The day is finally upon us — no, not the launch of the Pre, but the announcement of the launch of the Pre! While it’s certain to be a great piece of hardware, it seems like Palm is making some weird choices about how they’re rolling out the launch:
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Launch timing: I know there’s buzz around the Pre, but launching on a Saturday is a good way to make sure it’s out of the overall news cycle and kill buzz. Not only that, but 2 days before the Apple WWDC, where it’s known that Apple will be announcing new iPhone software (¬± hardware). Even if Palm has an iPhone killer on their hands, I don’t think this timing makes much sense. Why not 2 days after the WWDC announcments, where the Pre’s features would be compared to the new iPhone’s, and differences are highlighted. This would make sense if Palm were confident that the Pre would really outshine the iPhone — that they’re announcing it before, to me, shows some doubt about being better than the iPhone (not saying that they are or aren’t better, it just seems like a weak roll-out strategy).
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Mail-in rebate: The phone will be $300 before a $200 mail-in rebate. Mail-in? I realize that the rate of response on a mail-in rebate is relatively low, but the sticker price will be 50% higher, and that apparent extra $100 that people have to shell out seems like it would be a big turn-off to potential buyers (not the engadget crowd, but interested people who come in off the street, and may be comparing to the iPhone or T1).
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Required plans: Sounds like Sprint could have helped out by making the required unlimited plan slightly lower-priced than the iPhone’s — even $5 would have been appealing, I’m sure. Even though they include unlimited minutes (+$60 with AT&T) and text messaging (+$20 with AT&T), it seems like they could have made it so that people don’t even have to look at the features to see a lower price of ownership. I think it’s dumb of AT&T to charge so much for the unlimited options (particularly the texting), but in reality, I doubt that too many users, on a phone like the Pre with IM, Twitter, and email, are going to use a ton of SMS messages anyway. Maybe I’m wrong about that.
Finally, I hope this isn’t the sale pitch for Touchstone, but I really don’t know how they expect to pitch it otherwise — I just don’t see the point of it. Anyway, in the press release, they say:
Pre comes with a charger in the box, but for anyone tired of plugging a cord into their wireless phone, Palm introduces the Touchstone‚Ñ¢ charging dock, the first inductive charging solution for phones, available exclusively for Pre.
I would think that anybody tired of plugging a cord into their phone would probably become more exhausted by carrying around a Touchstone!
So, do you guys think that Sprint could have planned the rollout or terms better? Even if they hit a homer with the hardware, I hope they don’t screw up the launch.