The biggest unknown is price, which went unmentioned during the demo. My assumption is that Palm would try to take market share by coming in significantly lower than the $200 or so Apple wants for its iPhone. But when I ran that theory by Palm CEO Ed Colligan, he looked at me liked I’d peed on his rug. ‘Why would we do that when we have a significantly better product,’ he asked, then walked away.”

– Peter Kafka, MediaMemo

CEOs and Palm evangelists convinced that Palm’s new Pre handset is anything more than table stakes at the handset poker game would do well to consider two bits of Apple (AAPL) news and rumor that suggest Cupertino may be hard at work on a next-generation handset capable of mercilessly beating all others into sobbing submission.

The first: A rumor that iPhone 3.0 will support quad-core processors destined for an upcoming iPhone hardware revision. If this proves true and Apple (AAPL) does release a multi-core GPU iPhone–which is not as much of a stretch as you might think–it would likely support features we’re more accustomed to seeing on the PC. And as The Apple Core’s Jason O’Grady notes, “It would slaughter pretty much every portable gaming platform on the market.”

The second: Apple has applied for a patent on a behind-screen camera that could capture images “while the display elements are in an inactive state (in which the display elements are darkened and at least partially transparent).” It doesn’t take much of a leap to see that technology brought to bear on a next-gen iPhone and the long rumored iChat AV Mobile.

Those are two potential killer features for a device that already has three things the Pre does not: a maturing platform, a thriving developer ecosystem and a market leading music player and store. Are they just rumor and speculation? For now, certainly. But given the pace of innovation in the mobile industry, and more specifically, at Apple–where the multi-touch phone that Palm (PALM) is now aping originated two years ago–they’re not beyond the realm of possibility, are they?