Yeah! I finally got my free Pre Plus smartphone from Palm! In late September I wrote to Palm as they offered free Pre Plus devices for qualified developers:
Hello,
as I read in our newsletter you are offering free Pre Plus devices to
qualified developers. I am one of the people trying to bring an open and
free operating system to the great Palm Pre device. We are comming
originally from the Openmoko project and searching for a new device which
can be the base for our further development. We are doing all of this work
in our spare free time with the aim to have an linux based operating system
which feeds our needs of an free and open operating system which we can
modify in all areas.
I am one of this people working mostly on the Freesmartphone
(<http://www.freesmartphone.org/>) and SHR project
(<http://www.shr-project.org/>). I am a OpenEmbedded develper too and
currently integrating support for the Palm Pre device in OpenEmbedded.
It would be great if you can donate me a Pre Plus device to improve my
work and let me have one more device I can use to improve the FOSS support
for your great Pre device family.
Sincerely yours,
Simon Busch
Yesterday, three months later, the device arrived from the US here in Germany and is now ready to be used as new development device 🙂
Thank you Palm for supporting the FOSS community in such a way!