Best Buy will have the Palm Pre for $199, no rebate required

Yesterday, Sprint announced that it will charge $200 for thePalm Pre,but to get that price customers will have to send in a mail-in rebate.  As much as I dislike Best Buy, it looks like ‘the’ place to go for the Palm Pre.

This retailer will have Palm’s latest smartphone in its stores on the launch day, June 6, and will be selling this device at $200 with an instant rebate, not a mail-in one.

To get this price, customers will still have to commit toa two-year service plan, a requirementthat’s become standardfor discounts on smartphone purchases in the U.S.

Update on Thursday, May 21, 2009 at 9:39PM by Jon Arnason

Best Buy stores are allegedly restricted to an initial distribution of 4,250 Palm Pres for the June 6th launch day, an unnamed source has told the Boy Genius Report. If true, each of the 1,000 stores to sell the device will only get 4 units at first. A separate source claims that RadioShack will only receive two phones per store, with availability limited to coastal areas such as New York, New Jersey and California.