More than a decade after it made handheld touchscreen devices popular with the Palm Pilot, Palm is struggling to compete in the smartphone arena. The company, headed by former Apple executive Jon Rubinstein, unveiled updated versions of its two webOS-powered smartphones at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Thursday. The devices will be available from Verizon Wireless on Jan. 25, but prices have not been disclosed.
Two Palm smartphones, as yet unnamed, will also be available shortly through AT&T.
Palm released the Pre and Pixi smartphones, with Sprint Nextel as the exclusive U.S. carrier, at last year’s CES to great fanfare. But the smartphones were quickly eclipsed by Apple’s iPhone 3G.
This year’s versions, the Pre Plus and the Pixi Plus, have new features and designs. The Pre Plus has double the storage capacity of its predecessor, from 8GB to 16GB.
Creating more applications for the phones is critical, and the most-talked-about app is HotSpot, which allows both devices to serve as mobile hot spots for up to five other devices via a tethering plan, creating a personal Wi-Fi cloud. An easy-to-use and upload video application is also getting some buzz.
With 1,000 selections in its App Catalog, Palm distantly trails Apple’s App Store, which has more than 100,000 apps, and the Android’s Market, which has more than 20,000.
Palm is aggressively soliciting more developers, and on Thursday it opened its developer program to the public. Through the Palm Developer Center, approved programs can go directly to the App Catalog for download by users.
Rubinstein suggested that this week’s announcement of new carriers will make it easier to attract innovative programming. “As we expand our distribution, it makes our discussion a little bit easier with developers,” he told The Wall Street Journal.
Palm released a software development kit…