You’ve gotta love Microsoft. They’ve come up with a very exciting mobile OS in Windows Phone 7, which was launched at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona yesterday. It’s bright, contemporary (three years in, the iPhone interface is beginning to look a little dated, don’t you think?) and it features the current Emperor’s New Clothes of mobile – multi-tasking.

So Microsoft have done it, they’ve got something that potentially puts them back in the game; if they can tie up some key handware deals, they’ll probably give the smartphone market a run for its money. And by smartphone we mean, iPhone, obviously – because that’s all Microsoft cares about. They introduced Windows Phone 7 with a promotional trailer that showed off the competition more than what their own OS can do:

Ignore that fact that Android and Palm Pre handsets multi-task, and gun for Apple. It’s a shame so any time at all is spent slating the iPhone, because the trailer doesn’t give you a sense of how great the new mobile OS looks. Apple are advertising the iPhone during Corrie for crying out loud – their target market really doesn’t care about multi-tasking, it’s not a deal breaker.

Microsoft have a real chance to be a big player in mobile once more. Windows Phone 7 looks the shizzle, so hopefully we’ll see adverts like the trailer below, instead of seeing Steve ‘Crazy Horse’ Ballmer spending his money trying to run down the iPhone like a piss-drinking slag:

In there Summer there were all manner of rumours concerning the iPhone; specifically, that O2 would lose exclusivity and that both Orange and T-Mobile would pick up the 3G handset to sell, although O2 were expected to retain rights to the newer 3GS. It was more than a rumour according to trade publications – we found this feature in a copy of Mobile Today:

But today Orange have confirmed they will be selling the iPhone 3GS, massively diminishing O2’s clout in the market. Obviously T-Mobile haven’t announced they’re picking the handset up, since they’re merging with Orange anyway. There are no pricing details or even a release date yet, just a tantalising page on the Orange website for you to register your interest:

Last week O2 confirmed a UK launch date the Palm Pre, with a near-identical pricing plan to the iPhone 3GS. That O2 secured the Palm Pre in the first place raised eyebrows – how long have O2 been aware that their reign as king of the iPhone has been coming to an end?

Yes, we’re a day late with this one, but we spent most of yesterday kayaking as part of a team-building exercise. Honest.

O2 have declared themselves as “the home of the smartphone” with their upcoming exclusive launch of the Palm Pre (left) on October 16th. You could even go so far as to call them smart arses if you like.

In truth, O2 have had to go out all guns blazing to get an exclusive on the Pre as it is set to be the major smartphone rival to the iPhone, and the pricing plan revealed yesterday is iPhone-esque to say the least.

The Pre handset will be free to customers who sign up to a 24-month contract costing for £34.26 per month, which will include 600 UK minutes, 500 UK text messages and unlimited downloads.

Then there’s the 18-month contract – fork out at mammoth £73.41 per month and you’ll get a free Pre and a larynx-crushing 3000 UK minutes. There’ll also be 500 UK text messages and unlimited downloads.

An alternative 18-month contract will set you back just £29.38 per month but the Pre handset will cost you £96.89

Business tariffs will also be available on 24 or 36 month contracts and there’s still no news about Pre pay-as-you-go.

The Pre features a 3.1-inch touch-screen display, a slide-out Qwerty keyboard, a three-megapixel camera, push email support and high-speed internet access via 3G and Wi-Fi.

As our Paul said a couple of months ago, it’s going to be fascinating to see how O2 handle the fact that they’ve got exclusives on two competing smartphones, particularly as it’s widely believed that the Pre has to be a success if Palm is to survive. Maybe they’ll pick up disgruntled iPhone early adopters who want to try something new.

Let us know what you think of the Pre, and if you’d be tempted to invest in one. Or maybe you’ve got your eye on the Android-powered HTC Tattoo (pictured right), which is exclusive to Vodafone and has appeared as a pre-order on their website. As yet, there are no pricing details so it’s only getting this poxy paragraph at the end of the Pre story. Nyah nyah!

If Palm are trying to kill the Palm Pre, they’re going about it the right way. That’s not to say the Pre isn’t a good handset with a decent OS – all the feedback from users so far suggests it’s very decent indeed. And as we’ve discussed in the past, Palm have made the right move in allowing O2 to pick up exclusive distribution rights in the UK – that’ll prevent O2 from savaging the Pre to increase sales of the iPhone, which O2 also handle.

Canadian service provider Bell have announced the Pre will launch in the country on August 27th, and is now available to pre-order on a choice of airtime plans. Good news if you’re Canadian. And live in Canada. The bad news is this:

If you want a Pre, you have to take out a three year contract – there are no other options currently available. That means having the same handset until the latter half of 2012. To put it in perspective – it might seem the world has been banging on about the iPhone since the Industrial Revolution, but Apple only unveiled the handset two years ago.

Handsets in two years’ time will be far more advanced to what’s on offer today, never mind three. And what are the odds of any modern handset lasting that long without something going wrong? Would you dare risk your third year without insurance? Signing a two year contract is plenty to make some customers think twice – are Palm really going to let service providers peddle three year plans?

We couldn’t hunt down the rogue asterisk attached to the term so perhaps there’s a very obvious get-out clause. Hopefully the Pre will stick to the two year deals as offered in the US when it arrives in the UK later this year.

* mathematical nature of headline is entirely incorrect, intended only for promotional purposes

Very quietly and without too much fanfare, the Palm Pre has slipped onto the homepage of the O2 website:

Palm has signed an exclusive UK distribution deal with O2 – a smart move for Palm since it ensures O2 won’t market the iPhone too aggressively against it, although that decision made a little more sense before the rumours about T-Mobile and Orange stocking the iPhone 3G began circulating.

The brochure page for the Palm Pre talks potential buyers through the functionality, but reveals little that we didn’t already know – no hints on pricing, only that the handset will be available “in time for Christmas”. What the page is missing is the ability to subscribe for news on the Palm Pre once a launch date and pricing is announced; if you want to know more, you’ll just have to check back between now and December 24th.

Palm once said it had no interests in taking on Apple over the iPhone – the Pre will attract a different type of consumer, they said. So it’ll be interesting to see not only how Palm markets the Pre once it reaches the UK in the Autumn, but what sort of apps will be available to buy for it. Yes, for a phone that isn’t challenging the iPhone, they’re doing a decent job of suggesting otherwise.

But then the Pre isn’t the iPhone, is it? One key aspect of the handset’s operating system is that it can run background apps, something the iPhone should be able to do, but can’t. Gah. It’s simple features like this that open up a whole new world of apps to developers, and now they have their chance to create them – the Software Development Kit (SDK) for the Pre is now available. By the time the handset is available in the UK, the Pre App Catalogue should be rammed to the rim with apps.

What everyone is waiting to see, however, is whether Palm make a better job of managing their App Catalogue than Apple do of the App Store. Plenty of developers are considering giving up on Apple because of their inconsistencies in policy, the lack of communication and an endless list of problems and queries besides.

There’s also a opportunity for Palm to better manage the type of content available. For example, will Palm filter submissions so that their catalogue doesn’t fill up with 30 different shades of iFart? Some sort of quality threshold would be an ideal way to distinguish the App Catalogue, but that would potentially hurt Palm’s profits – apps that appeal to the lowest common denominator can also sell very well. How brave will Palm be in the months to come?

[Palm]

Despite the fact the iPhone has been scientifically proven by scientists to be much better than any other smartphone, some people just won’t accept the facts. You can’t argue with science, folks – it puts the sun in the sky and the beat in your heart, and it says the iPhone rocks.

You may disagree, of course. Like Creationists, you may choose to deny the science and live without the Jesus Phone. Yes, the iPhone does in fact prove the existence of God. No, there are no contradictions in those last two statements. Be quiet. So what are you going to do for a smartphone, then? You’re going to buy the Palm Pre, which is edging ever closer to these shores on a slow boat across the oceans.

It turns out the Pre enjoyed a modestly decent debut, selling over 300,000 handsets in the US in just a fortnight; not quite as spectacular as the iPhone 3GS shifting over a million units in three days, but then Palm hardly has the profile of Apple. And there’s news on a service provider for the Pre in the UK – it’s expected that Palm will this week confirm O2 have exclusive rights to sell the handset in this country.

Given the importance of the Pre to Palm’s future – it’s widely regarded as the company’s last-gasp attempt to stay in business – it may seem a bizarre choice to hand it to O2. While the service provider currently has the largest share of the market by revenue, it’ll be difficult for O2 to aggressively market an iPhone rival without harming their own sales. Perhaps Palm should have awarded the deal to Orange who, according to the Guardian, were biting Palm’s hand off for it?

But pitching Orange against O2 could have been even more disastrous for Palm; O2 could have went to town with the iPhone and sunk the Pre. At least this way, by effectively placing the Pre in the hands of the enemy, O2 is accountable and can’t attack it – O2 will be forced to manage the competition between the two products, perhaps to Palm’s advantage and Apple’s detrement.

How will O2 market the Pre, exactly? Well, given Palm’s history and Pre features such as a physical keyboard, it’s possible O2 will target business users rather than the masses attracted to the iPhone. Still no word on a UK launch date, but expect it sometime in the Autumn.

[Guardian]

The new Palm Pre is out in the wild Stateside, although it’ll be months before you can pick one up in the UK. Leo Laporte is world-renowned for his forward thinking views on technology, and yesterday mentioned on one of his influential online tech shows The Gilmor Gang that he’d been sent a review copy of the Pre.

Joining in the discussion was Michael Arrington from the equally world-renowned TechCrunch, who had quite a bee in his bonnet about Laporte receiving a handset to review, when TechCrunch didn’t. What happened next was spectacular car-crash television:

Reading Arrington’s thoughts on TechCrunch today, he was attempting to suggest Palm may be supplying handsets only to those reviewers who had commented positively on the Pre in the past. There was a serious point to be made, but it was buried in the on-screen spew of magma. That said, Arrington’s tone is more than a little dickish when he confronts Laporte with “What are you gonna do about it?”. He’s going to cut you off Michael, and tell you to go fuck yourself. That’s what.

It’s nearly time, just two days to go, and the iPhone haters are getting sticky pants regarding the launch of the new Palm Pre. It runs background applications! It has a physical keyboard! And if it doesn’t sell in significant numbers, then Palm are going down to Chinatown!

So to whip up an enthusiastic welcome for the handset that Palm’s future trading relies on, they’ve released a commercial. Sadly for those people who aren’t sure where their smartphone allegiances lie yet, the advert is hardly the dealbreaker. Instead of 60 seconds of hardcore touchscreen pornography, you get occasional snatches of the phone and its features, while the camera obsesses over several hundred Buddhist monks performing a Mexican wave. Meh.

[Facebook] via [Gizmodo]

The Palm Pre – cited by Palm fanboys as an iPhone killer despite having never seen or used one – is likely to launch in the UK before Christmas in an exclusive tie-up to O2.  Last week the Pre’s US release date was announced as a week on Saturday, however high demand in comparison to limited supply means the handset will not be available overseas until much later in the year.

The news of the Pre signing up exclusively to O2 has also set tongues wagging concerning the service provider’s exclusive deal with Apple’s iPhone; several sites are pointing to the deal with Palm as a sure sign that Apple will unlock the new handset due out in several weeks, and allow it to be used across a choice of several networks.

The Pre is only available on the Sprint mobile network in the US, and will retail for around £129, but still involve the customer signing a two year contract. Despite ruling the PDA market a decade ago, Palm have fallen on hard times; their revenue was recently reported to have nose-divided by nearly three-quarters. Palm need the Pre to pose a serious threat to the smartphone market if the company is to survive, and that’ll mean getting the likes of the iPhone and BlackBerry in a headlock and giving them a serious tech noogie. Whatever that is.

[The Guardian]

Over the next couple of months, the smartphone wars really hot up; Apple are expected to pile in with two new iPhone handsets, while Google and T-Mobile attempt to snatch more of the market with their new G2 phone.

Meanwhile, there’s all sorts of trouser-stretching excitement over the new Palm Pre. Those in the know who have had a hands-on fiddle reckon it could be an iPhone killer, but unless it comes with Flight Control pre-installed (personal best currently 114) it’s unlikely. That said, it looks very impressive; PC Pro have managed to get hold of a Pre and it does look special:

Is it enough to stop the Apple juggernaut? Probably not, but then it’s unlikely Palm want that mainstream market, and will be happy to reel in existing Palm owners and business users who think the iPhone is for kids. Which it’s not, obviously – Flight Control is very, very serious business.

[PC Pro]

Hey, I’ll happily admit I’m a fan of the iPhone, no two ways about it. But is it only me that thinks this new Palm Pre already looks five years out of date? Sliding keyboards – that’s so 2004, isn’t it?

Slightly underwhelming, unless you’re a Palm obsessive. The screen is similar to an iPhone with a 320 x 480 multi-touch display. And there’s that sliding keyboard, but instead of presenting it in landscape (like the behemoth that is the T1 handset) it’s a portrait keyboard. The practical reason might be to keep the screen free, but was it worth abandoning the aesthetics? For those grumbling about the keyboard on an iPhone being tooo small, it’s hardly an improvement.

Unveiled at the CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas, somebody may find a home for it when released later in the year. But really – shouldn’t manufacturers be trying to better the iPhone instead of ripping it off?