European carrier Telefonica has confirmed plans to launch the Palm Pre in mid-October in Germany, Ireland and the UK.

O2 Germany will be the first operator to get its hands on the Pre on October 13, while O2 UK and O2 Ireland will have to wait until October 16.

Despite the fact that O2 UK is the exclusive carrier of the Apple iPhone in the UK, the Palm Pre, which is also an exclusive, will be pitched at an identical price point and tariff. The device will be available for free on a 24 month contract as well as the higher end 18 month contracts, bundled with unlimited mobile data usage.

Touted as a serious competitor to the iPhone and Nokia’s flagship N97, the Pre packs a slide out keyboard and touch screen interface and is available with wifi and GPS. It boasts 8GB of storage and a 3 megapixel camera and probably a handset first in the shape of an inductive charging unit.

The device is also the first Palm gadget to run the company’s flagship webOS platform. Jumping on the cloud computing bandwagon, webOS allows consumers to pull their contact, calendars and personal information down from the internet on any device. A key feature of the alm platform is synchronisation of information between multiple services, so if the same contact is listed in the user’s phonebook and on their social networking sites, both contact details are pulled into the same interface. Likewise with multiple conversation platforms such as text message and email, as well as calendars.

Across the Atlantic however, there is some doubt as to whether US carrier Verizon Wireless will go ahead with plans to launch the Pre on its own network early in 2010, with reports coming in of weak sales of the device on Sprint’s network.

Palm recently cited strong performance from the Pre however.