Sprint has Pre Exclusive thru 2009 36
Reuters is reporting that Sprint Nextel has the exclusive U.S. rights to sell the Palm Pre through the end of 2009. Their source is “a person familiar with the matter,” so you can take it with a grain of salt. This person, who asked not to be named, did not offer any insight beyond this year.
SeekingAlpha has posted a story (Why Sprint Needs the Palm Pre to Succeed) that has some more meat.
“It is clear that Sprint needs something to make customers stick around, and they believe that they have that silver bullet with their exclusive deal with Palm (PALM) to provide the new Pre handset.”
...One 'must-have' handset can be a huge boon to a carrier, and with Sprint’s high churn rate it needs to give consumers something to get excited about."
For sure, Sprint needs all the good news it can get. More on Sprint's earnings can be found here.
36 Comments
I thought Rev. A allows it. (Too lazy to check Wikipedia right now).
India. I went to India last August for work and the CDMA coverage in that country is phenomenal. There's plenty of GSM coverage there too, but the hilarious part is my TMobile and AT&T wielding coworkers had more expensive roaming than me. ($3/minute as opposed to $2.50/minute with sprint) Take that silly GSM. :)
Although my scenario is an exception, if your travels do NOT include Europe then you'd be surprised at how much CDMA is out there. My company has offices in India, Singapore and Australia. For us, CDMA is a viable option.
From the specs and news coming out since CES, it appears that Palm has already crippled much of the Pre's potential already. I'm sure Verizon wouldn't need to alter it much to be happy.