CES 2010: Palm unveils Pre Plus and Pixi Plus and webOS 1.4 and more

Palm Pre Plus

Palm made a number of announcements during its CES 2010 keynote today. Among those are the Palm Pre Plus and Pixi Plus for Verizon as well as the upcoming release of webOS 1.4 and Flash 10.1. It also announced new developer tools and the first 3D games for the webOS platform.

The Palm Pre Plus will feature an update design which eliminates the center button, 16GB of memory (15GB user available storage) and will include an inductive back cover. The Palm Pixi Plus will remain almost unchanged adding only Wi-Fi. Pixi users will also have many colour choices thanks to the optional Touchstone back covers available in pink, blue, green, orange and black.

The Palm Pre Plus and Pixi Plus will also benefit from the new Palm mobile hotspot, a Palm webOS app that turns these devices into mobile Wi-Fi routers for up to five devices.

Both the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus are headed to Verizon and will be available starting on January 25th. Pricing was not announced today.

Palm webOS devices will also be headed to France courtesy of SFR in the second quarter of 2010.

Palm also announced the upcoming release of webOS 1.4. Among the new features to be added will be the ability to capture, edit, and share video. It will also offer battery life and performance improvements. It will be available for all webOS devices in February 2010.

A number of new games have also been added to the Palm App Catalog, including seven 3D games for Palm Pre customers. The new 3D capabilities come courtesy of a new Palm webOS Plug-in Development Kit (PDK) which builds on the Palm webOS Software Development Kit (SDK). The webOS PDK will be available to all developers in March as part of a public beta.

Lastly, the Palm Developer Program is now open to the public after an extensive beta program. Any developer can now submit applications for sale in any of the markets where webOS devices are available.