The staff of PreThinking was watching a 43 minute walk through of the Pre from tnkgirl and they found this interesting little bit of information slip from one of the Palm reps: “The Touchstone is the name of a entire line of products. This is the first Touchtone product in that family. This is the charging dock.”

What is he referring to here? It can be assumed that there will be more devices that are capable of using the inductive coupling for things other than charging a battery. PreThinking assumes that this means there will be data syncing capabilities for the Pre through the Touchstone or other devices, or even communicating with other Pre phones.

While this is an interesting slip on the part of the Palm rep, I feel that this might just be misinformation and our wild imaginations taking hold.  The Pre is not going to have a computer-side program to sync information: everything is done through the cloud with the exception of music, therefore syncing through your computer is useless (on the Pre anyway, maybe future webOS devices, but then what’s the point of Synergy on the Pre if you’re just syncing contacts from your computer address book?).  Also, communicating with other Pre phones can be done through Bluetooth and WiFi just like the iPhone will soon be capable of. It seems counter-productive to install additional hardware to communicate in a special manner when the current hardware would be suited just fine.

I’m sure there are going to be future Touchstone devices for future webOS phones, and the technology will certainly be useful in other applications, but I’m not sold just yet that the Touchstone will be used for something other than charging just yet.

[Via PreThinking]

Here’s the video.