With Palm Pre Pending, Palm Eos Surfaces
According to gadget blog Engadget, Palm is readying a smartphone dubbed the Palm Eos, which could debut on AT&T and ship as early as this fall.
Palm has been tight-lipped about Eos, but it is suspected to be a candy bar form-factor successor to the Pre, running about 10.6 mm thick with a 2.63 inch display. The device will offer quad band GSM/HSDPA with 4 GB of storage and a 2 megapixel camera, Engadget noted, along with posting a photo of the device.
Unlike the Palm Pre, the Eos is not expected to feature a slide-out keyboard. It will likely run around $350 before rebates, but hit the $99 price point after rebates and service contracts, making it a sort of webOS version of the Palm Centro.
The webOS-based Eos, which has the internal code-name of Pixie, has become known in the blogosphere as the "mini-Pre."
News of Palm's follow-up webOS device comes as the struggling device maker still hasn't set a concrete release date or firm pricing for the Sprint-exclusive Palm Pre, which will be released sometime in the first half of this year. Rumors have indicated that the Pre could hit stores as soon as May 17, while some speculate a June release is imminent.
The Pre, which Palm officially unveiled at CES in Las Vegas in January, is Palm's official attack on the now-iconic Apple iPhone 3G. The 3G Pre features a 3.1-inch touch-screen, a full slide-out QWERTY keyboard and 3 megapixel camera. It also offers a host of features like Wi-Fi, GPS and 8 GB of memory.