[/caption]Not much news has surfaced since I first mentioned my interest in the Palm Pre back on February 20th. Here we are 4 months later with 2 months to go, and we STILL don't have a price or a set release date on it.
This fact alone is not only frustrating, but completely ridiculous. What is the hold up? When is it coming out? Do you guys know of an expected price yet? Both sides (Palm & Sprint) are playing dumb with "We don't have a price or know when it's coming out." This is starting to piss off a lot of people (like me) who have been following this phone since its announcement at CES. Apple at least had the courtesy of providing a release date when they announced their iPhone.
We expected Palm or Sprint to make an announcement at CTIA with some worthy news about the Pre. All that was announced at CTIA were the plans you need to use the phone. Basically an Everything Data phone or a Simply Everything plan.
There have been several rumor dates floating around. A while back people predicted that the phone would be out my March 1st since Sprint traditionally releases their phones on a Sunday. Then April 15th (tax day) for whatever reason, then April 30th. PreCentral.net thinks the release date will be May 17th, but now are having second thoughts about that. As days wane on towards June 30th, I'm thinking we're going to see it released the last week of June.
I can't help but think at this point that maybe they're laughing or mocking us? I've been reading some of Palm's posts on their official blog and on their official Twitter profile and some of their responses to the community have been kinda dumb.
Just recently Palm showed the Pre to Molly McAleer, some chick who does her own show called The Molls Show. I'm guess that Palm showed her the phone to get her to advertise it? Despite Molly looking kinda cute, ultimately the video she did was pointless... I'll do you a favor and save you 2 minutes of your life: She reveals to the world in an emo sort of way that she "secretly" has a crush on the Pre.
The only thing that's worthy of news since February 20th is that the Palm Pre will support emulation for the old Palm O/S applications. If I were to make an educated guess, it's to at least let those that still use the old Palm devices the ability to use them while uring the developers of those old applications to port their software over to Web O/S.
As I'm writing this, PreCentral.net has confirmed with their sources that UPS is shipping back the finalized phones from China to the U.S. Apparently these phones have the final ROM flash loaded on so they're ready to be sold at launch. The question is WHEN? And how much?
It's hard to say if Sprint and Palm are trying to keep the hype with the Pre going. Sprint launched an ad campaign on the phone, ads have been found on Facebook, the homepage of CNN.com and other popular websites, but the ads don't reveal anything about the price or a release date. How can you advertise something without including a price? Just showing pictures of a phone with stupid slogans like "The new Palm Pre Only from Sprint. And only on the Now Network" doesn't tell any of us anything we'd like to know.
Update: PreCentral.net officially killed of May 17th, they're guessing the release date will be June 7th.
