Verizon Preparing to Put Off Pre Plans?

1) Palm execs never got off their high horse and spoke down to Verizon that they had the hottest smartphone on the market. It is about as sad as a burned out 50-something barfly bragging about the night she was elected homecoming queen.

2) The Pre, due to its cheap mechanical engineering, failed the quality control test for minimal durability. That sharp edge around the keyboard has been claimed to cut a few fingers but I can't confirm that.

3) This exclusive cloud computing and over the air sync'ing that they are forcing on the WebOS users is a bandwidth hog on Verizon's network. Verizon is the most critical on network performance to the point of on the fly throttling of cell phone transmission considering the local cell traffic. If Palm doesn't have those facilities in the cellular chip set, they screwed themselves again.

Short term gain, long term loss by being anal about the BOM spreadsheet again boys!

my post (and other news items, including a nice little scoop) is sitting in the PIC news queue, looking all lonely and sad. Damn Ryan and his timezones which totally conflict with mine...

i'll post here in the meantime, 'cause I'm a bit bored:

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Sites Claim Verizon Pre Confirmed

The headline says it all. We have two separate sites bringing us this news, putting paid to TheStreet's earlier, blatant attempt at stock manipulation. First, The Boy Genius Report is saying that they've "confirmed" Verizon Wireless will indeed be selling the Pre, There's no other meat to BGR's post: just this alleged confirmation from an anonymous tipster. Second is the E-Commerce Times, who have actually have a Verizon exec on record. Jim Gerace, executive director of media relations, says that Verizon will "offer the smartphone in January as planned".

You don't have to be a genius to see that Verizon's smartphone line-up stinks, and that in the absence of a CDMA version of that other smartphone, the Pre is an obvious catch for the USA's biggest carrier. Makes you wonder if anyone took TheStreet seriously.

Sometime PIC blogger
Treo 270 --> Treo 650 --> Treo 680 --> Centro
I apologise for any and all emoticons in my posts. You may shoot them on sight.

(tim hopes bhartman doesn't notice how often he links to PreCentral himself...)

SeldomVisitor wrote:
That's a serious question.

From what I've read, that Media guy at Verizon was fairly wishy-washy in what he was "confirming". It smells to THIS reader almost like a "Treo Pro"-like "carry".

To paraphrase in the way =I= read the stories:

== "Yes, we're going to carry the Palm Pre however we'll not be subsidizing
== it and it will be supported by Palm, not us."

So, is that TheStreet.com article actually incorrect or, heaven forbid!, was it actually the Me-Too Media =interpretation= of what that TheStreet.com article said that was wrong?

Here's what TheStreet.com =really= said:

== "...But people close to the discussions say Verizon has decided
== not to support the Pre..."
==
== "...Reached for comment on Verizon, a Palm representative says
== the company has never named Verizon as one of its partners..."
==
== "...Sources did say that Verizon could be more delicate about the
== decision and order just a small amount of Pre phones with no intention
== of lending much marketing support..."

I think we're witnessing another Treo Pro Affair - no kidding.

SV:

Monitz was remarkably clear as to what he meant. From the lead paragraph:

Pre phone isn't making the cut at Verizon (VZ Quote).

The Pre, Palm's premier touch-screen smartphone, which has been an exclusive offering this year at Sprint (S Quote), had been scheduled to arrive at Verizon in January. But people close to the discussions say Verizon has decided not to support the Pre.

Note the contrast in the bolded passage. The clear intention of the article is to suggest that the Pre won't arrive on Verizon -- subsidized or not.

In addition, all of the factors listed by Monitz are reasons Verizon wouldn't carry the Pre, not reasons they wouldn't subsidize it.

And finally, carrying the Pre without subsidizing it would just be idiotic. That is, if they want to sell more than five of them. Who in their right mind would buy a locked phone for as much as an unlocked phone (which is what anyone buying an unsubsidized Verizon Pre would be doing, under that scenario)? There's no reason on God's green Earth for Palm to make that kind of deal with Verizon, because Palm actually wants to sell the Pre. There certainly may be talks about how much of the price of the Pre will be subsidized by Verizon (e.g., MIR vs. not, etc.), but if Verizon just plain didn't subsidize the Pre, Palm would have no reason to put it on Verizon's network.

I think the two most reasonable conclusions to draw are either:

1) TheStreet simply got it wrong.
2) Verizon is lying about whether or not they'll carry the Pre.
3) One side or the other fed the rumor to TheStreet as a negotiation ploy.

Which of those do you think is more likely? I find it very unlikely that Verizon would lie about this issue, considering how that makes them look if they then don't carry it. And it seems very likely that Verizon would float these kinds of rumors about not carrying the Pre, to pressure Palm to agree to things like the subversion of the App Catalog.

And it looks like Verizon blinked first.

SeldomVisitor wrote:
Are you familiar with the Treo Pro history?

I know that it was released on Alltel, which Verizon sucked up, therefore some Verizon customers ending up with Treo Pros on Verizon.

I'm familiar with what you're referring to as a "Treo Pro-like 'carry'", if that's what you're asking. It doesn't seem to me (from what I've been able to read) that the Treo Pro situation was at all unusual on Alltel. There were a variety of price points available, depending on whether you wanted it unlocked, or w/ a two year contract, etc.

How does that relate to Verizon not subsidizing the Pre? (I can certainly believe that they won't support the Pre. AT&T didn't support the Centro, either. If you had any problems, you turn to Palm.)

Again, Monitz was fairly explicit in the article. It might be true that Verizon has some other scheme up its sleeve, but that's not what the article addresses.

Anywho, the words used by the Verizon folks, anonymous and overt, are ... unusual. We'll have to see how this develops.

[somewhere, I'm not sure where, I've posted way in the early history of the Pre "Why WOULD Verizon carry this THAT late with all the OTHER phones that are and will be coming out?". Maybe Verizon is thinking so, too.]