My interest in Palm’s WebOS should be well known to anybody who’s read this site for a while. Although I’ve had a lot of interest and did eventually get a used Palm Pre I never ended us using a new Palm device as my primary phone. The main reason was the fact their hardware was woefully behind once I finally decided to upgrade form my Palm Treo 755p.
Palm (well technically now HP but I like calling them Palm better) has been running a discount program form developers. If you’re a developer Palm will give you $200.00 off of an unlock Pre 2. It’s a pretty sweet deal when you consider it’s an unlocked phone that gives you access to WebOS 2.0. A couple of weeks ago I inquired with Palm about this program and they sent me back a couple of e-mails asking about the applications I was planning on writing. This was basically a quick screening process to ensure I wasn’t just trying to get a cheap unlocked phone, but instead actually planning on developing for the platform.
After a couple of e-mails they offered me a free Pre 2 for development purposes. I figured that was a pretty good deal and took them up on the offer. I’m not exactly sure when the phone will arrive but I was told it could arrive as early as this week (although being Palm is having their big event tomorrow I was told that was no guarantee).
Either way I didn’t say anything as I was unsure if this was something Palm was doing but wanted to keep if to developers expressing interest in the discount program. Well it seems that’s not the case and Palm has 100 99 Pre 2 phones they’re planning on giving out to developers free of charge. So if you’re a developer and have interest in WebOS you could get a hold of Palm via the Pre 2 discount program. It’s likely you can nab yourself free reference hardware (that will function properly on either T-Mobile or AT&T but will only have 3G speeds on AT&T).