Last-Minute Predictions For Palm’s CES Event#
In 20 minutes as of the time of this writing (11AM Pacific/2PM Eastern) Palm will have their big CES event (live coverage can be found at PreCentral). What will they announce? Here are my guesses.
- Upgraded versions of the Pre and Pixi on Verizon. This chart shows what the new specs will probably be (doubled memory on both devices).
- Lower-level graphics support. That GPU that’s sitting idle in the Pre and Pixi now? Expect it to be put to good use, along with support for OpenGL ES or WebGL. Furthermore, there will probably be lower-level APIs for developers who want to make more graphics-heavy applications (read: games).
- Video Recording. The underpinnings of this have been sitting in webOS for quite some time. Hopefully they’ll finally make themselves useful.
- webOS 2.0. This really goes along with the lower-level graphics support and video recording, but it’s definitely time for a major update to webOS.
- A new device. I’m still strongly in favor of Palm establishing a trio of webOS devices. I say they should introduce one with a larger screen than the Pre and no hardware keyboard to go directly after the iPhone, but a device designed to succeed the aging Treo would work as well.
- Finished App Catalog. Yes, it’s out of beta, but so far they haven’t rolled out the official process for submitting apps. This is something the platform desperately needs.
- A real sync solution. I realize the part of the point of the platform is “synergy” with web services, but I’d like to be able to sync with some desktop software, thanks. Palm has been laying low on the “media sync with iTunes” front ever since Apple disabled it a few months ago, so hopefully they’ll announce their own way of going about it.
- webOS phones on AT&T. There have been some rumors about this in the last few days. It would be nice to have Palm phones on another network, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
Some of those are legitimate predictions, and some are just things I’m hoping for. We’ll see what happens come their conference.
