Sprint Employees Reportedly Already Training on the Pre, Feb 15 Launch not so Crazy? 37
Two separate reports have come in claiming that Sprint employees are already training up on the Palm Pre. The first from Sarah Lacy (the reporter who managed to pull the new Pre features out of McNamee) claims via Twitter that Sprint employees "are training on them, but they don't come out until June." There's a similar report over at SprintUsers from Awake:
Good news, several Sprint stores in my area have received brochures and literature on the Pre today. The store advocate said they should get a demo and live model within weeks, they expect the Pre will launch in 3 weeks!
Awake double-checked that these employees were talking about the Pre and not the Treo Pro, but don't take it as gospel that the unlikely February 15th launch we reported on is now a bit more likely. Why not? Well, at sister site WMExperts we find confirmation that Palm's Treo Pro on Sprint has been delayed until, guess what, February 15th. So either Febuary 15th will be a day of miracles for Sprint and Palm or there are a few wires getting crossed somewhere.
37 Comments
I'm not sure Sprint has a ton of options on when they release it. Sprint isn't doing very well financially... Even compared to the other carriers they are in bad shape.
If there's one thing we should have all learned over the years, it's that Sprint employees really don't know anything. Even the ones who think they know, or are in higher-up positions within the company. It's fun to speculate, don't get me wrong, but we've heard everything from "a few days" to "June". They are a completely unreliable source of information at best.
@Dieter
A friend of mine who works for a corporate Sprint store has already played with a live demo unit of the Pre and he had nothing but good things to say about it. He also said that it would be launching "soon". So I don't think it's crazy to believe the February rumor that has been going around the blogs so far.
Keep your fingers crossed, I know you are getting a Pre too.
"He doesn't know much about phones so it could've been a Treo Pro instead of a Pre, but he was positive it was a flip phone...so who knows, this could be true."
No chance. I'll bet my entire life savings it was the Touch Pro. The Pre isn't a "flip phone" (nor is the Touch Pro for that matter), but maybe he was referring to the slide-out keyboard on the Touch Pro.
He could just as easily have been referring to the slide-down keyboard on the Pre. Hard to tell, short of B2M2 emailing him a picture of each one and asking "Which of these was the phone you saw?"
I've never heard of anyone referring to a slide-out keyboard (no matter which direction it slides) as a flip phone.
But more to the point, his friend who by his own admission doesn't know much about phones was taking to a Sprint employee who by definition knows nothing about phones. :) I wouldn't get your hopes up guys.
Palm Treo Pro, Palm Pre, WTF? Maybe the dumb names are intentional - to make rumors confusingly useless? They certainly aren't helping differentiate the lines...