GSM Versions Of Palm Pre And Pixi PlusGSM Versions Of Palm Pre And Pixi Plus

It looks like the Plus versions of the Palm Pre and Palm Pixie are going to be available in GSM versions soon opening the way for AT&T and/or T-Mobile to carry them in the US. This is welcome news for people travel abroad as the CDMA versions don't work on GSM networks in Europe and other countries.PreCentral has cobbled together some information that points to the GSM launch. They have linked to documentation for devices labeled the P101UNA and P121UNA that have been certified by the Standards Council of Canada. As PreCentral points out, the FCC hasn't tested or certified the devices yet, but I'm sure Palm is going to submit devices soon if they haven't already. There are GSM versions of the original Pre for other carriers around the world but due to the exclusivity agreement with Sprint, neither T-Mobile nor AT&T sold it.

WebOS sales have been lackluster on the Sprint network. They sold less than one million devices in their first quarter of availability. The Pixi launch hasn't helped much and neither have deep price cuts. The platform has to be available on at least one of the top two US networks to save Palm.

The Pre Plus and Pixi Plus will be available on Verizon starting today. Assuming the North American GSM versions are ready to ship by Palm, it will still be another few months before all carrier and governmental testing are complete. I'd estimate Q2 will be the earliest we'd see it on a US based GSM network.

Will it be enough to save WebOS? By June, the Pre will be a year old. Palm will need to have some new hardware ready to go by then or it won't matter how many networks it is available on.