At this year’s WWDC, Apple announced the new iPhone 3GS. While this was a pretty interesting refresh to the iPhone line, I believe that the lowering of the iPhone 3G 8GB to $99 is much bigger news. For a while now, people have been preaching that Apple needs to hit the $149 price point or lower in order to make their way into a more mainstream market. With this announcement, they have.

The Palm Pre launched yesterday and is certainly the phone that has been most compared to the iPhone. While I’m sure there was a fair amount of people who bought it and love it (and let me just say I personally have not used one yet), but I don’t think Apple has to worry for a variety of reasons.

According to recent news, it appears as if Palm will be releasing their Pre sometime in May or June. This could be anywhere from more than a month to a few days before the iPhone 3.0 software and (suspected) new iPhone hardware are released. The question is, what would be better for Palm, a release before the new iPhone or after?

Palm showed off many features of their yet to be released Pre this week at the CTIA Wireless Association’s annual event. Many of the features appear to be direct arguments towards getting a Palm Pre over Apple’s iPhone. For example, Palm showed off the Palm Pre version of the Pandora application at their Sprint booth. Since the Pre allows background processes, it was pretty powerful to see users be able to listen to Pandora while doing other things on the phone, as well as skip songs from anywhere on the phone.