Ok, not really.

That’s assuming, though, that her driving on the Palm OS Classic emulator isn’t indicative of her actual driving.

Here’s another video of the emulator in action. Apparently, it has sound support. We also noticed that the screen doesn’t seem as sensitive as it should be; it will be interesting to see how everyone else fares navigating an OS made for a stylus with just their fingers.

Yup. Someone is getting a free Pre!

Here’s how it works.

1. Register for our forums. Pretty simple so far, right?

    

2. Make 5 posts in the forum before the Pre comes out. These 5 can occur at any time.

    

3. We will choose at random one of the 5+ posters to win a free Pre.

    

Rules:

• Posts must not be spammy. Seriously, we don’t want to see any Levitra ads. Disqualification will result!

   

• We will PayPal transfer or send a check to the winner for the cost of the Pre handset. The winner will still need to pay for the service plan, and any other charges associated with the Pre. The handset cost is based on the cost of the Pre on a two-year plan. We will define more clearly what this cost is once we know!

   

• Feel free to ask questions in the comments or in the forums (okay, so this isn’t really a rule).

   

Good luck!

You have to admit, it’s got a decent name. It certainly hasn’t achieved the iconic status of “iPhone”, but it’s got the potential to get there. Somehow, the single-syllable alliteration flows in an unexpectedly pleasant way. If you’ve ever wondered how the name came about, here you go.

The professional branding agency Catchword was hired by Palm to come up with the name for their upcoming iPhone competitor, and Catchword posted a case study (now coming up as a 404 not found) detailing how they came to call it Prē:

“The creative exploration was mammoth. Yet after developing many thousands of names (and screening hundreds for legal snags and global suitability) the answer was almost elemental in its simplicity.

The Palm Prē. Refreshingly direct, unlike many of its hipper-than-thou competitors that take themselves way too seriously. The name Prē also subtly conveys the device’s ability to predict its user’s movements. And we like the fluid alliteration and upscale tonality (reminiscent of Grand Prix). An added bonus: the Prē links naturally to its sibling, the Trēo, both aurally and visually (with the long bar over the “e”).”

Palm’s classic OS emulator is cool, I guess. Sure, it’s fun to go back and pretend you’re in 1998, but I’m not sure that this is really something worthy of the buzz it’s generating.

As you can see in the video, Palm’s claim is that app developers who had extremely robust apps for Palm OS will need this until they come up with a webOS app. To be fair, I’m sure there are bunches of people who will be using this. I’m just not one of them.

You’ll find this video and lots of other new ones on Palm’s blog, here.

At CTIA 2009, Palm showed off what the Pre can do with third party apps–and honestly, it looks pretty sweet. Pandora for iPhone was great, but simply didn’t make sense because you couldn’t do anything while listening. Multitasking is the future, whether Apple likes it or not.

It remains to be seen what type of battery life the Pre will have, especially given that power users that are going to have 10-15 apps or more open at a time (rumor has it there’s no limit on number of open applications).

In ther good news, we’re still on track for first half of 2009. Enjoy.

Jim Vance, are you a genius? A couple days ago, no one had heard of Logicomm, and no one knew when the Palm Pre was coming out. You changed all that with a simple tweet.

Vance, CEO of Logicomm, an IT firm, and Palm Pre beta tester, claimed at the end of last week on Twitter that the Pre would be coming out April 30th. This certainly seems unlikely, given that we’re now almost in April and Palm has yet to say anything about an official release date. However, it would confirm rumors that the Pre is “on schedule”, which caused Palm’s stock to rise last week. Also, why would a beta tester have access to that kind of information?

Either way, I’m willing to bet Logicomm just got a lot more popular.

I know, news has been a little slow lately. We still don’t know pricing on the device, and the release date is the ever-vague “first half of 2009″. The good news is, the Palm Pre still seems to be on consumers’ minds, according to web traffic estimator Compete.com. Despite peaking at 400,000 visits per day just around the time it was announced at CES, the 100,000 visits Sprint and Palm’s Pre pages are currently getting are encouraging.

Palm, please, think of what a little marketing could do!

Check out Compete to view the entire article.