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.

Palm Pre to launch on Sprint June 6th for $200

At long last we have this thing.  Sprint today confirmed that it will launch the Palm Pre on June 6th for $200 on a two-year plan and after a $100 rebate. The first-ever webOS smartphone will sell not only in Sprint stores but also Best Buy, Radio Shack and Walmart. Using the phone will require either at least an Everything Data plan for home users, a Simply Everything plan, or a Business Essentials with Messaging and Data plan.

NYT: Palm Pre to launch in the first week of June

The New York Times claims the Palm Pre is due in the first week of June.  You have to take all these rumors and announcements with a grain of salt, but we can all hope, right? 

AT&T Vs Pre: Internal Document Smackdown - Slams the Pre

Want more evidence that the Pre release is imminent? How about AT&T sending a document around their internal network for employees to bone-up on some anti-Pre, pro-iPhone talking points …and then holding some in-store seminars for employees to make sure they get the message?

There are a few points here that are indisputable, but fans of the Pre might take umbrage at a few of the things here about the Pre (click the image above for the full size):

• The Palm Pre “Touchscreen control gestures not intuitive” whereas the iPhone features “Patented Multi-Touch screen” and “Fast and responsive navigation.” Hokay.
• The iPhone sports a “Thinner, lighter, bigger screen, metal and glass design” while the Pre is “Available in Black only; plastic casing.”
• The Pre gets knocked for not being a GSM world phone and “Limited free Wi-Fi access” because they don’t get to use AT&T Hotpots.
• The Pre has an “Unproven App Catalog app store.”

If this feels familiar to anybody, it should. Same thing happened in the months running up to the launch of the BlackBerry Storm, which caused a small flurry of Duelin’ Documents between AT&T and RIM. Don’t take this lying down, Palm (but don’t hurt your relationship with AT&T either, we’re eager to see the Pre on AT&T ASAP).

source:precentral

Palm Pre may beat iPhone with May ship date

Palm and Sprint are poised to undercut Apple by launching the Pre a month or more earlier, as long as a leak of internal Sprint communications proves accurate. According to PhoneNews, the carrier has ordered a rare mid-year vacation freeze for May that touches on staff at retail and other public-facing positions, similar to AT&T’s policies during its iPhone releases. The move would let Palm start shipping Pre units to Sprint stores late this month with the aim of a May 17th launch if enough phones are in stock across the US.

As a contingency, Sprint would push the launch back to June 29th — symbolically, the 2-year anniversary of the iPhone’s launch — if there isn’t enough supply for the Pre for the mid-May introduction.

The schedule corroborates a rumor that Sprint employees will start training in April and that Palm will successfully meet its well-known goal of launching the Pre ahead of the next iPhone. Struggling financially, the smartphone creator will virtually depend on the success of the full-touchscreen device to remain in business and is eager to avoid having its early publicity undermined by a new iPhone release. The Pre is one of the few smartphones seeing a climb in demand for the next few months.

source:macnn

iPhone 3.0, Palm Pre to drive phone demand

iPhones running the OS 3.0 update and the Palm Pre are both likely to spur the next wave of smartphone sales in the next three months, according to a new ChangeWave study. Of those looking to buy a device in the 90 days following the March survey, iPhone demand is technically remaining flat at 30 percent; however, about 20 percent of the total group said they would be more likely to buy an iPhone now that iPhone OS 3.0’s features are public. Of those whose interest is sparked by the prospect of iPhone 3.0, demand is evenly split by the theoretical capacities of new hardware. About 9 percent would be willing to buy a 32GB iPhone at the $299 price of the current 16GB model, while 11 percent would want to buy a 16GB iPhone if it was lowered to the $199 price of an 8GB version. If a stripped-down 8GB model were available at $99, 8 percent would opt for that model.

Palm remains a distant third in demand but has seen plans to buy one of its phone spike from just 1 percent in December to 4 percent in March based almost exclusively on favorable impressions of the Pre, which brings a new OS and a more modern touchscreen design.

Conversely, demand for BlackBerries has actually cooled over the past 4 months, dropping from 39 percent to 37 percent. The decline is assigned to a cooldown following the launch of the BlackBerry Storm.

ChangeWave warns that Palm may have trouble increasing demand due to loyalty, as only 1 percent of existing iPhone users and 4 percent of BlackBerry users would consider switching to any of Palm’s phones. Just 1 percent are also willing to switch to Sprint for any device.

source:elecronista

Palm webOS gets classic apps, cloud sync

Palm today took aggressive steps to expand support for the webOS by adding legacy support, Internet sync, a larger developer program and new third-party apps it says showcase the new mobile platform. The company has revealed that outside firm MotionApps has developed a utility known as Classic that emulates support for PalmOS software. Like its rough equivalent in Apple’s Mac OS X, it creates a virtual environment that works with “most” apps; the change to a full touchscreen OS requires that MotionApps put in simulated buttons. It should launch at the same time as the Pre, which should ship to Sprint in late spring. The smartphone creator also plans to tackle services like Apple’s MobileMe and Microsoft’s My Phone with its own cloud sync service. Developers will have access to a platform known as the Mojo Messaging Service that will let developers have information sent to and from a subscription system that automatically flags new content and pushes it out to webOS phones. While initially limited in what it can handle, Palm expects it to broaden significantly. Palm will expose the feature to programmers when the Mojo SDK that underpins webOS is made generally available.

As part of its effort to encourage support, Palm has complemented cloud sync by saying it will provide access to its Mojo SDK to a “broader set” of developers than the small group that had initially been let in. The expansion will still be small but should expand to include every interested developers as tools are refined to a more usable state.

Click to read more ...

Palm Pre Being Assembled in Taiwan

Palm, Inc. designed its next smartphone, the Palm Pre, itself, but this company outsources all its device production. The OEM that will be manufacturing the first webOS-based smartphone is Chi Mei Communication Systems (CMCS).

Chi Mei isn’t as well-known as some of the other Taiwan-based smartphone makers, like HTC, Compal, and Inventec. It is best known for producing handsets for Motorola.

As mentioned earlier, the Palm Pre will be the first device to use Palm’s just-announced webOS. This will be a multi-tasking operating system able to wirelessly synchronize a wide variety of data with online services like Google and Facebook.

The Pre itself will feature a sliding keyboard as well as a multi-touch-capable 3.1-inch display. This device will also be equipped with 8 GB of on-board storage, Wi-Fi b/g, Bluetooth 2.1, and a 3.0 megapixel camera with LED flash.

In the U.S. the Pre will be available first from Sprint, who will add its mobile broadband service EV-DO Rev. A. The GSM version for Europe and Latin America will have the 3G standard HSDPA. Palm has promised to release this device in the first half of this year, but has declined to be any more specific.

source [brighthand]