Palm enters deal with Verizon and SFR, spits out Pre Plus and Pixi Plus

Tom on January 08, 2010

Palm, the American smartphone manufacturer, who turned around its fortunes last year with the introduction of the highly popular Pre smartphone for the Sprint wireless service in the USA, have expanded their carrier portfolio today at CES.

Today Palm has announced that they have new deals with two extra carriers: Verizon Wireless in the USA, and Vodafone-owned SFR, a French carrier.

Verizon will score big-time from the new deal with Palm; they have scored an updated version of the popular Pre slider-smartphone, dubbed the Pre Plus. While the Pre Plus looks nearly identical to last year’s Pre, power-users will enjoy the doubling of internal memory to 16 GB, a standard back cover that works with Palm’s wireless Touchstone charging platform, and of course service from Verizon – a carrier that offers very good coverage across the contiguous United States.

The other noticeable change for the Pre Plus is the deletion of the spherical navigation button below the display that featured on the original Pre. The front of the rounded display is now free of clutter, save for the sharp, 3.1-inch 320×480 display and the in-call speaker.

Engadget reports that the Pre Plus has an improved slider mechanism, a ‘snappier and clickier’ keyboard, and fairly impressive 3D graphics performance.

The other news, product-wise, is the announcement of an update to the (already very new) Palm Pixi. Also dubbed ‘Plus’, the Pixi Plus retains the same shape and feature-set as the Pixi that debuted for the Sprint service, but the Plus offers WiFi connectivity – a nice bonus for users with home or office wireless internet.

There’s no word yet on what SFR, the French wireless operator, that also signed a deal with Palm recently, will receive after today’s announcements.

Both the Palm Pre Plus and Palm Pixi Plus will be offered on the Verizon service starting January 25. There’s no word on price, yet, but it should arrive in the next couple of days.

Palm Pre Plus press shots