From engad­get:

Think you’ll have to wait until June 6^th for all the Pre sur­prises to emerge? Think again. A break­ing Reuters report has just dropped one of the biggest cel­lu­lar bomb­shells of the year: Ver­i­zon Wire­less, America’s largest mobile oper­a­tor, will soon be car­ry­ing Palm’s Pre. Oh, that’s not enough? No wor­ries — it’ll also be sell­ing a “new ver­sion of the touch­screen Black­Berry Storm,” which is obvi­ously the Storm 2 that we’ve been toy­ing around with. The report makes clear that both phones would be cleared for ship­ment in around six months, which cer­tainly jibes with whis­pers we’ve heard about Sprint’s mighty short exclu­siv­ity period. The news came from the company’s Low­ell McAdam, the top exec­u­tive for the ven­ture of Ver­i­zon Com­mu­ni­ca­tions and Voda­fone. To quote: “Over the next six months or so you will see devices like Palm Pre and a sec­ond gen­er­a­tion Storm.” First Sprint, then AT&T, and now Ver­i­zon? T-​Mobile, where you at?
[Thanks, E]
Update: Seems Mr. McAdam con­tin­ued on by not­ing that VZW would get the Palm Pre “and a cousin.” Hmm, Eos, any­one?

So Ver­i­zon is get­ting the Palm Pre, the Palm Eos, the Black­berry Storm 2 (now with­out inher­ently lim­it­ing click screen) and we keep hear­ing rumors from trusted sources about Ver­i­zon get­ting some vari­ant of the iPhone. Prob­a­bly not just a CDMA ver­sion of the 3G, as that would poten­tially vio­late their con­tract with AT&T, but I’ve heard rumors that Ver­i­zon may be get­ting either or both the iPad tablet and the iPhone Mini.

Admit­tedly, this is all spec­u­la­tion, but I’ve pointed out before that each major US car­rier seemed to have a stan­dard bearer smart­phone plat­form. Ver­i­zon pushed Black­berry, Sprint had the Pre, AT&T had the iPhone and T-​Mobile had the Android G1. Now it seems Ver­i­zon might be mov­ing to con­sol­i­date every­one else’s mar­quee phones under their own ban­ner. Any­one got any good Android on Ver­i­zon rumors?

Don’t get me wrong. Palm’s keynote at CES was impres­sive (I wasn’t there, but thanks to live­blog­ging from gdgt, Tre­o­Cen­tral and cnet, I feel like I was). Palm’s webOS plat­form and Pre smart­phone take the best of the iPhone and Google Android, mix them together and fix all their flaws. It’s an excel­lent smartphone.

And a year ago, maybe even six months ago, that might have mattered.

The mobile mar­ket is crowded and get­ting more crowded. The line between smart­phones and fea­ture phones is blur­rier than ever, and might be erad­i­cated entirely if Android ful­fills its promise to become the dom­i­nant “fea­ture phone” OS. Here in the US, the bat­tle lines are drawn, with each major car­rier hav­ing a pre­ferred smart plat­form. Ver­i­zon has Black­berry, T-​Mobile has Android, AT&T has the iPhone, and now Sprint has the Pre. And even there, Palm is snatch­ing defeat from the jaws of vic­tory, hitch­ing their wagon to a car­rier that is best known in the last few years for hem­or­rhag­ing cus­tomers and money alike. The Pre doesn’t even sup­port Wimax.

See, here’s the prob­lem. The Pre doesn’t fit. It’s a great smart­phone, but that’s not enough any­more. You have to plug into a whole ecosys­tem to make it work. Palm’s intent is for the Pre (which comes with Exchange OTA sync out of the box) to plug into any­thing, and it might work, but it’s a longshot.

I’ll be stick­ing with Win­dows Mobile for my smart­phone needs at least for another year or so. Because I use Microsoft Office on my other PCs, sync my files with Live Mesh, man­age my media with Win­dows Media Player, email with Exchange, man­age my pho­tos with Live Pho­tos, etc. I use a Microsoft smart­phone because I’ve already bought in to Microsoft ser­vices. And ser­vices are com­ing to drive device selec­tion, not the other way around. And Palm, as cool as their new plat­form is, doesn’t sup­ply services.

Maybe this is where their part­ner announce­ments will pay off. Face­book fea­tured promi­nently in their keynote, as did Google. But can some­one other than Google make a bet­ter Android than Android? I wouldn’t put money on it. Palm’s last fight will be a good one, they’ll go down swing­ing, but the end­ing is not in doubt.

As you may have heard, Google has a “kill switch” fea­ture in Android that allows them to remotely remove soft­ware they deem mali­cious from Android-​based cell phones. While some poten­tial end users are up in arms about this fea­ture, the reac­tion from the devel­oper com­mu­nity has been much more mild.

Some of the appli­ca­tion devel­op­ers for Google’s Android plat­form said they weren’t aware of a kill switch fea­ture the ven­dor report­edly has put into its mobile oper­at­ing sys­tem, but they weren’t too sur­prised either. “We’re not too con­cerned. We’re not mak­ing mali­cious apps. It should be fine and I totally under­stand why they’d want to do it,” said Jeff Kao, co-​founder of Eco­rio, a Toronto-​based developer.

Google Android Devel­op­ers Not Sur­prised By Kill Switch — The Google Chan­nel — IT Chan­nel News And Views by CRN and VARBusiness

Josh Curry and I dis­cussed this on the lat­est Max­i­mum Geek (Episode 28, just posted), and we came down squarely on oppo­site sides of the issue. Josh sees it as an abom­i­na­tion, yet another way Google can get cor­rupted by the power they wield. Per­son­ally, I don’t see it as much dif­fer­ent from Microsoft’s Mali­cious Soft­ware Removal Tool, which is installed with every copy of Win­dows that has auto­matic updates turned on. It gives Google a way to remove soft­ware that poses a real dan­ger to phones or net­works, but users have to trust that Google will use it only as a means of last resort. Most users and devel­op­ers seem will­ing to give Google the ben­e­fit of the doubt on this, where the same peo­ple were much more alarmed when the secre­tive and heavy-​handed Apple was revealed to have the same fea­ture on the iPhone (it’s prob­a­bly worth men­tion­ing that while the iPhone kill switch was a secret uncov­ered by code inspec­tion, Google spilled the beans on the Android kill switch themselves).

Go ahead and read Josh’s take and then let us know where you stand on the issue. Can Google be trusted to use this fea­ture benevolently?