Hasta La Gadget!

Original post. Acer got off to an enthusiastic start in the smart phone market back in February, but it looks like their plans for freebie Windows Mobile phones are being held up by the usual carrier-related traumas in the US.

Acer’s been having a lot of press events for their laptop and notebook lines here in New York, but they haven’t said much about their smart phones. So we asked. According to Acer’s laptop PR folks, Acer now isn’t planning any US smart phones until 2010.

That’s disappointing, as they’ve already started to roll out products overseas and the head of their smart phone division, Aymar de Lencquesaing, has years of experience in the USA. When I spoke to him in February, he said there was some hope that they’d get phones out before Christmas of this year.

Acer’s first-half devices are pretty run-of-the-mill Windows Mobile stuff, but they have more interesting products in their pipeline. The company’s $500 H2 model, for instance, uses Qualcomm’s state-of-the-art 1-GHz Snapdragon chipset and has a 3.8-inch, 800-by-480 touch screen, and they’ve also said they’re experimenting with Google Android phones.

Palm today announced that its eagerly await touchscreen smartphone will be arriving on Canadian shores in the second half of this year. The Palm Pre will be available in the great white north exclusively under contract with Bell Mobility.

The announcement makes the Canadanian mobile carrier the second to announce a Pre deal after Sprint in the United States. The phone will utilize Bell Mobility’s high-speed 3G network.

The Palm Pre has yet to get a firm release date in Canada or otherwise.

AT&T has announced that the next-generation BlackBerry Curve 8900 will be available to subscribers and new customers sometime this “early summer.”

Like the first version that T-Mobile released several months ago, AT&T’s Curve 8900 will include Wi-Fi, GPS, a high-resolution 480-by-360-pixel LCD screen, and a 3.2 megapixel camera. In addition, the AT&T model will work in almost 20,000 company hotspots across the country, although it will most likely lack the ability to make free Wi-Fi calls.

Unfortunately, it also looks as if the Curve 8900 will still be a 2G phone even on AT&T. The carrier said in a statement that the handset will be a quad-band EDGE (850/1900/1700/1800 MHz) world phone, but made no mention of 3G HSDPA data access. That made some sense for T-Mobile, which is still working to get its 3G data network up and running even in major cities. But on AT&T it’s a big disappointment.

On the plus side, the GPS chipset will work with the optional AT&T Navigator service. No word yet on pricing.

The Internet has been buzzing today about Palm’s second WebOS smart phone, the follow-up to the upcoming Palm Pre.

I’ve heard from some friends as well, and the predictions are coming into line – Palm’s working on something that’s lower-cost, and yes, it will have a QWERTY keyboard. Boy Genius Report published a blurry photo of a supposed phone, and Engadget followed up with a Photoshop rendering, the name “Eos” and a pretty comprehensive list of specs.

Finally, around dinnertime, Michael Arrington on TechCrunch christened it the “Pixie,” and Greg Kumparak on Arrington’s own TechCrunch site fell into the Eos camp.

The new device is supposed to be a slim, lower-cost WebOS gadget, destined to come out within several months of the Pre. Engadget purports to have almost suspiciously precise specs, and even to predict that it’s coming out on AT&T.

The problem with rumors like this is that people tend to take them too literally. Six months before launch, a lot of specs are subject to change. Calling the frequency bands for AT&T, for instance, is extremely premature; unlike Apple, Palm are comfortable working on a range of bands and radio interfaces, and could swap a different radio in lickety-split if they get a good deal from a different carrier.