Palm Confirms Verizon Partnership for Pre, Pixi

Consumer Electronics Show (CES) — As expected, Palm today announced a new partnership with Verizon Wireless to sell new versions of the Palm Pre and the Palm Pixi. And you won’t have to wait long – they’ll go on sale Jan. 25. No pricing details are available just yet, but we’ll know more in the next couple of weeks. The team-up for what’s being called the Pre Plus and the Pixi Plus will be an exclusive.

The Pre Plus has double the internal memory than the original Pre. There is 16GB of flash memory and an inductive battery cover. The Pixi Plus has built-in Wi-Fi and a bunch of new colors, including blue, green, pink, orange and blue.

In addition, Palm announced that it will be opening up its developer program. Anyone can submit a WebOS app, which should help the company build its app library, often criticized for being too small.

Palm also unveiled a new plug-in development kit (PDK) – to debut in March – that should help with app development. The company launched a number of new 3-D game titles that take advantage of PDK.

Palm also announced a new partnership with SFR in France during the CES event.