Palm's Lynn Fox Calls Howard Stern, Suggests the Pre 11

We know that Palm's getting pretty savvy lately with the social media (snooze-inducing webinars aside) -- they're on Facebook, Twitter, and seem to have a penchant for showing up at awards shows with Pres and Treos in hand, not to mention the little matter of getting time on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. Add one more relatively inexpensive marketing vector to Palm's quiver: calling in to Talk Radio shows.

Forum member tprevett lets us know that towards the end of Stern's wrap-up show, a woman professing to be a Palm employee called in and recommended the Pre.  In fact, we're hearing it was former Apple PR head and current Palm PR Honcho (Honcha?) Lynn Fox.  Self-professed Sternaholic Mark provides the full rundown:

Jon took a call from a woman who said that she works for Palm and she knows that they've been talking phones lately. She said that they have the new Palm Pre coming out and it's something that's going to blow away all of the other things that they've been talking about.

Jon said that he knows the phone has gotten a lot of hype but he didn't want to turn it into an ad. She said that it should be out by June.

Grab the audio from the forums to hear the full 1 minute, 30 second bit. Aw heck, it's already 'out there,' here's an embed:.

Big ups to the Stern crew for asking the tough questions: when's the release date?  Is there a video recorder?  Answers: you already know it's "1st half of 09" and "No."

Maybe Palm was trying to take advantage of some latent bitterness at a certain iPhone app kerfuffle or maybe Palm is being incredibly savvy about stretching what little cash they have left. We're leaning towards the latter.  Put on your crass, cold-blooded, stereotyping demographic slicing hat on:

• Facebook reaches teens,
• Twitter reaches nerds (sorry, it's true, but I'm included),
• Awards shows reach women,
• and Stern reaches men, the kind of men who have zero interest in any of the above vectors of communication

Pretty smart there, Palm.  There's one crucial demographic you're missing, though: the people who will stop listening if they can't go out and buy the thing ASAP.