Palm Pre on June 6th for $199.99: It’s Officially Official

By  |  Tuesday, May 19, 2009 at 6:46 am

Palm PreOkay, no more disclaimers: The Offical Palm Blog says that Sprint will start selling the Pre on  June 6th for $199.99 (with two-year contract, after $100 rebate). That’s price parity with the 8GB iPhone, if you’re considering the price after the (ugh!) rebate. And yes, Palm and Sprint will be releasing the phone two days before Apple has the opportunity to announce a new iPhone. (Maybe Palm has better sources than me and knows definitively whether the Pre will face immediate new-iPhone competition–or maybe not.)

All this leaves only one major question about the Pre–namely, how good is it? I’m looking forward to finding out…

 
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5 Comments For This Post

  1. jcunwired Says:
    May 19th, 2009 at 7:21 am

    I’d be interested in your take on the phone once its released (if you plan to review it), particularly because you’ve been rather pessimistic – and I respect your opinion!
    As far as WWDC and iPhone news, my guess is that this will be delayed for Jobs return to make a big splash and grand comeback.

  2. Harry McCracken Says:
    May 19th, 2009 at 7:32 am

    Actually, I consider myself to be a Pre optimist–from an interface standpoint, it’s the first phone since the original iPhone to introduce some truly original new ideas. (Android is nice, but nothing radical.) And the hardware looks good, too. It’s just reasonable, of course, to be wary of declaring something to be wonderful based on demos–it’s possible that the Pre will be buggy and unreliable, or that Palm hasn’t been showing us areas of the software that are disappointing.

    But if the Pre turns out to be as good as it seems to be so far, it’s an impressive piece of work. I keep saying that it’s totally in tune with the spirit of the original PalmPilot–it’s the device that Palm would have built in 1995 if the technology had existed. I mean that as a high compliment.

    I’d love to think you’re correct about Apple (the part about Jobs making a grand comeback reasonably soon). But I’m guessing that the keynote will happen as planned, and that it will involve a new iPhone of some sort.

    –Harry

  3. Paul Judd Says:
    May 19th, 2009 at 8:02 am

    I agree with Harry on the Keynote date. It’s already been announced and the whole event is already sold out based on the dates that we already know about. I seriously doubt that Apple will cheese off all of these folks and either change the date of the whole event with such a short notice or have a whole ‘nother event 2 weeks later just to have the next phone announced by Steve. Events like these are planned well enough in advanced because they are tough enough to change last minute. They can update the presentation, but they aren’t going to delay it. People are expecting it to happen.

  4. jcunwired Says:
    May 19th, 2009 at 9:01 am

    Apologies, I must clarify. WWDC will go off as planned, but I do believe that an announcement of any new iPhone hardware platform (or media tablet, possibly) be postponed until a later date when Jobs himself can come back and announce it himself. Both events are huge news, it makes sense to pair them.

  5. Paul Judd Says:
    May 19th, 2009 at 9:41 am

    Why wait though when you could just announce it at WWDC which is already going to get alot of eyes (being sold out) than wait weeks to months just so Jobs could show it off. The only rationale for doing that would be if any upgrades are that far off anyway.

    The whole problem with creating a separate event is that it has to be for more than the iPhone and some mythical tablet. It has to be really worth it to have all the extra overhead in addition to giving Palm a free month of non-iPhone related attention. It makes far better sense for Apple to cut Palm off at the pass after only 6 days – make the announcement (if there is one) rather than have to wait a month or so to plan a separate event – All just to have it demoed by Steve Jobs. Thats it.

    Remember, the 3G iPhone was announced at WWDC last year. Why would it be any different this year. It isn’t as if there is some sacred code that says that Steve Jobs must announce EVERYTHING. In fact, I would argue that they are moving away from that approach to curb customer dependency. All I am saying is that it just doesn’t add up. Why would Apple waste a perfect opportunity to eliminate any advantage that Palm would have?

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  1. Alleged iPhone 3.0 Specs and Ship Date Leak | Technologizer Says:
    May 19th, 2009 at 4:53 pm

    […] said that this news breaking today is unfortunate for Palm, which announced that the Pre would be shipping on June 16 for US$199.99 (after rebate) earlier […]