AT&T CEO indicates desire to sell Palm Pre on the AT&T network

By Michael Herald, posted Wednesday, May. 27th, 2009
Reader Comments: 2

According to the Wall Street Journal, AT&T Inc. CEO Randall Stephenson has said that he envisions his company offering the Palm Pre to its customers, once Sprint's exclusivity deal for the Pre expires. Sprint is to begin offering the Palm Pre on June 6 of this year. The terms of the carrier's exclusivity deal for the Pre have not been made public as of yet.

Currently no carriers have announced support for the GSM/UMTSversion of the Palm Pre that was demonstrated at this year's Mobile World Congress event, which took place in Barcelona back in February. It is this version that AT&T would eventually offer, since the Sprint version of the device works on CDMA based networks.

Source: Mobile Burn

I also heard that Verizon will get the Pre sometime after the Sprint exclusive. So it probably won't help Sprint much, since it is known now that the other carriers will eventually pick up this device.

Posted by Michael Herald, Thursday, May. 28th, 2009

The Pre's Achilles heel is Sprint; Palm isn't the only company who's future is riding on the success of the Pre. But for Sprint, success isn't just selling the Pre to existing customers, but convincing users to switch carriers, something that's not likely to happen in large numbers. Sprint's ever shrinking customer base isn't going to provide the Pre the home run that Palm needs.

On AT&T, the Pre would be a guaranteed success. As an added bonus for Palm, contract-less unlocked GSM Pre's would make sense, opening up a whole new market for the device.

Posted by bluewater, Thursday, May. 28th, 2009

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