games can be found on our site: Buka, Totemo, Radiant, Everlands.

and video trailers on our YouTube channel.

Here are the links to the PreCentral App Gallery: Buka, Totemo, Radiant, Everlands.

Palm has announced its Hot App winners with YouView Visual Voicemail Client and Pandora Radio taking the big bucks.

Congratulations to the winners of the Hot Apps competition! The competition was fierce, and it was great to see your apps climb the charts as users discovered and fell in love with them. We really appreciate your hard work, and hope the Hot Apps program helped you promote your app.

$100,000 Winners

First up, the big winners in the Free and Paid categories:

Winner, Paid Apps – YouView Visual Voicemail Client

YouView Visual Voicemail Client by Syntactix is a visual voicemail client powered by YouMail. It replaces your carrier’s voicemail and provides a ton of handy features for handling your voicemail and other phone services.

Winner, Free Apps – Pandora Radio

Pandora Radio by Pandora, is your free, personalized, streaming radio station, that customizes playlists for you based on the kind of music you like.

HP has upped the incentive to buy a Palm Pre Plus or Pixi Plus and is now including a $50 gift card which is valid in the HP Home and Home Office Store.

All of these incentives are great and so is the rock bottom price of both phones, but the real incentive will be for HP to come up with webOS phones that people actually want to buy.

Phil Hassey has chronicled the porting process of Galcon to webOS which only took 3 days. He details every aspect of the journey and it is well worth a few minutes read-

“I’ve just completed and submitted my port of Galcon to the Palm. The entire process took 2.5 days. Here’s my play-by-play of the porting process. A huge thanks goes out to Mike Kasprzak for hand-holding me through the process and co-writing this post.  If you’re doing a Palm port, be sure to read the whole blog post over before you begin so you get the big picture.  Also, not everything is exactly in the right order, so that’ll give you the birds-eye view…”

Is it just me who sees the irony of the webOS developer podcasts now being available on iTunes? “You can now subscribe to our developer podcasts via iTunes for download to your phone or other device. The URL to subscribe to the podcast is here.”

Michael Gartenburg has concluded that the Treo should be included in his Five gadgets that changed the World article, and I tend to agree. A worthy read.

From SlashGear- “Treo – I first used a preproduction Treo at the end of the 2001 and wrote my first review in the January of 2002. It wasn’t the first device to merge a Palm OS handheld with a phone but it was arguably the first device that did it well enough to be used on a regular basis. Treo bucked the trend at the time by eschewing multimedia features; there was neither movie-clip playback nor MP3 audio support. Rather, it targeted business users, merging voice and data with personal information management functions and it did it well. Other devices of the era tried to integrate these functions, but they failed because they tried to add either telephony features to PDAs or organizer features to phones and neither approach worked well. Treo was the first device that successfully merged features in harmony, producing a sum that was greater than its parts.

Things that we take advantage today were part of the Treo experience. Flip it open and your speed-dial list was ready to be used. Tap a few keys and you could instantly find the contact you wished to call. All the familiar Palm applications including an e-mail client, Handspring’s Blazer Web browser and an SMS application were present. Take a look at the iPhone’s dialer and you’ll see the direct descendent of the work Handspring did a decade ago. Treo no longer defines state of the art but most devices that are state of the art today would not be here without Handspring’s efforts and the smartphone you might dread to leave behind is the direct heir to the original Treo…”

Gizmodo is running with an article about a future webOS tablet which will be stylus driven. It may be called PalmPad and it may be not, but I suspect the Palm name will be included because I am pretty certain that Palm was working on this at the start of the year. I was told (by someone who had seen such a device) that it was working on a much bigger phone than normal and that it was purely stylus driven. Earlier comments about this are here and here. If this is true it is actually bad news and a missed opportunity now that the iPad has arrived. Let’s just hope that it will be able to utilise the stylus in the way many of have been hoping for.