Verizon was the only explicitly-named carrier partner for the launch of the Palm Pre 2 yesterday, but some digging around source code for U.S. and Canadian Palm sites, references to both AT&T and Rogers have been found. Funnily enough, the commented-out code says “The Palm Pre2 phone is available on the Rodger’s network,” so you might say Canadian progress for the Pre 2 hasn’t even made it to the first rung of marketing just yet.
We also don’t know how far Bell’s exclusivity deal from the original Pre stretches, but that was a long time ago, and no doubt HP wants to spread webOS as far and wide as possible. Rogers is the biggest carrier in Canada, and would likely be a juicier partner than, say, Telus. Palm’s press release for the Pre 2 clearly mentioned Canada, so it’s coming up here one way or the other. As for AT&T, that’s not much of a stretch, but again, nothing is official just yet.
The Palm Pre 2 announces a few incremental hardware upgrades, like a glass face (rather than plastic), 5 megapixel camera, and 1 GHz processor, but the software is also getting an upgrade to webOS 2.0, which comes with it a new multitasking interface, Flash support in the browser, and a bunch of smaller functional updates. It might not be a huge leap for Palm, especially since we were expecting something explosive after they were bought by HP, but a tablet will likely be where we find the two companies work especially well together.
For more information on the Pre 2 and HP’s webOS 2.0, take a look at their landing page.
[via PreCentral]