Palm Australia Manager, Brett Murray, has confirmed that the Palm Pre will be available in Australia in the 2nd Half of 2009. Meanwhile, Smarthouse has gone on the record as saying the Pre will be an exclusive offering of Telstra in that country – for 3 months – at which point you can assume other carriers would snag the Pre for their customers.

Obviously, Murray would not confirm or deny the exclusive Telstra offering. We probably won’t see any announcements internationally until the Sprint Palm Pre launch date has been announced at least. The only thing Murray added was the playing down of any potential patent problems stemming from the iPhone multi-touch issue with Apple, and basically, that was nothing more than the company line.

The prices according the Telstra Palm Pre rumors will be:

• $299 with contract ($220 USD)
• $899 outright ($669 USD)

[Via Smarthouse]