Finally, the Old World will be getting some New World love from Palm.   From theThe Official Palm Blog:

Today, O2 announced details about pricing and availability for Palm Pre in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Germany. The webOS phone will be available on 13 October in Germany and on 16 October in the UK and Ireland.

Details on tariffs for the phone and service plans will be available here for the UK, here for Ireland, and here for Germany. As with our network partners in the U.S. and Canada, O2 will be the exclusive carrier for Palm Pre for its launch in these countries.

Currently only the details for the UK market are available:

Palm Pre is free to O2 customers taking out a 24-month contract and to customers taking an 18-month contract at £44.05 or £73.41 per month. See attached table or the O2 website for full tariff options. All customers will receive unlimited UK data browsing over O2’s HSDPA network and unlimited access to 7,500 Wi-Fi hotspots through both The Cloud and now BT Openzone.

The Palm Pre will also be sold with some innovative accessories. The Palm Touchstone Charging Dock allows connectionless charging of your Palm webOS™ phone. Palm Touchstone is based on inductive technology based inside the Touchstone Charging Dock which allows you to charge the handset without connecting a wire directly to it. The Touchstone and Back Cover will retail at £44.11, a saving of £10.

So at 44.05 £ (24 months) or 73.41 £ (18 months) per month all customers will get the phone for free and will receive unlimited UK data browsing over O2’s HSDPA network and unlimited access to Wi-Fi hotspots.

Not to be left out, the Touchstone will also be available to European customers.

It sounds good!

Hopefully the other European Countries will be able to get the Pre soon, now that the distribution of the webOS device has officially started.

And now the most difficult part:

• should I buy a HTC Touch Pro 2, or;
• should I wait for the Pam Pre distribution in my Country?

Please, help me!!  Leave your opinion in the comments section.

I may not be using Windows Mobile as my primary device anymore, but I was an avid Windows Mobile user for some time, and still keep a Windows Mobile 6.1 within easy reach in my home office.  One of the things I always liked about Windows Mobile is the amount of customization you can perform, which is great because the default interface is just terrible.  There are a number of options available, but one of my favorites was the iPhone look-a-like, Winterface, from Vito Technology.  Today, Vito completely updated Winterface when they released version 2.0.  Read on for the full press release.

VITO Technology releases new version of Winterface. Now you may customize the look of your phone to your personal needs: change skins (10 new skins are available), background color or picture, headings for the icons and much more. Change the face of your device together with your mood!

NEW SKINS. Some time ago we had a contest "Give a new face to Winterface". Thanks to this we got lots of skins made by our users for Winterface. Now we’re glad to announce the official support of the skins that we received during the contest. And all of our users now can choose the skins they liked here, download and install the cab file.

CHANGEABLE BACKGROUND. It is possible either to change background color in Casino and Tile skins or to change the whole background picture.

CUSTOMIZABLE HEADINGS. You may now either remove or add icon headings. Besides you can change them. Thus you may name apps on your device the way you like.

IMPROVED FUNCTIONALITY. The dots in the bottom are clickable now so you can be immediately put to the screen you want to. When opening the running apps you may not only close applications one by one but also close all running apps at once. The battery charge is now seen like a %. If you have any VITO software (http://vitotechnology.com/products.html) the icons in Winterface will stylistically coincide with the skin you choose.

BUG FIXES. The lock screen of Winterface won’t interfere anymore while you’re speaking over the phone. If your device is switched on with a password Winterface will allow you to enter it. Calendar widget now shows the appointment for all future events as well as repeated appointments. The locked Winterface can’t be anymore closed by the "v" gesture.

Winterface is available for $19.95 at http://vitotechnology.com/vito-mobile-shell.html or at the JAMM Store.  Soon, Winterface 2 will be integrated into the Vito Communication Suite, which is available for $24.95

Handango, a major software distribution site for almost every major handheld platform, has a history of assigning awards to top programs spanning several different categories.  Over the years the Handango Champion Awards have become quite coveted by developers, lending credibility to programs.  This year Handango has opted to add a new element to their voting: they are inviting you to participate.  This is a great way to show support for your favorite application.  Check out the details here.

Well, it’s good news for Palm – they’re going crazy with new app submissions and have had to hire new staff to clear the backlog of submissions!

We got more applications than we could handle well, which is a good problem to have. Unfortunately, it means we dropped some things on the floor, and that’s bad, but with the impending “stuff” that’s coming, this is all going to get a lot easier for everyone and a lot more transparent.

If you didn’t get a response in a timely manner, let me apologize to you. We should have done a better job on this, and I apologize for this. I’m working with the people I work with on this to try to make sure we do a better job of this moving forward. Good news is we’ve hired some people — one’s started, one starts next week, and the third starts the week after that, and that’ll give us some great people and some new resources to make sure this gets fixed and works properly.

Now that’s the kind of problem any company would like to have these days! Although it might be frustrating for the people who have submitted apps, it’s great news for Palm that there is such a huge amount of interest!

In other Palm news, they have just issued a press release announcing an increase in the number of shares available for public offering of common stock to 20,000,000 shares (NSDQ: PALM).

I never believe rumors and speculation, however the Microsoft Courier tablet news posted on Gizmodo.com intrigued me.

Image courtesy of Gizmodo

The guys at Gizmodo said they had the chance to put their nose on a tablet by Microsoft itself, sporting a couple of 7″ multitouch screens. From Gizmodo.com:

Courier is a real device, and we’ve heard that it’s in the “late prototype” stage of development. It’s not a tablet, it’s a booklet. The dual 7-inch (or so) screens are multitouch, and designed for writing, flicking and drawing with a stylus, in addition to fingers. They’re connected by a hinge that holds a single iPhone-esque home button. Statuses, like wireless signal and battery life, are displayed along the rim of one of the screens. On the back cover is a camera, and it might charge through an inductive pad, like the Palm Touchstone charging dock for Pre.

[...]

The Courier user experience presented here is almost the exact opposite of what everyone expects the Apple tablet to be, a kung fu eagle claw to Apple’s tiger style. It’s complex: Two screens, a mashup of a pen-dominated interface with several types of multitouch finger gestures, and multiple graphically complex themes, modes and applications. (Our favorite UI bit? The hinge doubles as a “pocket” to hold items you want move from one page to another.) Microsoft’s tablet heritage is digital ink-oriented, and this interface, while unlike anything we’ve seen before, clearly draws from that, its work with the Surface touch computer and even the Zune HD.

Over the next couple days we’ll be diving much, much deeper into Courier, so stay tuned.

The video provided by Gizmodo.com shows one of the possible usage scenario of a “Courier UX Model”, thanks to a simulated UI, and the (really cool!) user interaction is by mean of a mixture of gestures, touches, and pen input-control.

Image courtesy of Gizmodo

While the demonstration is interesting per se, the real device (if it exists) shall not be limited to this. A full package of some “added value contents”, to be delivered somehow wirelessly, are expected to complete the Courier, in order to make it stand over the crowd of current and future competing devices, and to contribute in pushing further the UI technology.

Given the form factor I think the following contents should be fully integrated with the device:

• lectures material (it’s perfect for attending classes);
• e-books (as the Kindle does);
• audio books;
• some kind of media entertainment (songs, movies, shows, etc.), just to offer one more reason to choose it respect to current alternatives.

Stay tuned on JAMM and on Gizmodo.com for more details, and keep you fingers crossed, I’ll keep mine.