Because of this whole Easter thing, news is kind of slow today. So, yes, we are going to talk about a charger and a rumoured release date for the Palm Pre. The Palm Touchstone is a charger that uses magnets to keep the phone in place, while charging it through induction; there’s no plugs or anything. Palm has let out more details on this new type of charger, and there have also been a number of hints that the Pre might be released on Queen’s Day (April 30 for all of our non-Dutch readers).
The Touchstone charger is a pretty cool little gimmick. It doesn’t use plugs or contact points to charge the Pre, but instead relies on a technique called induction, or more specifically, electrostatic induction (right…? I’m going to fall on my bum with this one, I know nothing of this stuff). The Touchstone is a small cylindrical metal object to which you can attach the Pre via magnetism. You just place the Pre on top of it, no matter the position, and it will start charging. You can still interact with the device, and answering a call will automatically put it on speaker phone.
Sadly, the Touchstone will not ship with the Pre by default; you’ll need to buy it separately. Pricing information is not yet available.
More interesting are the signs and rumours pointing to a April 30 release date for the Pre. Firstly, we have Logicomm CEO Jim Van, beta tester for the Pre, Twittering away about Palm’s saviour, stating a possible release date of April 30. He also posted a tweet about the device’s price; USD 299 with a two-year contract. In addition, there’s talks that all Sprint retail employees are not allowed to take vacation days in May, which in the case of the iPhone was a good indication of a release date (but with AT&T, of course).
This would mean the Pre will see a release date before any possible new iPhones and the iPhoneOs 3.0, so the Pre won’t have to compete for media attention. Seems like a good idea.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megnet
Edited 2009-04-13 19:04 UTC
It’s Electromagnetic induction: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrostatic_induction
Also, please don’t feel bad about getting this wrong. To quote Wikipedia:
yup. It’s nothing that great…all it is is a loosely coupled transformer(i.e. two electromagnets). The only major trick here is compensating for losses due to loose coupling (as opposed to a transformer where the two cores are directly in contact and are geometrically symmetrical, thus fewer losses in magnetic flux)…
Edited 2009-04-13 19:50 UTC
This rumored 4/30 launch date conflicts with engadget.com’s findings. Everything is speculation at this point, so its impossible to know what to believe. Seems there is no doubt this will occur in the next month or two though.
http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/13/palm-pre-launching-no-earlier-th…
Didn’t realize the Netherlands still had a royal family. I thought it was an autonomous collective.
… there’s some lovely filth over here!
Anyone has news about European release date?
How efficient is induction? It would be a shame if millions of phones started using this simply because it was “cool”. Longer charge times, more fossil fuels burnt. Sounds like a big negative to me.
Feel free to plug yours to a small wind turbine…
It is efficient enough…though not as efficient as plugging it into a socket. With the right contact surfaces (and geometries) and some clever signal processing you can get it so losses are negligible. Systems such as these are already used in industry when there are hazardous environments where having an electrical connection would be too dangerous (in underwater situations unfeasible).
Or when charging an electric toothbrush.
or my granddads waterproof cordless phone…
I’m wondering when it’ll be available to purchase at retail and the price.
I jumped over and had a look a the Palm Pre page – looks like a nice phone, the disappointing thing is the small size of flash that is included and there is no mention as to whether it is possible to expand storage using some sort of flash card.
The one thing that has been holding me back from an iPhone or an iPod touch (or any other smart phone) has been the lack of storage; I have 50GB worth of music and would like to store all of it on the device at once – the problem is that there isn’t a phone out there with either sufficient storage by default or the ability to expand out to that size. If there was a 32GB model and a mini-sd slot (so I can put a 32GB card in it) – I would purchase it instantly but so far from what I have seen it has no expansion which is kind of disappointing.
Edited 2009-04-14 10:53 UTC
Do you really need to carry around all 12,000+ songs at once?
I don’t feel the need to load and unload songs on all the time – I’d prefer to load them all on at once and have them all with me so as my mood changes through the day I’ll have all my music at my finger tips.
heh, I have like 50gb of music, too, but i hardly ever listen to most of it.
But the problem is that I’ve been in a situation where a song I haven’t listened to in months – I suddenly feel like listening to it. What ever the excuse maybe it doesn’t excuse phone companies from failing to provide sufficient space or at least some form of expansion that allows those who want a lot more space.
Making up excuses or trying to convince me that I don’t need to carry around 50GB of music doesn’t change the fact that I have a demand from a product I am interested in and no one has stepped up and met that demand.
yeah, I wish they’d start sticking dual MicroSDHC slots in phones. its not like they take up gobs of space. fit them under the battery or something.
Sounds like a hard-drive based MP3 player is what you’d need at the moment… trouble is none of them are phones, obviously. I get where you’re coming from, I’ve got about as much music as you do and I’d love to carry it all around with me on a flash-based device.