Does voice and SMS

Jul 11, 2009 06:29 GMT  ·  By

The Palm Pre high-end mobile phone was released into the wild more than a month ago, yet analyst estimations and market reports show that the traction it is currently seeing on the market does not match by far the hype it registered before launch.

Even so, there are a lot of enthusiasts out there that grabbed their Palm Pre device and started to play around with it, in ways that are not safe to try at home, showing some of the hidden capabilities that the mobile phone maker packed inside its nice-looking handheld.

This time around, the story is about a Palm Pre that saw a little hacking around, a process that turned it into working on Verizon Wireless' network. Not too bad in the end, for the carrier already announced plans to have the device available for its subscribers sometimes about six months from now, although the hacker is still experiencing some problems with making the handset work flawlessly: “Only problem is that I can’t get data to work. Apparently webOS is checking to see if the device is provisioned or not before allowing a data session to take place. So my next step would be to somehow bypass this provisioning check,” the hacker says.

The video below shows how the phone connects to Big Red's airwaves, so take a look at it to learn more. Cleanser, a PreCentral forum member, is the one to make the move, and it seems that there were some problems with Verizon as well, and that a little convincing was necessary before the carrier added the handset to his account. For what it's worth, it seems that Palm Pre does voice and SMS quite well on Verizon's network and some more of its capabilities are very likely to be activated in the near future, so stay tuned to learn what more the Pre will be capable of doing.