Well, that didn’t take long. Interested in getting a Palm Pre Plus on Verizon? How about in getting it for free? Then head over to Wal-Mart Wireless for the deal you’ve been waiting for. With a new contract or a contract renewal, you can get a Verizon Pre Plus for free. At least, it’s free for now. These things have a tendency to be for a limited and undisclosed time only.
Thanks to Rick for the tip!
While we understand the drive to throw in freebies to entice a customer to buy a product, we as the customer generally prefer that the freebie be somehow useful to the product I am looking to purchase. Case-in-point, Wal-Mart Wireless’s online site (powered by LetsTalk) is giving out free 4GB microSD cards from Kingston with select Sprint phone purchases, including the Samsung Instinct S30, HTC Hero, Palm Centro, Samsung Moment, and the Palm Pre and Pixi. Wait, that’s not right…
In other news, Verizon’s website also has some cleaning up to do, as Hebrew language blog Palm Preacher noticed. Verizon’s fancy try-it-out emulator for the Pre Plus lists the following tech specs: 7630 MB ROM/256 MB RAM. If you’ve been following the news about the Pre Plus at all, you’ll noticed that those numbers are exactly half of what they should be, in fact they’re the specifications of the regular Pre, not the double plus good Pre Plus. At least some other parts of the Verizon website list the Pre Plus with the proper storage and memory. Now if only Verizon would actually show off the Pre Plus on their website…
Thanks to Darrell and avnera for the tips!
The scrum of analysts trying to get their two cents in before Palm’s financial call continues. We won’t note all of them, but when something surprising or interesting pops up, we can’t help but mention it.
While we hope that the financial results on Thursday will give us a better glimpse into how well the Pre has sold in Europe, the analysts over at MKM Partners aren’t hesitating to say they’ve done well. The firm recently upgraded Palm’s stock from Neutral to Buy and raised their price target to $20 (up from $11). What motivates such optimism in the face of a quarter that is expected to have been as good as predicted but still not that great?
Like us at PreCentral, MKM believes that the expected launch of the Pre and Pixi on Verizon next year will open up Palm and webOS to millions more customers, as well as mitigating “the uncertainty of an AT&T relationship.”
MKM also noted something of particular interest: Palm has performed better in Europe than expected and the Pre has been “outselling key HTC and Motorola [Android] models in major markets like the U.K.” If that is the case, it represents a surprising turn, where Palm historically did well in the US and failed in Europe, but is now struggling in the US and succeeding overseas. Right now we have no way of confirming the hypothesis, though we do hope that Palm at least breaks out their sales by carrier or region.
Thirdly, MKM’s analysts believe that the price battle between Amazon and Wal-Mart over Pre and Pixi pricing is not only indicative of the ongoing war between the two mega-retailers, but that it shows strong support for both devices and vindicates “Palm’s strategy of targeting the mass market, rather than tech enthusiasts.”
And in the last note in their four-point position, MKM actually expects that the soon-to-be-reported quarter from Palm will actually exceed expectations. They also expect that Palm will miss their mark in the coming quarter (ending February 2010), but expansion onto new carriers in 2010 will not trouble investors too much.
While Thursday will bring the answers we’ve been waiting for, it is nice to see that analysts have been more positive on Palm this quarter than last. Then again, they may have learned their lesson when Palm blew out the predicted unit sales by hundreds of thousands. But Palm is still a shaky company in a fast-moving industry in a very shaky global economic climate. Right now, investors are looking for signs that the Pre was not just a one-hit-wonder – they want a company that can survive, or at least one that will make an attractive acquisition target.
Thanks to rowehc for the tip!
If there’s anything that we at PreCentral love to see, it’s two giant retailers going after each other’s price tags in the quest for customer wallets. Lately, mega-box super retailer Wal-Mart and ecommerce monolith Amazon have been going at it, slashing prices back and forth in a battle that shows just how efficient these two companies’ distribution systems are. And with the western front battle over iTunes all sorts of quiet between Palm and Apple, we need some other fight to cheer on, right?
The beneficiaries of all this back-and-forth price cutting is clearly you, the potential customer. Not satisfied with having just matched pricing with Amazon, Wal-Mart has lowered its pricing on both the Sprint Palm Pre and Sprint Palm Pixi be a few dollars to best their online competitor. A Pre will set you back $74.99, while a Pixi from Wal-Mart now costs $22.99. Wal-Mart’s contract renewal and off-contract prices remain unchanged. We can’t say for sure how long this pricing will last; the cheap Pixi deal at Wal-Mart only stayed around for about a week.
Amazon, the ball’s in your court now.
UPDATE: Game, set, match. Amazon has matched Wal-Mart’s prices on the Pre and the Pixi.
Thanks to Eric for the tip!
Choices for buying the new webOS-based Palm Pixi are becoming more interesting. On November 15th, you can walk into a Sprint store or one of it’s affiliates like Best Buy and Radio Shack, lay down $200 bucks (with $100 coming back as a main-in rebate), and walk out with a new Pixi.
Or, if you’re a [...]
And we thought that $99.99 at Sprint was a deal! Wal-Mart’s online wireless store has the Palm Pixi up for pre-order at a frightening low price: $29.99 for new contract customers. What would set you back $200 out-the-door (less a $100 mail-in-rebate) at a Sprint store is only $30 at Wal-Mart. As we said, this is for new contract customers only, with a contract renewal Pixi costing a hefty $249.99, and off-contract weighing in at $499.99. Wal-Mart Wireless lists the Pixi for pre-order and as having an estimated in-stock date of November 24th, while Sprint stores and affiliates like Best Buy and The Shack can expect to have it on the 15th, this coming Sunday.
Thanks to Shadow-360 for the tip!
And you thought $79.99 for a Pre was a good deal. The folks over at Phone Cashback.net have teamed up with Wal-Mart/LetsTalk to make the deal even more sweet, with a not-instant rebate for the Pre that brings the price down to a paltry $0.00. The same accessory bundle is included in the deal. While Phone Cashback.net will be running their promotion until Wednesday, the freeness only comes when paired with Wal-Mart’s own $100 mail-in-rebate, which expires on Monday, and only applies to new contract orders. So if you’ve been waiting for the chance to jump to Sprint and grab a Pre, Monday may be your day.
Move quickly, because this deal expires on Monday, September 28th. Wal-Mart Wireless (formerly known as LetsTalk) has decided to slash $100 off the price of the Palm Pre, dropping it down to a mere $79.99. Why they’re still charging $179.99 regularly is a mystery to us. But forking over $80 to Wal-Mart won’t just get you a Pre on Sprint, it’ll also net you a free accessory kit, which includes a car charger, screen protector, clear case, and a bluetooth headset. The bundle is valued at $34.99, so we wouldn’t expect anything of good quality out of it, in fact it may all stick, but if its included at no extra cost, why not?
Thanks to Sharon for the tip!
Move quickly, because this deal expires on Monday, September 28th. Wal-Mart Wireless (formerly known as LetsTalk) has decided to slash $100 off the price of the Palm Pre, dropping it down to a mere $79.99. Why they’re still charging $179.99 regularly is a mystery to us. But forking over $80 to Wal-Mart won’t just get you a Pre on Sprint, it’ll also net you a free accessory kit, which includes a car charger, screen protector, clear case, and a bluetooth headset. The bundle is valued at $34.99, so we wouldn’t expect anything of good quality out of it, in fact it may all stink, but if its included at no extra cost, why not?
Thanks to Sharon for the tip!
As reported by Reuters (and then every other news outlet under the sun), at an investors conference this morning, Sprint CEO Dan Hesse told shareholders:
“We don’t intend to advertise it heavily early on because we think we are going to have shortages for a while. We won’t be able to keep up with demand for the device in the early period of time.”
This jives with earlier rumors about there being a limited supply for the Pre on hand at launch, possibly around 375,000 units – all to be spread out to thousands of Sprint stores and select Wal-Mart, Best Buy, and Radio Shack locations nationwide. Analysts Lawrence Harris of CL King Associates doesn’t expect that Sprint will be able to poach many customers from Verizon or AT&T, saying, “It’s going to sell principally into the base, to existing Palm owners and existing Sprint subscribers.”