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The long gestating speculation about the release date of the Palm Pre smartphone–either the company’s last gasp or the first step in a phoenix-like renewal–has finally ended with the official announcement that the phone will be available starting June 6 from Sprint. For those watching the corporate competition closely, that’s just two days before the launch of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), which is widely expected to feature the announcement of the next version of iPhone hardware. And Palm also decided to stay in line with both the iPhone and RIM’s Blackberry Storm with a sale price of $199 (with new 2-year service agreement)

For those of you not keeping up with this saga, the Palm Pre has the basic requirements for a 2009 smartphone–touchscreen, QWERTY keyboard (in this case, a slide-out version with chiclet-style keys), 3G cellular and Wi-Fi connectivity, GPS–but adds a couple of intriguing twists, with the biggest being its operating system.

For the past several years, Palm continued to pedal its moldy Palm OS (which hasn’t been updated in years) on phones like the Centro starter smartphone while offering the Windows Mobile OS on models like the Treo Pro. The new operating system–Palm webOS–looks to restore the company to the extensible platform that once attracted thousands of developers who created add-on applications that enhanced the usability of a device beyond what was originally intended… something that Apple learned from in its iPhone App Store strategy. (And if there are applications from the Palm OS days of yore that you still can’t live without, a company called Motion Apps will be releasing the Classic application, which enables you to run the old Palm OS environment on top of the webOS platform.)

Another intriguing piece of the Palm Pre launch is the optional Touchstone charging accessory (which will be available at launch for $50). What’s so big about a charger? It doesn’t use wires. The Pre will be the first major phone to use wireless, magnetic induction charging technology (which has been used by devices such as electric toothbrushes), and all you need to do to charge the phone is lay the Pre onto the hockey puck-shaped device (along with using the special back cover that comes with the Touchstone). And according to the San Francisco Chronicle, you can still use the phone while it’s charging:

The device can tell when it’s being charged and will offer a speaker phone option for incoming calls. Pick up the phone and the phone converts it to a regular call.

I have a special place in my heart for Palm. Long before I became an iPhone convert, I was deeply enmeshed in the world of the Palm OS (I’d edited several of my colleague’s books on the subject and ended up revising what became the final edition of the book, and being a Palm expert helped me get my job at Amazon way back in 2000 when people were still buying PDAs). So I hope that the Pre does well for Palm and offers some innovative competition in the smartphone marketplace. That said, I don’t see it becoming the runaway blockbuster (with sales of 5 million or more, as the New York Times defines it) it needs to be to compete with the iPhone. Are you swayed/tempted by the Pre? Ready to gamble on a new smartphone operating system? Let us know in the comments.

–Agen G.N. Schmitz