Jenkins: Palm Pre will sell for under $200

Zdnet.com reported last week that the long-awaited Palm Pre cell phone will be released June 6 and sell for $199 after a $100 rebate with a two-year contract. The phone will be available at first only on the Sprint network.

There are great expectations for this phone, and Palm has to have a successful launch of this product. The company has seen a lot of hard times lately, and many think the Pre will make or break them over time. While this may be a bit extreme, it’s certainly true that the Palm Pre is the most important product the company has produced in years. With the updated Apple iPhone to be unveiled soon after the Pre, it becomes essential for the Pre to make a big entrance.

n The new search engine called Wolfram/Alpha debuted last week. While it is certainly no present threat to Google in the search market, it is excellent in a limited area. You can think of it mainly as a calculator in a sense, as its main function is to compare and correlate stored data to reach useful conclusions.

One excellent outcome of its appearance is that Google felt enough heat to announce new features of its own. You can find these features by searching Google on any term, then selecting the Show Options link at the top of the results page.

You’ll then be given several choices to expand and improve your search. I really like what they’ve done with this, as it adds quite a lot of context to your search efforts.

n Techcrunch.com recently reported that MySpace page views are declining rapidly, supposedly due to the growth of Facebook, the popular social networking site. This is bad news indeed for MySpace if true, for it means that even people who visit the site are spending less time there. MySpace was one of the first major sites to provide what we now call social networking, and it ruled this space for quite a long time, especially for musicians looking to showcase their music.

n Here’s some great news: Napster has just announced its new pricing plan, and it’s excellent. For $5 per month, you can get 5 free MP3s and access to around seven million songs to stream or play any time you want online. I thought Napster was a good deal at its former price, so you can bet I love this new plan. I’ll be trying this out soon and will report on my experience with it.

n Scribd.com now offers the ability for authors to sell their works on its site as e-books or electronic documents. It joins a growing group of sites that are moving toward digital delivery to supplement or replace physical book sales to satisfy a new market for content that users can download.

n One of the most exciting and meaningful trends now is the movement of the Web away from the model of page views to the idea of a real-time stream or a series of streams. We can thank services such as Facebook and especially Twitter for ushering in this new way of viewing the Web. Even Google has had to reassess its approach in light of the success of Twitter as a source for real-time search.

This new tendency to think of things in flow rather than as static pages reminds me of the saying from Gestalt psychology: The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. No one could have added up the individual elements of the Web and predicted what we’re seeing now. This is the great thing to me, that we will be constantly amazed and surprised by what is right in front of us.