Palm stockholders have approved the "Agreement and Plan of Merger" with HP. The vote is one of the final steps on the road to mergerland. HP's $1.2 billion dollar buyout of Palm is now expected to be complete this Thursday, July 1st.

HP has confirmed that is has purchased Melodeo, a a privately-held company that provides cloud-based delivery systems for music and related content. TechCrunch reports that HP paid nearly $35 million for the firm, whose lead product streams music playlists to mobile devices.

NuTsie's flagship service (which is available on several platforms including Blackberry, Android and Windows Mobile) scans your iTunes playlists and allows you to access those playlists on your mobile device in shuffle mode. You can also look at other users' playlists and discover songs through the company's proprietary recommendation engine or nuTsie's editorial playlists (i.e. Top 100 Reggae Songs, Top 100 90′s Songs).

In a statement HP says the acquisition is another example of their efforts to bring new, innovative technologies to market. Following the recent bid to scoop up Palm, the company has been investing heavily in various "cloud based" services.

Another Palm VP has left the company. According to paidContent.org, David Temkin, VP-developer platform for Palm Inc., has now left to head up the mobile department at AOL.

According to his bio Temkin's role at Palm was to lead the team responsible for the webOS App Catalog, the webOS SDK and various Palm developer resources.

Long-time Palm OS users who choose not to make the transition to webOS generally end up in either the iPhone or the Android camp, depending on any number of factors. However, deciding which non-Apple platform can be quite a daunting task for long-time Palm OS fans.

Thankfully, Android Central has posted an blow-by-blow comparison piece between Sprint's two flagship smartphones entitled "Pre vs. Evo: An Epic Breakdown". In the piece, June of 2009's Palm Pre squares off against June of 2010's HTC Evo 4G in a head-on match of the current top of the pile for Sprint's WebOS and Android devices.

The participants in this debate, Contributors Craig Froehle and Don Ferguson, both offer some amusing banter as well as some keen insight into the strengths and weaknesses of both WebOS and Android. Even more interesting are their comparisons of both platforms to the ancient but familiar Palm OS Garnet, especially in the realm of the long-neglected aspect of PIM functionality.

Continuing the long, strange saga of the world's first new Garnet-device in nearly five years, our friend Tam Hanna is now reporting that the Aceeca PDA32 handheld has indeed entered "beta" status and is now in the hands of a few select testers. Despite having missed their previously announced June release date, Aceeca appears to be making slow but steady progress in bringing this device to market sometime in the near future.

Dated yesterday, Tam's article quotes an anonymous Palm developer stating that the device "…is real -- you just can't buy it quite yet…". The poster goes on to say that he has a device on his desk for beta testing and first impressions are "…even better than I was hoping for!" There is still some system software work to be polished before it is ready to ship." The excerpt concludes with another affirmation that the device is indeed real and heading to market.

Palm Inc. has launched a new promotion offering webOS app shoppers 50% off. The sale is going on now through July 9th in the on device US Palm App Catalog.

Palm says in a company blog post that nearly all of the apps in webOS Catalog are on sale at half the standard price with a small handful of exceptions.

After the hullabaloo over the last major webOS release, February's v1.4, Palm has focused on smaller, less significant bugfix updates for WebOS, such as April's minor 1.4.1 and 1.4.1.1 updates. Now, a webOS 1.4.5 release is imminent for Sprint and Verizon networks. webOS 1.4.5 is reportedly smaller update primarily designed to address reliability issues with PDK 3D games, as well as hopefully making those games playable on the lesser hardware specs of the Pixi. AT&T, the most recent domestic carrier to jump on the WebOS bandwagon, is rumored to be waiting a bit before certifying 1.4.5 for release, likely due to the "newness" of webOS on Big Blue.

Unless you are a Pixi-owning action gamer, this is a relatively minor update--"limited", in Palm's own words-- but one that will hopefully set the stage for the substantial "fall update" mentioned during Palm's developer day. That substantial update promises to be one addressing performance and battery life issue within WebOS, as well as offering APIs for the microphone and camera to make 3rd party voice recording and image capture apps possible.

According to the latest "Get a Safer Phone List" published by the Environmental Working Group, Palm's Pixi on Sprint (no mention is made of the newer Pixi Plus on Verizon or AT&T) ties for the worst rating among smartphones (both current and legacy) alongside several BlackBerry models, Virgin Mobile's Kyocera Jax, and HTC's Magic (aka My Touch 3G) for T-Mobile. The Pixi was rated at a 1.56w/kg SAR level when held to the ear, while the FCC limit for public exposure from cellular telephones is a SAR (Specific Absorption Rate) level of 1.6 watts per kilogram. The ancient, circa 2003 Treo 600, with no specific carrier listed, also earned a mention on the "worst phones" list with a 1.53 w/kg measurement.

With the recent news of the city of San Francisco now having the distinction of being the first metropolitan area in the country to pass a law requiring wireless handset retailers to post the SAR values of individual mobile phone being sold, such ratings might become more significant from a marketing and public relations standpoint, even if consumers do not heed the potential health concerns. The Treo 650 was also criticized for its high SAR levels. Long-time Palm OS followers may remember that the Treo 650's eventual withdrawal from the marketplace came about partially due to its failure to pass the RoHs guidelines in 2006.

With the five-year anniversary approaching of the most recent Garnet-powered handhelds from Palm, the wait for Aceeca's PDA32 continues. The upcoming Garnet-based PDA32 has long passed its preliminary release date of April 10th and is now slated for release sometime this month, according to Tam Hanna, who continues to closely monitor the situation.

According to Aceeca's latest update from Tam, they have no news on the Windows CE-based (and therefore, far less interesting to PIC readers) MEZ1500 yet but the first pre-production run of the PDA32 will occur in "...early June, so we should have more news for you in June."

Access has quietly released a new version of their Palm OS Garnet Virtual Machine for maemo powered Nokia devices. Now up to version 6, Garnet VM Beta 6 1.05b (as it's formally titled) brings official support for Nokia's N900 smartphone. PIC had previously reported on an unofficial workaround back in December. Thankfully, compatibility with the older Nokia N-series devices has been maintained, so owners of the N810, N800 and N770 Internet tablets who happen to use Palm OS are still in luck.

Access' release notes are scant, but the new version is still a beta and dated May 27th, 2010, and lists only "stability improvements" in the changelog, much like the previous release of the Garnet VM that occurred in December 2009.

After a brief flurry of activity last fall, little has been heard (or seen) from Israel's Else Mobile (formerly Emblaze Mobile) and Japan's Access regarding the ALP OS-powered Edelweiss, Monolith, or First Else devices. January's CES did bring a few hands-on reports that generally offered praise for the device's UI intuitiveness.

Now it unfortunately appears that the future of this near-mythical device might truly be in doubt, if today's Engadget report is accurate. According to their tipster, the OS is still not ready for prime-time and no major carrier agreements have been made. As recently as January, the company was promising a Q2 launch for the supposedly "game-changing" device. Engadget did attempt to make contact with the Emblaze marketing manager with no success other than being promptly transferred to the firm's legal counsel. Until an actual Else device sees the light of delay on retail shelves, it appears likely that the various incarnations of ALP OS will have the dubious distinction of joining Palm OS Cobalt in the vaporware OS graveyard.