Palm Pre Release Date Made Official by Sprint

Sprint announced today that the Palm Pre will be released June 6th and will cost $199.99 after a $100 mail-in rebate and a 2 year commitment. The Palm Pre will be available nationwide on the 6th from Sprint stores, Best Buy, Radio Shack, and some Wal-Mart stores.

"For those who juggle life circa 2009 bouncing from conference call to car pool schedule, from doctors numbers to doctoral thesis data, from social calendars to social networking Pre marks a new wireless crossover standard. Before Pre, you had to compromise when selecting a wireless phone. To get the business features you needed, you had to sacrifice the personal entertainment features you wanted. Pre consolidates your important information professional, social and personal into one revolutionary device using an operating system that redefines the experience of living and working wirelessly." the press release said.

One of the interesting things to note about the Palm Pre launch date is that it's one day ahead of Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference, where Apple is expected by some to unveil its new iPhone.

"The Palm Pre takes full advantage of Sprints Everything Data plans", said Avi Greengart, research director for Consumer Devices at Current Analysis. "The Pre has been expressly designed for multitasking among multiple web pages and applications. It also builds on Palms heritage in PDAs by managing your digital information whether thats on a corporate server or on the web."

"The Pre's dynamic 'activity cards' approach to handling and navigating multiple applications is a great advance, but the core breakthrough is the integration of information across multiple applications on and off the phone," said Andy Castonguay, director of Mobile & Access Devices Research, Yankee Group. "With social networking and messaging being so important to consumers, the devices new Palm Synergy functionality which gives Pre the ability to automatically pull friends' contact details, messaging addresses and personal calendars from different applications online and on the phone will greatly simplify people's ability to communicate with their friends and colleagues the way they want."

The Palm Pre is a full-touch screen device and even has a touch area that extends beyond the actual screen itself. On the sides of the phone there are also touch sensitive buttons for added functionality. In addition to the nice added 'touches' the PalmPre also features a headphone jack, 8GB internal memory, and a full QWERTY slide-out keyboard if you don't like the onscreen touch keyboard.

Like the iPhone, Palm Pre has a proximity sensor, accelerometer, and an ambient light sensor.

Could Palm have regained their loss market share to Apple after the release of the Palm Pre? It's soon to tell but it definitely looks like Palm might be back in the game, especially at the $199 price point. I just hope Palm and Sprint can keep up with the high demand expected at launch. The CEO has already said that they expect a Palm Pre shortage during the initial launch.