Palm CEO Ed Colligan Talks Pre with Investors 50

We're listening to Ed Colligan talk to investors about the state of Palm and what some of their plans are going forward.  Some interesting tidbits:

• There will be no more PalmOS devices released by Palm (excepting the Centro getting released on other carriers).  They're focused on webOS and Windows Mobile.
• Not only will Palm have an app store at launch, they're not locking down the device so you can only install apps from their app store.  You'll be able to "side load" apps directly over USB or over the air from any provider.  Good news!
• While Palm can't comment on how long exclusivity will last with Sprint, they are able to say that outside the US they have partnerships going with other carriers.  Colligan specifically mentioned North America (We already knew that will be Bell Canada for sure), Latin America (multiple carriers) and Europe (we strongly suspect that will be Vodafone).
• Speaking of that exclusivity, Palm hopes that a strong launch with Sprint will attract other US carriers.  He specifically mentioned that Palm would be looking at releasing on other carriers in the 2010 timeframe.
• As far as applications go, Colligan said that there are a few they feel they need to have at launch.  Specifically, he mentioned Epocrates, a great medical app.
• On the issue of PATENTS, Colligan made sure to note that there are no pending legal actions with Apple right now.  More pointedly, he noted that Palm has 15 years worth of patents (over 1500 of them in total) and that in patent fights often go like this:

The reason you do that is to have a defensive position.  It's like two little porcupines going around, and you don't want to touch each other because you might get stung. You peacefully coexist and everything's OK and you keep working together.  We're very respectful about people's intellectual property, we believe we're huge innovators and have been for a lot of years and that this product has an enormous number of innovations in it.  If something does happen there, we do have the portfolio, we think to defend ourselves and to be successful doing that.  But nothing's happened to date, so we're really just focused on getting the product out the door.

That about does it for the newsy-bits.  Colligan also expressed happiness with their relationship with Sprint, noting that despite their woes, Sprint has over 50 million subscribers and there are more PalmOS users on Sprint than on any other network.