CNBC has posted an article focusing on the expectations for Palm's Quarterly Earnings. Palm is due to report their final Q2 FY09 earnings tomorrow after the market closes. No one really expects many positives, given that the company has already pre-announced that it expects revenue to come in at half of what was expected. However, there should certainly be some interesting discussions during the conference call around the anticipation surrounding the CES announcement and the sudden departure of Palm's CFO at a curious time.

This past year was abysmal for the smart phone maker: late-to-market products, a stock price in freefall, worries that its single biggest investor Elevation Partners may divest its stake in the company, a pricing model for the Palm Treo Pro that raised lots of eyebrows, layoffs, a new chief financial officer with little direct Wall Street experience announced Monday, and true worries about whether Palm even stands a chance as a going concern in 2009.

The Palm OS command bar is a feature that has likely gone unnoticed for many current Garnet OS smartphone users. It has its roots from back in the PDA days as a handy hidden shortcut that provided quick access to common program functions such as Cut, Copy & Paste, Bluetooth status and such by invoking a special stylus swipe. With the disappearance of a dedicated graffiti area, this feature largely fell by the wayside yet remained in the Palm OS. CommandBar is an app that can bring back the handy feature and gives you additional control over how its invoked and used. It installs as a preference pane and brings back and adds to the functionality of the forgotten utility.

CommandBar v0.5.5 is available now for $9.95 (it is currently on sale for $4.95). It comes with a free trial period and is compatible with all Palm OS Treo's and the Palm Centro.

Last week images surfaced of an unidentified device that gained a lot of buzz and circulation due to its uncanny Treo like keyboard and unusual form factor. Of course, the rumor mill immediately began churning out various stories that this was to be Palm's first Nova device while others claimed it was a future Palm Windows Mobile handset. The term "Roteo", previously coined by our very own Pat Horne as a whimsical work of Palm fiction, began making the rounds online as the mystery device's very own code name.

Now some light has been shed on the mysterious handset, as Pocketables has revealed that this is a rather chunky unit is in fact a prototype mobile Internet (MID) device from Compal with the amusing moniker of "Tabasco". The site tracked down the original photographer and gleamed a few of the specs and points to additional pictures of the non-working display unit which was in fact showcased during the Computex 2008 show.

Picking right up where the rumored Sprint Treo Pro story leaves off, Palm has just updated their corporate blog with a strange update focusing on the original GSM version of the Treo Pro. Palm is now claiming that the device has been deemed "AT&T Network compatible".

Carrying the misleading title of "Get Your AT&T Network Compatible Treo Pro on", Palm's blog post is little more than rehashed statement that as a quad-band GSM handset, the device is indeed compatible with AT&T's domestic network in all of its EDGE and HSUPA coverage areas. As of this writing, the device remains available only as a pricey unlocked handset, and is not authorized, subsidized, or supported officially by AT&T in the U.S.

Palm has launched a newly rebranded mobile application store/website. Powered by PocketGear's storefront system the site offers downloads for both Windows Mobile and Palm OS devices with distinct Palm Inc. aesthetics. Promoted by PocketGear as an "App Store", the downloadable app simply launches Blazer or Pocket IE into a mobile-formatted Palm Software storefront. Unfortunately, no actual stand-alone optimized app is available at this time for managing downloads nor is any integration provided with the Palm Desktop software.

Compatibility with "over 25 Palm devices" is mentioned, though none are specifically referenced other than the Centro and Treo Pro. While app stores are all the rage these days, installing apps and over the air downloads has been possible on Palm devices for a some time now.

Palm's CFO isn't the only well known employee announcing their departure today as word has come in that Marc Blank of ChatterEmail fame has left the company. Marc writes in a forum post "As of December 14, 2008, neither Josh nor I are affiliated with Palm, Inc.; therefore, neither of us will be monitoring this board or handling support [...] What's more, we are not privy to any plans that Palm might have for supporting new and existing customers."

Marc Blank was brought into the company in early 2007, when Palm purchased his ChatterEmail program. ChatterEmail is still widely considered as one of the best email solutions for Palm OS smartphones. While nothing was ever officially stated, Marc was suspected to be contributing to the email/messaging portion of Palm's next generation operating system.

Palm, Inc. today announced that Douglas C. Jeffries, previously chief accounting officer at eBay, will join Palm in January 2009 as the Company's new Chief Financial Officer. Andy Brown will transition out of the CFO role and stay with the company through January.

"I am delighted to welcome Doug Jeffries to the Palm team. His extensive financial, operational and strategic experience will contribute enormously to Palm's future success. I look forward to partnering with Doug as we lead Palm to new levels of achievement in the years ahead," said Ed Colligan, president and chief executive officer. "I also want to personally thank Andy for the way he has guided Palm's finance organization and all that he has accomplished over the past four years. Andy was instrumental in our recent recapitalization and has been a key part of Palm's transformation."

BusinessWeek has just published an article entitled Palm Pits Its Hopes on Nova. The piece focuses on the expectations of the upcoming Palm CES announcement "New-ness" peppered with a few revealing quotes from Palm executives. In fact, both Jon Rubinstein and Ed Colligan make some of the most direct remarks about the Nova OS to date and they leave no doubt that Nova will be the focus of the Jan 8th event.

Rubinstein's efforts are about to bear their first fruits. On Jan. 8 at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Palm is due to unveil the long-awaited operating system, code-named Nova, as well as the first of a family of products that will run on it. While Palm has protected its plans with Apple-like secrecy, Rubinstein and others say the goal is to create products that bridge the gap between Research In Motion's BlackBerry devices, oriented to work and e-mail, and Apple's iPhone, oriented to fun. "People's work and personal lives are melding," Colligan says, adding that Palm is aiming for the "fat middle of the market."

Rumor: Bit by bit, additional details continue to emerge that confirm the existence of an upcoming CDMA version of Palm's Treo Pro. In fact, its release appears to be imminent based on the latest bit of leaked news. Engadget Mobile has obtained what appears to be a legitimate Sprint memo indicating that the Treo Pro is indeed set to arrive in January.

The document goes on to report that the Treo 800w will indeed reach end-of-life status in favor of the sleeker, more media-savvy Pro. With a short, unspectacular lifespan of barely six months on the market, the much-maligned 800w gains the dubious distinction of being one of Palm's shortest-lived smartphones.

Just a quick reminder that this weekend is the last chance to take advantage of our latest MobileHeist sale. The PalmInfocenter Store currently has 25 of some of the best selling Palm OS titles on sale at half the standard price.

All of the titles can be found here at our MobileHeist Sale Page. Each application must be added to your cart from this page to qualify for the discount, as no coupon codes are necessary. This Sunday, December 14th is the last day of the sale.

The folks at Eyebeam have put together a couple of pre-configured packages and simple steps for setting up a dual boot environment for Linux on a number of Palm PDAs. There is also a video guide posted on Instructables (embedded after the break) that walks through the process with a Palm TX. This method involves copying over a PDA optimized Linux boot image to an SD card and going from there.

The video demonstrates their Reware project and shows the basics of how to use the Reware disk image and some musical apps created for it. Users are of course encouraged to back up prior to attempting this process as there is a potential for data loss.