Pre-Diculous, Redux

Palm’s Michael Abbott delivered more than just the keyonote at Web 2.0 Expo. But not that much more. Absent from his remarks Wednesday evening was any news about the price of Palm’s forthcoming Pre handset or a hard-and-fast release date–two bits of information the industry has been pining for since the device was first announced in January. What Abbott offered up instead was a rehash of what it’s been telling us about the Pre for months now, along with three bits of minor news.

The first: Palm, as was rumored, is expanding its early-access program for Mojo, the WebOS SDK. The second: The company is introducing a new set of integrated cloud services, called Mojo Messaging Service, for developers. From the official announcement:

“The Mojo Messaging Service is an elegant, standards-based way to exchange information over the Internet. When new information is available, it is ‘published’ to the cloud and all interested parties who are subscribers are notified that new information is available. This will allow developers to push live content to their applications or services. The Mojo Messaging Service initially will have a limited feature set and service level that will evolve over time.”

And the third, as was also rumored: Developer MotionApps has written an emulator called Classic for the Pre that will allow users to run more than 30,000 PalmOS apps on the device. Also from the official announcement:

“Palm also announced that MotionApps (www.motionapps.com) is creating an emulator application that will allow most Palm OS applications to run on webOS devices. The application, called ‘Classic,’ will be available for purchase when the Palm Pre phone becomes available from Sprint in the first half of 2009, and gives users peace of mind as they transition to Palm’s new webOS.

Since Palm OS applications running in Classic won’t be able to leverage core webOS functionality, Palm is working with partners to ensure that popular Palm OS applications are made available on the webOS platform and are optimized to take advantage of everything it has to offer. In the meantime, the MotionApps Classic application will allow customers who have invested in the Palm OS platform to use Palm OS applications they’ve grown to love and depend upon on their new webOS devices.”

Mildly interesting announcements, I suppose. Still, frustrating for those waiting for news that really should have been provided by now. What of pricing and availability information for the Pre? When will we be given that?