An interesting video interview (video link) with Elevation Partners' co-founder and Palm board member Roger McNamee has been posted to Bloomberg.com. In the 6-minute interview, McNamee offers several interesting bits of insight about Palm's upcoming WebOS and the Pre. The usually casual McNamee is also snappily attired in a suit and is sporting a tidier-than-usual rock star haircut in this video.

No concrete release details for the Pre are given by either the Bloomberg TV anchor or Mr. McNamee other than the usual "first half" window. Much discussion is made of Palm's rivalry with RIM and Apple and how they all target different segments of the market vs. the traditional feature phone manufacturers. McNamee does offer that the price premium for smartphones is now "tiny", so this might offer a glimmer of hope that the Pre will not drastically overshoot the new $199 smartphone benchmark established last year by the iPhone 3G .

The poor Treo 800w has suffered the dual ignominy of both a short lifecycle and being a relatively rare device. It was stocked in the wireless departments only a select few Best Buy stores and appeared on no carrier outside of Sprint. Thankfully, the forthcoming Treo Pro should hopefully remedy this situation, as it has just appeared in a leaked Best Buy phone inventory roadmap featured on Engadget.

The CDMA version of the Treo Pro, announced Wednesday, will hit Best Buy retail stores with SKU 9175689 on March 15th and looks to launch simultaneously with Sprint's web and retail stores. No pricing is given but Best Buy has traditionally very aggressive with its smartphone pricing on new contracts, primarily due to the fact that the company has eschewed mail-in rebates for quite some time.

Barnes & Noble has announced that it has acquired Fictionwise for $15.7 million in cash. Fictionwise, is a leading e-book retailer and is known to many around here as the owners of the eReader business.

Barnes & Noble said it plans to use Fictionwise as part of its overall digital strategy, which includes the launch of an e-Bookstore later this year. The Fictionwise founders, Steve and Scott Pendergrast, will remain with the company and will run the Fictionwise websites as a separate business unit within Barnes & Noble. They plan to continue to add additional titles to their e-book collection and continue the expansion of the eReader format onto more platforms.

RNS Software has released a new version of its Hi-Launcher application for Palm OS devices. Hi-Launcher is a highly customizable app launcher, that works much like the Windows Start menu. This program offers a whole range of shortcuts to launch apps, dial contacts, chance system settings that can be popped-up up in any app via a button press or stylus stroke. This version adds some new features including a keyboard backlight control, better menu creating options, browser shortcuts and many other various minor enhancements and bug fixes.

Hi-Launcher v3.5 is available now for $19.95. It comes with a free trial period and is compatible with most devices running Palm OS 3.5 and higher.

Sprint and Palm have sent out invitations to select members of the media (PalmInfocenter included) for a "first in a series of interactive Webcasts featuring Palm Pre." The invite only webinar is described as:

Join Fared Adib, Vice President, Device Operations & Logistics for Sprint, and Matt Crowley, Product Line Manager at Palm, as they provide a demo of Palm Pre on the Sprint 3G Network. They will walk you through why the partnership between Sprint and Palm offers an extremely compelling new device - Pre - and will change the way customers view and use their wireless device.

Additionally, they will highlight three key differentiators, available exclusively from Sprint, that make Pre standout in the smartphone device category, and help bring your life, personal and professional, together, effortlessly.

A chief contributor to yesterdays grim quarterly Palm earnings preview has been the lengthy delays in getting a carrier-backed version of the Treo Pro onto U.S. store shelves. Now the long- awaited Treo Pro for Sprint has been officially announced by Sprint as of today. The CDMA version of the Treo Pro, arriving some six months after its GSM sibling, boasts several enhanced hardware specs, including a needed CPU boost to 528mhz, and it will also be one of the first devices to ship with the updated Internet Explorer Mobile 6.

Availability in Sprint's retail stores will commence on March 15th, with B2B and Palm.com availability following one day later. The device will carry a $199.99 price tag with a two-year subscriber agreement (after a $100 instant rebate and $100 mail-in rebate, with an Everything plan with data or a $30 per month or higher data add-on). Full retail price for the device is reported to be a staggering $549.99.

Although most didn't expect to hear much more out of Alltel in the post-Verizon acquisition period, they have seemingly come from out of nowhere to steal Sprint's thunder with the Treo Pro. Alltel has now quietly become the first U.S. carrier to offer a subsidized, officially carrier-endorsed version of the Treo Pro smartphone for sale. Just days after the Alltel Treo Pro rumor made the rounds online, the device has just appeared for sale on Alltel's web store for most zip codes, beating the BGR's reported March 5th launch date.

The Alltel-branded of the Treo Pro looks identical in all aspects to the GSM and Sprint versions and carries a $199 price tag with a new 2-year contract and after a $125 mail-in rebate. In addition, online orders receive a free Bluetooth handset with purchase.

Palm, Inc. today reported preliminary results for its third quarter of fiscal year 2009, which ended Feb. 27, 2009.

The company announced that it expects to report revenues for the third quarter of fiscal year 2009 in the range of $85 million to $90 million. The revenue declines vs. the company's second quarter of fiscal year 2009 and third quarter of fiscal year 2008 are the result of reduced demand for Palm's maturing legacy smartphone products, the challenging economic environment and later-than-expected shipments of the Treo Pro in the United States. The company expects declining revenues and continued margin pressure from its legacy product lines in the fiscal fourth quarter.

Despite the global economic slowdown, smartphones sales grew and gained market share in the United States throughout 2008. According to The NPD Group, consumer sales of smartphones to U.S. consumers represented 23% of all handset sales in the fourth quarter compared to just 12% in Q4 2007. Led by the release of Apple's iPhone 3G at $199, the average price for a smartphone fell 23 percent from $216 in Q4 2007 to $167 last year.

"AT&T and the iPhone began the trend of the signature touch-screen smartphone. The arrival of the BlackBerry Storm on Verizon Wireless, the T-Mobile G1, and imminently the Palm Pre from Sprint completes the new competitive dynamic," said Ross Rubin, director of industry analysis, The NPD Group.

The global economic downturn has had a significant impact on the mobile phone industry as overall worldwide mobile phone sales to end users totalled 314.7 million units in the fourth quarter of 2008, a 4.6 per cent decline from the fourth quarter of 2007, according to Gartner, Inc. Manufacturers continued to struggle against low consumer confidence in both emerging and mature markets.

The top five mobile phone vendors all experienced a decline in sales in the fourth quarter of 2008. The industry did experience growth for the year, with worldwide mobile phone sales to end users surpassing 1.22 billion units in 2008, a 6 per cent increase over 2007 sales.

Handmark has released a new version of its Pocket Express news, entertainment and information app. The company has also decided to make the formerly $60/y application available for free. Pocket Express offers users mobile optimized access to news, sports, weather, travel info, horoscopes stocks and more. Handmark also now plans a version with local content for European users with content in eight languages - English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Finnish, and Swedish.

Pocket Express v4.25 is available now from the PIC store or direct from Handmark. It is compatible with most devices running Windows Mobile or Palm OS 4 or higher with an Internet connection.