Palm Pre to sell like hot cakes, Sprint CEO proclaims
Best to er, pre-order, says man familiar with the matter
Cloud storage: Lower cost and increase uptime
The Palm Pre is going to sell so well the company will have trouble meeting demand. This is according to impartial observer Dan Hesse, CEO of Sprint, the network with an exclusive deal to supply Palm's last-chance handset.
Palm is betting the company on the Pre, which is set to launch on the 6 June. What is less well reported is how dependent Sprint is on the success of Pre which explains Hesse's recommendation that everyone pre-order their handsets or risk disappointment.
The handset is being listed at $199, after a $100 mail-in rebate (except, apparently, at Best Buy where the rebate will be applied at the till), which should prove attractive for a device that taps so completely into the current vogue for social networking.
Mobile Burn is reporting a rumour that the company will only have 30,000 Pre handsets available at launch; that's not very many, even for a device that can only be used on CDMA networks (and thus won't spread outside the USA until Palm can afford to develop a GSM version).
30,000 seems extreme, but Dan Hesse did tell an investor conference: "We won't be able to keep up with demand for the device in the early period of time."
Rumours of limited supply have become grist to the mill in the handset business - if no one is camped outside your shops on launch day then you're dismissed as unpopular, so the comments come as no great surprise when so much is resting on one little handset. ®
COMMENTS
Re: anonymous coward
Err, I have a Palm treo pro and it has hsdpa, wifi etc... I can't see why you think the pre wouldn't get those features to? They had Pre's with vodafone sims in at barcelona. I don't reckon it will be too long until it comes here.
@ Will Re: Still no news...
And even if it eventually comes with GSM, that's a bit lame for Europe. Any decent web-centric device has to have 3G or it may as well be back in the 20th Century. Nokia E Series and N-Series will kill it here.
@ Will Re: Still no news...
did you not read the article? Palm do not have a version of the Pre that'll work on the UK networks. It will only run on the US network. Therefore, no UK launch for the near future.
And if it is correct that they've only been able to manufacture so few, they they're going to have their hands full for the next 6 months or more just producing enough units to sell to US customers before they'll be able to start thinking about the rest of the world and setting up new production runs with GSM chips in them
IT infrastructure monitoring strategies
What you need to know about cloud backup
Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
Customer Success Testimonial: Recovery is Everything
Data control in the cloud
