Palm gets official with webOS 2.0 and Pre 2: hitting France on Friday, Verizon 'in the coming months'

And just like that, the rumor mill smirks. HP has just come clean with a device that we’ve been hearing more and more about over the past few weeks, and with it will come the next generation of webOS that we’ve been hearing about for even longer. The Palm Pre 2 will be the first device to ship with HP webOS 2.0, with the revamped and renamed (presumably to use on more than just Palm smartphones) mobile OS promising “true multitasking,” Stacks (for organizing apps) Just Type, HP Synergy (links your email and social networking accounts), Exhibition (enabling users to run apps designed specifically for the Palm Touchstone Charging Dock) and support for Adobe’s Flash Player 10.1 Beta. It’s also bringing along a new Favorites tagging option, Skype Mobile (on the Verizon version only), text assist, integrated Quickoffice, VPN support, a redesigned launcher and full support for Bluetooth keyboards and SPP peripherals. Read more

France's SFR announces Palm Pre 2: 1GHz processor, 512MB RAM, webOS 2.0

Considering how tight of a lid Palm and HP have been keeping on details about the next Palm device, we were surprised to see it pop up on the website of French carrier SFR (who recently disappeared the Pre Plus). It’s official: the Palm Pre 2 is coming.

Yeah, you’re interested. Here’s what details SFR dropped:

• 1GHz processor
• 512MB RAM
• Same design as the current Pre series, but with a “flatter screen” (we’re supposing glass) and “more refined design.”
• Update: as arthurthornton notes in the comments – if you look closely that finicky USB door has been removed and replaced with a simple, exposed MicroUSB port. Looking more closely the finish on the edge is matted – so it looks like that crack-prone plastic we’ve been dealing with is a thing of the past.
• Update 2: PreCentral member thomas92 notes via email that SFR also says that webOS 2.0 will bring a faster boot time. We really need to work on our French, it seems.

Additionally, our rusty French translation yielded this until-now unannounced webOS 2.0 feature: push. Specifically, SFR is talking about Facebook push integration (touting it as “the great innovation of 2.0”) with messages, events, wall postings, and chat. We’re not going to read too much into that, as we would hope that Palm would integrate push into more than Facebook. So either SFR is overreaching, or they’re not telling us everything about push and instead are focusing on what customers want to hear about, i.e. Facebook.

WebOS 2.0 gets fresh round of screenshots; new Palm phones and Touchstone certified?

The name of certification firm TÜV Rheinland may not ring a bell, so allow us to jog your memory: these are the guys that outed the GSM versions of the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus prior to their announcement earlier this year. Hence, the interwebs are paying pretty close attention this evening now that we’ve found US and Canadian certifications for Palm models P102UNA and P102EWW, which — following Palm’s typical model numbering convention — would correspond to North American GSM and CDMA versions of some new device, respectively. To put things in perspective, the P101UNA was unearthed in the certification database on January 23rd and announced for AT&T on March 22nd, so we could reasonably still have a couple months’ wait on these… or a couple days. No way of knowing yet how Palm plans to play this. There’s also a listing for a new “inductive battery charger,” which would certainly imply a new Touchstone — which may or may not still bear the Touchstone name.

On a related note, we’ve received a slew of new webOS 2.0 screen shots — and while some of them look familiar, our eyes were drawn to the sexy new “classic” and flip-style digital clocks. Important? Not necessarily, but sometimes it’s the little touches that count. Hit up the gallery for the full show (and don’t forget our first batch from a few weeks back, while you’re at it).