Good Great news for Palm fanatics like me: Palm Pre is here; watch out Apple iPhone.

At the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) in Las Vegas Thursday, Palm (the company formerly known as Palm Computing, which is formerly known as PalmOne, and was formerly known as Palm) unveiled the world’s first device to run on the Palm webOS™: the Palm Pre. The new mobile phone sports a 3.1″ touch screen, is 3G enabled, has 802.11b/g WiFi, built-in GPS, ambient light sensor, accelerometer, proximity sensor, Bluetooth, 8GB internal storage, and the thing that Apple people missed in the iPhone: a slide-out QWERTY keyboard.

It will be released soon, and no pricing information yet as of the moment. The only down side, as of this writing, is that when released, it will be in CDMA only. Wonder when will the GSM version will come out? Can’t wait for this piece of technology to land on Philippine shores (perhaps, when that time comes, I will ready to retire my 5-year old PalmOne Treo 600).

Nonetheless, this is a very bold indicator that Palm (the company, the platform, the device, the company who started it all) is very much alive and is ready to reclaim it’s turf in the mobile and smart phone markets.