Announced at the 2009 CES and scheduled for release on June 6, 2009 (full press release below), the Palm Pre is a touchscreen smartphone featuring a 3.1-inch 320 x 480 display, a full QWERTY keyboard, and a Synergy function that integrates information from Facebook, Windows Outlook, and other applications to create detailed contact information combine messaging.

The smartphone also comes with a 3-megapixel camera with LED flash, GPS, Bluetooth with A2DP capabilities, and Palm's webOS operating system. You can store information in the phone's 8 GB of internal memory, hook up storage devices with the miniUSB port, and charge the phone wirelessly with Palm's included charger. 

The Palm Pre is $199.99 in the United States after a $100 mail-in rebate and a 2-year contract with Sprint. If you really need to have the phone off contract, it will run you $549 — but it will not be unlocked, so don't expect to activate it on Verizon.

In Europe, the Palm Pre launched on October 16th in the UK and Ireland and on October 13th Germany exclusively on O2. It will launch in Spain at a thus-far-unnamed date exclusively on Movistar. In Canada, the Pre debuted on Bell Mobility on August 27th, 2009 for $199.95 Canadian with a 3-year contract.

On September 25th, 2009, the Palm Pre appeared on Amazon for $99.99 — $100 less than the usual price. That's with a service plan, of course. Then, on September 28th, Wal-Mart dropped the price of the Pre even lower to $79.99. Even more recently, Amazon did the same but additionally waived the $36 activation fee, making the inferior Pixi webOS phone look pretty unattractive by comparison.

Head over to the Product Details page for several video demos of the Pre.