“Verizon Wireless plans to start selling Palm Inc’s Pre and a new version of the touchscreen BlackBerry Storm in about six months, the top executive for the venture of Verizon Communications Inc. and Vodafone Group Plc said on Thursday,” Sinead Carew and Franklin Paul report for Reuters.
“Shares in Sprint Nextel Corp., the exclusive launch provider for Pre, fell 3 percent after the comments from Lowell McAdam during a webcast as the highly anticipated Pre is seen as key to helping Sprint stem subscriber losses,” Carew and Paul report.
“Shares in Palm were up more than 11 percent after the announcement of a second U.S. carrier for the device on which Palm is depending heavily to revamp its own business and regain market share from rivals such as Apple Inc’s iPhone,” Carew and Paul report.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Verizon Wireless. Home of the iPhone Wannabes.
Now, let’s see: First the business geniuses at Palm freeze what’s left of their market by pre-announcing the “Pre” (Get it? “Pre”-announcing. Anyway…) which kills sales of existing Palm devices as what’s left of the Palm devotees wait desperately for the Pre and its measly collection of web apps.
Now, just days before launch, Palm’s aforementioned business geniuses decide to let everyone on Verizon who’ve been waiting doggedly for the Pre so they can claim to have a sort-of iPhone, too, basically delay their purchase for yet another long six months. That’s a huge chunk of the Pre’s potential market.
And, oh yeah, at the very start of the “Long Wait for ‘Pre’ Part Deux,” Apple will drop iPhone 3.0 and, quite likely, new iPhone hardware.
Consciously or subconsciously, the Apple castoffs that make up what’s left of Palm must want the company to die.
