Best Buy Holding a Pre Trial Launch June 7th?

I have a feeling that $999 price is just a temporary placeholder price. Perhaps they are going to require that all initial Pre sales require a new contact or a current contract extension, ala first 20 months the iPhone was on the market.

Now, If the $999 price is NOT a mistake and is indeed correct then we'd better start preparing our Palm eulogies.

Don't underestimate the significance of that $999 full retail price. While it's a tiny, miniscule group of users, there ARE people that buy CDMA phones for full retail price. These are usually the early adopters who buy a phone, use it a few months, then sell it to mitigate the cost of their next handset purchase. It's one thing to clobber those users with the usual $450-$600 retail price for an unsubsidized CDMA phone, as we have seen on Treos past. But for Palm to have the gumption--nay, the ARROGANCE--to charge a cool grand for a handset that in many ways lags behind a Centro is just ridiculous.

Ceiling for the Pre is 2nd place? Only in Colligan & Elevation partners' (wet) dreams! More like 5th place, especially if all of this pricing and availability tomfoolery continues.

P.S. Palm's hubris right now reeks of Nintendo's strategic cartridge "shortages" of the late 80s. The only diffference is Nintendo at that time was on top of the market whereas Palm now is just a shell of its golden years pre-IPO self.
Pilot 1000->Pilot 5000->PalmPilot Pro->IIIe->Vx->m505->T|T->T|T2->T|C->T|T3->T|T5->Zodiac 2->TX->Verizon Treo 700P->Verizon Treo 755p->?

Because this site is comprised (mostly) of REAL users relating their REAL world experiences. Most of the people here are long-time Palm veterans and have watched that company teeter on the brink for the better part of the past decade, alternating between minor successes (Centro, TX, Treo 650) and outright failures (LifeDrive, Fooleo).

Most of us (at least me) WANT Palm to succeed. However, they usually end up just sucking.

Back on topic:

It would be just cheaper to sign up for a new Sprint line/contract, get the cheap Pre for $199, then cancel the contract ASAP and pay the ETA and keep the Pre. That's STILL cheaper than $999.

Another possible conspiracy theory:

The Pres seen at CES & CTIA seemed to be very snappy and blindingly fast at times (launching apps, rotating the screen, flipping thru cards). Yet the early hands-on reviews of production Pres say that it can get laggy. Did it get bogged down from adding more stuff to the final production ROM? Were the early demo units overclocked/tweaked/optimized in order to impress the press and get a favorable early buzz? Or does Palm already have a mildly refreshed "Rev B" hardware/OS waiting in the wings?

Perhaps the first 5k or so Pres (BB's stock) hitting the market be the A-revision and will then swiftly & quietly be replaced by the much snappier B-revision? It wouldn't be the first time. Look at the performance improvements between the Rev. A and Rev. B Treo 755p's, for example. Or, more recently, the various ROMs found in Sprint Treo Pros.
Pilot 1000->Pilot 5000->PalmPilot Pro->IIIe->Vx->m505->T|T->T|T2->T|C->T|T3->T|T5->Zodiac 2->TX->Verizon Treo 700P->Verizon Treo 755p->?

The Bot Genious Report "article" has been totally poo-pooed by that Sprint Insider guy.

It now being the next day, I'm glad to see this debunked.

It would be absolutely disastrous for Palm to pull something like that.

When the iPhone was originally released, there was more than enough for *everybody*. NO ONE was DISAPPOINTED. This kind of "beta" release would leave a bad taste in everybody's mouth.

And no, I wouldn't line up for a shot to buy *one* Pre that a store might or might not have in stock. I have my limits, dammit.

>>>Palm calls it's ROM updates "the next model."

LMAO.

But people have now seen how Apple handles updates and will expect Palm to follow suit.

Why would you want to buy this when the EOS is right around the corner? Compared to the EOS it is a brick.

There's always another new device around the corner. You follow that philosophy long enough and you'll never buy another phone again.

Anyway - personally, I think Pre is way cooler than EOS. Curvy slider FTW.

"The m500 and m505 were released at the same time in March 2001. The m515 was released roughly a year later in March 2002"

I remember very well when they were released. The m500 arrived about a week sooner than the m505. I had one of the very first m505s in my part of Ohio. I went to the Circuit City with the package # of the m505s that had been unloaded from the truck that very day and the employees didn't even know they had the thing yet. This was of course long after I had my pre-order in at Palm. It was tempting to buy a 500 to get OS4.

Maybe they were released at the same time, but the m500 showed up first. That month was the most exciting ever in the Palm Kingdom and will never be duplicated.

I would vote for the release of the NR70 and NR70v. Sony had been cooking up some crazy handhelds in the years leading up to it (T615c, etc), but these were the first handhelds that really showed the capabilities of Palm OS if the manufacturer put in the effort. HVGA, keyboard, MP3 player, video playback, camera, and crazy twisting. That was cool.

Without Sony, we could expect Palm to release the m515 sometime in 2010. Without Apple, we could expect Palm to release the Pre sometime in 2042.

-Bosco
m105 -> NX70v -> NX80v -> iPhone -> iPhone 3G