The Palm Pre from Sprint made a bigger splash than Palm Sunday did this year. But was the impression a lasting one?
It sold out within an hour. Still, the numbers selling out were small, maybe 50 or 60 in stock — just enough to feed smaller skeletal crowds with Palm on their minds, nothing like the iPhone mania. Sprint Nextel itself seems vestigial compared to the giant it was when Sprint was a byword for telecommunication. Now Sprint’s days selling the Palm Pre are numbered, less than 200, until January 10, 2010, when Verizon becomes the exclusive vendor. They’re a new smart phone touted by Palm groupies everywhere, but is this commotion just a conniption?
You could be the first octogenarian on your block to buy a Pre with its nouveau WebOS, but Palm Inc. is dying, and the wireless carrier Sprint is no longer so wired.
Palm Pilot users are like devotees to Marihesh Mahaha Yoga, but will they have the last laugh? Many do prefer a QWERTY keyboard to an iPhone’s touchscreen. It’s relatively cheap too. Sprint sells the Palm Pre for $200 after a $100 mail-in rebate, plus a two-year service agreement which is better than you can get now with most American-made cars.
Selling out might be deceptive to speak about. Sprint wouldn’t say how many units were available nationwide, certainly not thousands at any one outlet, probably not even hundreds. The Pre is great for sorting through emails using a common interface – the secrets of Yahoo, Google, revealed by this smart phone with a QWERTY. The octogenarian might sync his Pre to iTunes — there’s no law against it — and he was heard saying, “I love iTunes,” to his granddaughter, a young woman wearing a cowboy hat from Nevada who prefers Blackberries and calls them fruity. But the Sprint deal will expire sooner rather than later and Verizon will bound onto the scene, with its stability for such issues as service and maintenance, although an Indy repair shop for cell phones might be a better answer for the Sprinters in the interim. Is it Palm pre Sunday yet?
Jeff Gasner is with CPR-Cell Phone repair. The leader in Cell Phone Repair and iPod repair offering cell phone repair services nationwide. To learn more about Cell phone repair, ipod repair, cell repair services, visit Chicagocellrepair.com.
