The eagerly awaited Palm Pre smartphone will be available on Saturday, June 6, in the U.S. for $199.99 after a $100 mail-in rebate and a two-year service contract with Sprint Nextel.
Besides Sprint stores, the Palm Pre will be sold online and at Best Buy, Radio Shack and Wal-Mart. Buyers will have a choice of Sprint’s Simply Everything unlimited plan for $99.99 a month, an $89.99 plan with 900 minutes, or $69.99 for 450 minutes. Palm will also offer a wireless Touchstone charger kit for $69.99.
The Palm Pre is the first phone to run on Palm’s new webOS and will include Sprint Navigation and Sprint TV. Sprint will be the exclusive Pre provider through the end of the year. In Canada, Bell Mobility will offer the Pre.
Betting the Company
Palm, once a tech powerhouse with its Palm PDA devices, has fallen on hard times in recent years and needs the Pre launch to be successful. Barclays Capital is betting on the Pre’s success and has raised its performance estimates for Palm, seeing sales of almost $2 billion for the year. But launch costs and other problems the company faces could temper profits.
The Pre’s launch on a Saturday appears timed to overshadow the possible announcement of a new iPhone at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, which begins Monday, June 8. That gives buyers two days to succumb to the hoopla and get used to the Pre before any Apple announcement. Analysts expect Apple to offer a new iPhone, and AT&T, the exclusive iPhone carrier in the U.S., may reduce the cost for iPhone service.
AT&T’s charges are widely viewed as a barrier to increasing the iPhone’s share of the smartphone market, and Sprint’s pricing appears designed to exploit that problem. Currently AT&T charges $69 a month for iPhone service, which includes an unlimited data plan,…