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A slight slip by a Palm rep reveals the Touchstone, formerly just a toadstool of wireless recharging goodness, is destined to become its very own product line.  Touchstone is an accompaniment to the Palm Pre phone slated for delivery in the first half of this year.  Phillip Lam over at PreThinking suggests several potential uses for the Touchstone beyond simple charging.

Lam suggests things like data transfer, wireless connection to speakers, Pre to Pre communication, Pre to Sprint diagnostics.  Lam and other bloggers happily confess we don’t have any clue what Palm could be targeting with a whole product line and of course, Palm isn’t saying.  Only one of Lam’s ideas make much sense to me.

Data transfer seems silly.  After all, the Palm Pre is designed to be a sync with the clouds device.  There should be no real benefit in local syncing.  Pre to Pre and Sprint diagnostics seems far too boring to be something to bring up.  But, here is what makes sense to me: auto integration.

Imaging a spot on your dashboard that your Pre will magically stick to (OK, we know it’s magnets) and allow your music and phone conversations to surround you via your car speakers.  This would be a welcome addition to the Palm family and make a lot of sense for folks that spend any amount of time in their cars and hate dealing with docking the device.

Other than this instance, the other uses for the Touchstone fail to make sense to me, other than to add wireless recharging to other future products.  How about you?  Let us know in the comments.

Source: [PreThinking]