Anyone remotely interested in Palm products knew that January 8th, 2009 at 11am Pacific Time would either mark a glorious return to tech industry prominence or a lackluster offering that signaled the upcoming demise of an industry staple. Many of us watched the drama unfold before our eyes via live blogs that were taking place around the internet.

First of all, a big “THANK YOU” to them for giving us the opportunity to peek into the unfolding excitement. Second of all, we wanted to share with you all the information that came out… and there is nothing quite like reading the bloggers’ reactions WHEN they happen.

Crunch Gear Live Blog
By John Biggs & Peter Ha
This was by far the best live blog of the Palm event on the web, if you ask me. It was updated quicker than all the others I visited and the information was quick and to the point with insight and humor mixed in for good measure. The pictures were pretty good:

You really felt like you were learing about the product with them and overall, they loved it as much as us claiming, “This is an iPhone, Android, Palm race now. Symbian and WinMo are done.” and later continuing, “I want the palm pre. Really bad.”

gdgt Live Coverage
by Ryan Block

Hands down the most thorough coverage we saw. The picture were great and it offered the most initial detail although it was missing the personality… it seemed almost… too “official”. Part of the problem is I was jumping around from source to source. I probably could have stayed on gdgt and liked that the most. However, it was on 60 second auto refresh or manual refresh whereas Crunchgear had AJAX updating… and that ended up being the deal breaker.
PalmInfoCenter: Live Palm CES Coverage
by Ryan & Kris
This at least matches the coverage of gdgt simply because these folks are Palm fans. Big props to an awesome job that had well balanced and well timed coverage with information and pictures alike. It has been a long time since the last OS update and they seemed to think this one will be here just as long, “this new platform is gonna be the basis for the next decade of Palm’s efforts. wow” Here is a shot of the wireless battery charger from Palm taken by PIC:
Kyte.tv & Fast Company Live
Although it was a valiant effort, the streaming channels on Kyte.TV were an epic failure. They loaded at about 1 frame per minute and the entire presentation was always behind. After awhile, it was confusing to listen/watch when I was trying to actually get the new information… I turned the volume off and watched parts of it purely for the ambiance. Don’t make fun of me, I enjoyed it.

Gizmodo: Live Palm Keynote
by Adrian Covert
I usually love Gizmodo, but this was one big FAIL of a Liveblog. I intended to follow only Gizmodo’s blog the entire time but when 15 minute chunks at a time went by I just gave up. Every once and awhile I would check back in…. just to see… and they seemed to be just as clueless as I was. What’s up with that, Giz? I only say this cause I am disappointed as I was expecting Gizmodo to have the best coverage.

Immediately following the Live Blogs we read a few blog posts that we enjoyed and we would like to highlight:

• Kelly Hodkins from BGR wrote: “The handset will have the latest TI3 OMAP CPU, EV-DO Rev. A, 802.11b/g, GPS, Bluetooth, 8GB of internal storage, a 3MP camera with LED flash, MicroUSB connection, mass storage support, 3.5mm headphone jack and Bluetooth A2DP support. This thing is a Palm?”
• Adrian Covert from Gizmodo: Gizmodo somewhat redeemed themselves from the live blog disaster by posting a nice, concise summary of the pertinent details of the Palm Pre. For people not as crazy obsessed as us, it was a nice overview with only the need-to-knows.
• Greg Kumparak from MobileCrunch: Basically followed up on CrunchGear, picking up the crumbs and leaving readers the main morsels of knowledge. Considering this is a phone… shouldn’t it be CrunchGear following MobileCrunch?

Register Hardward gets their own section of one bullet for the simple fact that their title was funny and they brought more opinion and info to the table than the others, actually providing insight as opposed to regurgitating specs:

• Tony Smith from Register Hardware: Great post!