At CES in Las Vegas, Palm officially announced the upcoming availability of WebOS devices on Verizon Wireless, and unveiled the first two WebOS phones for The Network, the Palm Pre Plus and Palm Pixi Plus. As their names imply, the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus are mostly like their Sprint counterparts, but with some subtle, enticing improvements. Foremost among these is the ability for the phones to create a Wi-Fi hotspot. Like the HTC HD2 we reviewed this fall (and which will soon be coming to T-Mobile), the new Palm phones will be able to share their network connection to nearby computers and devices by creating a Wi-Fi bubble. It's a great feature that we're seeing on more and more smartphones, so it's an interesting way for Palm to stay relevant and ahead of the pack.
A couple new plus-sized devices
Of course, to handle the new capability, Palm had to add Wi-Fi to the Palm Pixi. Otherwise, the hardware on the Pixi remains the same. The Palm Pre Plus gets more of an internal boost for its appearance on Verizon. Palm has doubled the internal storage to 16GB, though we would have liked to see a microSD card slot added for even more versatile storage options. The Palm Pre Plus will also get double the RAM of the Sprint model.
 In our hands-on tests, we didn't notice much of a difference from extra RAM on the Palm Pre Plus, but we suspect performance gains will be most obvious in casual use with plenty of separate cards running at once. The processor on the Palm Pre Plus remains the same as the original version, but that might be enough petformance considering the demos we saw for the future of the Palm WebOS.
The new Palm Pre Plus also gets an improved keyboard. We had our original Sprint Palm Pre on hand for side-by-side comparisons, and we couldn't feel a significant improvement between the original keyboard and the keys on the new Verizon Wireless Palm Pre, but the new Palm Pre Plus definitely had a bit more travel to the buttons.
 The Palm Pixi Plus is externally completely unchanged from the original phone. Though a rumored pink Palm Pixi has yet to make an official appearance, Palm was showing off a variety of new artistic back covers to fit the Pixi shell. We've always liked the look and feel of these artistic covers, and they manage to be stylish and solid without feeling cheap. Still, they seem a little expensive for an add-on accessory on a phone that will be bargain priced for new smartphone buyers.
Palm takes a couple steps forward
If the updated Palm phones were somewhat underwhelming, aside from the new Wi-Fi hotspot capability, the improvements that Palm is making to their WebOS seem to be quite impressive, and will offer some features and improvements that will push Palm ahead, at least for now.
Palm was demonstrating Flash 10.1 support on their upcoming WebOS 1.4. WebOS 1.4 will come to all Palm devices by February of this year, though only Pre phones will see some of the more processor intensive features enabled. Flash looked great running on the Palm WebOS browser. It wasn't perfect, certainly not desktop class, but it's obvious that Adobe has made great strides in adapting their mobile version of Flash to run faster on today's hardware. Inline movies and simpler flash banners ran very smoothly in our hands-on look, and we're happy that this support will come soon even to existing Palm Pre owners.
Besides Flash 10.1, Palm will also open up developer support for deeper access to the graphics hardware. This will bring 3D gaming to the Palm WebOS platform, and Electronic Arts was on hand to demonstrate a few choice titles at the Palm CES press conference. The accelerometer worked well controlling EA's Need for Speed on the Palm Pre Plus. Overall, we'd say graphical performance was comparable to our Apple iPhone 3GS running the same game, though the iPhone has a much larger screen.
All Palm devices will be able to record video after the Palm WebOS 1.4 update. Palm will even add a basic video clipping tool to focus on just your favorite moments in a video shoot. WebOS phones will also be able to send and upload videos as MMS messages or to a variety of online services.
Minor details
Besides the major updates to the Palm WebOS platform, Palm also announced a few minor changes in store for the new Palm devices on Verizon Wireless. Both new Palm Plus models will ship with only the inductive charging backplate, which eliminates the confusing hassle of having to buy a backplate and touchstone charger separately. The Palm Pre Plus will lose the contentious button-ball of the original Palm Pre, and we won't argue with that choice, since the button didn't do much but get in the way of the ubiquitous gestures necessary to manage the WebOS cards interface.
Verizon Wireless will start selling the Palm Pre Plus and Palm Pixi Plus on January 25. Pricing has yet to be determined, but we're guessing it will be competitive with Sprint's pricing.
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