Palm Ring-P: new phone or new carrier?

An interesting new bit of info popped up courtesy of a listing filed by a Senior Compliance Engineer for Palm on the Bluetooth SIG site. The listing identifies a “Ring-P” device coming this January. Could this be a new device or a new carrier?

The Pixi is set to launch November 15 at $100, roughly the same price as the Palm Pre at this point, so we can rule out this is for the Pixi. The Pixi is a smaller, thinner candy-bar styled webOS phone. The phones matches up to a smarter Centro replacement; the Centro was a hit for Palm (big unit seller). That leaves either a new device or a new carrier.

My money is on new carrier. January marks the expiration of six months from the date of Pre’s launch on Sprint. Many of us believe the exclusive agreement with Sprint was 6 months. Verizon has said time and time again that the Pre will be on it’s network and after the positive attention of the Motorola Droid launching on the Verizon network, this would continue the intro of some decent smartphones. Finally.

A new device seems a bit wishful to me. Certainly the Palm team is working on something, but it is a relatively small group and brewing an OS coupled with two phone launches has probably sucked up most available resources at this point. I just don’t see it.

Read: [PalmwebOS]