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After much speculation, it is official: Verizon Wireless will pick up the Palm Pre. Yesterday morning, during a conference call, execs at the country's largest mobile operator said it would start offering the Pre "early next year."

Sprint has exclusive rights to the smartphone, the first to run on Palm's webOS, until the end of 2009. Expect the Pre to land in Canada and Europe later this year.

Unlike Sprint, Verizon plans to not allow Palm to preload Palm's App Catalog on the Pre, as the carrier is committed to only including its own applications store on the phones it carries. So that means no preloaded on-device application stores for the RIM BlackBerry models Verizon offers or any Google Android or Apple handsets it might offer in the future, let alone a software storefront for Windows Mobile when Microsoft's launches it this fall.

I can't see all of these manufacturers or the developer community putting up with this for very long. Do you think Apple would even consider launching the iPhone with a carrier that doesn't include the App Store on the device? I don't.

If Verizon's as eager as I think it is to start offering the iPhone when Apple's exclusive agreement with Apple ends, it'll have to become more flexible on this matter pretty quickly. Once it does this for Apple, you know the other vendors aren't going to let themselves stand out in the cold, all alone with their on-device storefronts, for very long.