In the past week or so Palm has begun running a new television commercial for the Pre on major networks in the US. This second ad from Palm features the same woman from the previous Chinese dancing ad, however instead of meditating on a rock, the woman speaks directly into the camera while showing only a quick glimpse of the Pre. You can catch the video embed after the break.

The new ad, titled "Go with the flow", has received a good deal of negative and confused reactions online. Numerous forum members have called the spot creepy, while others say that it plays more like a pharmaceutical commercial.

Major League Baseball has announced that its MLB.com Mobile Premium website is now available for the Palm Pre. MLB Mobile Premium provides live audio broadcasts of every regular season and playoff game with the choice of listening to home or away commentary, video highlights, MLB.com Gameday presentation with pitch by pitch info and live stats and a expanded scorecard.

The service is available over the web at wap.mlb.com. It is available to subscribers for a one-time fee of $14.99 for the remainder of the 2009 season, including the entire postseason, or a monthly charge of $2.99.

An enterprising Pre user has uploaded a video to YouTube which demonstrates a Sprint Palm Pre operating on Verizon. While the underlying basis of this hack is somewhat common on CDMA handsets, it shows that there is at least some potential for using the Pre, even in a limited fashion, on the VZW network.

The user is currently able to get the Pre on Verizon and make phone calls, however the data side of things is not operational. The problem lies within a data provisioning check which is preventing unauthorized EVDO connections. The video demo is embedded after the break.

Bell Canada has just launched a new campaign for a free Palm Pre. The contest details are leading to some speculation about eventual retail pricing and a possible Canadian release date.

The fine print of the contest rules (.pdf link) contains some interesting hints. The full MSRP of the Pre is listed at $650 Canadian monetary units, which would be somewhat close to its US counterpart at $550. Also detailed are the contest ending and drawing dates which are August 31st and Sept. 7th respectively. While nothing is certain, the timeframe lends some additional credence to a fall release.

O'Reilly is putting together a webOS Mojo SDK focused developer webcast for next week. Held on Tuesday, July 14th at 10 AM Pacific, Automated Unit Testing with the Palm Mojo SDK will be presented by Christian Sepulveda, of Pivotal Labs (developers of Tweed).

Agile development expects that you will be implementing your applications in a test-first or behavior-first manner, progressively building a test suite as you build new functionality. This is known as Test Driven Development (TDD) or Behavior Driven Development (BDD). This leads to building your application in smaller steps, with solid code overage, and a test suite that allows you to change the code you're working on without fear of breaking other parts of your application.

Owing to the essential role they play in the user interfaces of smartphones like the iPhone and Palm Inc.'s Pre, accelerometers are expected to appear in one-third of mobile phones shipped next year, according to a new report from iSuppli.

"By next year, one out of three mobile phones shipped worldwide will include an accelerometer, up from one out of five in 2009, and one out of 11 in 2008," observed Jérémie Bouchaud, director and principal analyst, Microelectromechanical Systems (MEMS) for iSuppli.

PreCentral claims to have received a leaked screen-grab from a Palm presentation that details a upcoming webOS update. The slide shows a possible set of features that are due to be included in a webOS v1.1. Most of the functionality detailed involves improvements to the Exchange ActiveSync functionality and enterprise centric security policies.

If accurate the update could be coming quite soon for Pre users. The slide is dated May 18th, and lists a 30 day timeframe for release, which would technically make it already past due. Other details, changes and added applications could be in the works but only one slide from the set is shown.

SplashData has released an update to its SplashTravel application for Palm OS devices. SplashTravel provides over 15 tools for travel. Users can find real-time flight, weather, and travel info wirelessly as well as other tools such as live currency conversion, currency calculators, country codes, conversion charts, maps and more. This version is mostly a bug fix release that fixes a problem with the currency converter.

SplashTravel Professional edition v2.16 is available as a monthly ($6.95/mo) or standard edition for a one time $29.95 charge, which forgoes the real-time updates.

Sprint has published a new support document that reveals a new upcoming American football application for the Pre. Sprint says NFL Mobile Live will be available for the Palm Pre by August 1 via a future over the air update. It will also be preloaded on all new Pre's purchased following its release.

NFL Mobile Live will offer live audio broadcasts of every regular season game, 8 live video NFL games, plus the usual scores, stats and more.

Design group teehan+lax has released a new GUI kit for webOS and the Palm Pre. The kit includes a nicely put together Photoshop PSD file, that includes many of the common user interface elements from webOS.

The images are sorted and separated for easier graphical manipulation and design experiments. Many images are taken directly from screenshots and the SDK and are built with vectors for better editing and scaling. The GUI kit originally included some of the exclusive webOS font files, but someone seems to have requested their removal.

After years of debate and crisis, record labels and online radio stations have come to a new agreement on royalty rates involving Internet music streaming. Streaming companies such as Pandora, welcome the new terms, but are also facing a change in the way they offer their typically free services.

As a result, Pandora's founder says that some of their heavier users will soon be charged a small fee when utilizing over 40 hours of streaming music a month. He says this will only affect the top 10% of their heaviest users and it will only be a 99 cent charge per month.