Palm preps for the Pre. Bloomberg Boot Camp, a report on today's technology. We don't yet know how much it will cost...or precisely when it will go on sale, but Palm got plenty of attention when it announced the Pre at this month's consumer electronics show. It features a touch screen, a slide out keyboard and a whole new operating system....called Web OS. VP Stephane Maes...

"The Palm Web OS has some very unique aspects. First of all, we have something called Palm Synergy. As you know, people have stuff all over the Web, right. They've got contacts in Facebook, they've got contacts in Yahoo, they've got their Outlook contacts for work. And what we're doing is linked contacts, where all of your contacts come together on the device from all these different sources on the Web. Same thing goes for calendar. We're doing layered calendars. For example, you have your Google calendar, your work calendar and we're able to do a layered calendar where you view all of those together. Some other key aspects of the platform is the ability to have multiple applications open and running at the same time. So it makes it very easy, almost like a desktop, to be doing multiple things and once and not get distracted by just having one screen open and when someone sends you a message it basically taking over the screen."

Palm hopes to continue its reputation for making devices that are simple to use...yet powerful. The same model that has made the iPhone so successful for Apple. The Pre, initially, will exclusively be carried by Sprint. It will only say that pricing will be competitive. Will the Pre win enough customers against the iPhone, the BlackBerry and Windows Mobile devices....to make Palm competitive again? We'll know...in the near future. Bloomberg Boot Camp, I'm Fred Fishkin