Verizon ditches Palm Pre

September 25, 2009

Verizon ditches Palm Pre It’s been another week of mixed news for Palm over its Pre handset. The device will likely get a boost in sales thanks to a major price cut by Amazon, but it appears Verizon has ditched plans to carry the handset on its network.

The headline price of the Pre – the amount charged to new customers buying direct from carriers Sprint – recently dropped from $199 to $149, partially because it was replaced by the Pixi as Palm’s flagship handset.

However, Amazon is now offering it for just $99, with no need for rebates, to buyers taking up a new data plan. The five plans on offer are the same as those available to customers buying directly from Sprint.

It’s already been (apparently inadvertently) established that $99 is an attractive price point for the Pre: that’s the price at which Best Buy mistakenly offered it back in July, to the delight of many customers.

It now looks as if Sprint may remain the only option for Pre buyers in the United States. Business site The Street reports that Verizon has decided against plans to add the handset to its network. Sources say its decision is based on factors including the Pre’s comparatively weak sales, a potential conflict between Verizon’s own VCast app service and the official Palm app store, and a lack of enthusiasm for adding Palm’s WebOS to the range of operating systems the network has to work with.

Neither Verizon nor Palm has commented on the reports. Other sources have noted that Palm has placed orders for equipment which strongly suggests it is still planning to make a version of the handset for a network other than Sprint.

Palm has also boosted its bank account this week through issuing 20 million extra shares. While that inevitably caused a small drop in the stock price (around 5 percent), the offering has raised an extra $360 million.