Palm unveils new phones, new carriers, developer programs, and video capabilities at CES

Today at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Palm and Verizon Wireless introduced Palm Pre Plus and Palm Pixi Plus, two new phones combining the power of the Palm webOS platform with several new enhancements. Palm Pre Plus sports a streamlined design that simplifies navigation, 16GB of storage (15GB user available storage), and a Touchstone Back Cover. The incredibly thin and lightweight Palm Pixi Plus adds Wi-Fi along with an optional splash of color, thanks to new Touchstone Back Coversavailable in pink, blue, green, orange and black for all Palm Pixi phones. Both Verizon Wireless phones will be available January 25.

The companies also introduced Palm mobile hotspot, a Palm webOS app that turns your Palm Pre Plus or Palm Pixi Plus into a mobile Wi-Fi router. The app provides wireless broadband access for up to five Wi-Fi enabled devices. Palm mobile hotspot will be available in the Palm App Catalog for Verizon Wireless customers.

Another carrier will soon be bringing webOS phones to its customers: Palm and SFR announced the availability of Palm webOS phones in France in the second quarter of 2010.

Current and future Palm webOS customers can also look forward to an even broader range of powerful apps for their phones. The Palm developer program is now officially open to all. Any developer can sign up at the Palm Developer Center and immediately start developing and distributing applications for Palm webOS devices. Developers have the option of distributing apps through the Palm App Catalog or over the web. Palm also unveiled a $1 million developer Hot Apps bonus program to encourage continued innovation in the rapidly growing Palm webOS developer community.

At today’s event, Palm also demonstrated some of the additional options that developers will be able to leverage, including Flash content in the browser on a Palm Pre. Palm expects a free Adobe Flash Player 10.1 plug-in to be posted to the Palm App Catalog in the coming months and expects Palm webOS to be one of the first mobile platforms to include the full Flash Player in the web browser.

Finally, Palm demonstrated a new feature that all Palm webOS customers can look forward to: the ability to capture, edit, and share video. This functionality will be available via a free over-the-air software update.

For more details on today’s announcements, click here.

via Palm Blog