Hasta La Gadget!

Oh, hey, look at that: you can buy a Pre now! As of 8:00AM on the East Coast, the phone went on sale at Sprint stores, with Best Buy, Radio Shack and Wal-Mart also retailing the phone today as Saturday dawns across the country. After Sprint’s invite only pre-Pre launch event last night, we still saw plenty of folks lined up outside Sprint’s “flagship” New York store in the Flatiron Building before the doors opened. Apparently people started queuing around 5:00AM, with Chris Lee and Randy Williams the first through the door — replacing a Treo Pro and a HTC Mogul, respectively. Like last night, the process took about 40 minutes, but a lot of that is spent waiting for a small pit crew of Sprint employees to swap over your address book, so if you forgo that we’d say you can be in and out in 30, which should still be plenty of time to savor the moment. Word is that the Flatiron store has about 100 units, but it’s clear that inventory varies widely between locations and retailers — Touchstones seem to be a much rarer commodity.

We’ll be checking out some other launches across the country, so stay tuned, and be sure to send in your own pictures and impressions!

Some word from the wilds:
Tipster Brad says that his Best Buy store in Orlando has only 9 Pres available, and they’re giving them out one by one on an appointment basis — he was fourth in line, so he’ll be going back at 12:15PM to pick his up. Unfortunately, their Touchstone stock is zero.

Kevin C. Tofel was fourth in line at his local Sprint store, which purportedly had 30 phones in stock, but he picked up the last of the Touchstones.

We just checked in at the Bryant Park Sprint store in New York City, and while Pre inventory is cool, they are all out of Touchstones. We’re starting to think the supply of those is quite limited. We also hear that at least one tenacious gentleman got in line at 6:00PM yesterday, and spent the night outside the store in order to get his first.

Continue reading Palm Pre goes on sale nationwide, line forms on the right

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Palm Pre goes on sale nationwide, line forms on the right originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 06 Jun 2009 09:24:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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• Tethering is not supported and Sprint has no plans to offer a tethering add-on. The company says it just isn’t a very good user experience and would prefer folks added on a data card line instead.
• About 1,000 invitations were sent out to randomly-selected Premier customers for this evening’s events at ten locations across the country. We’ve heard intermittent reports of folks getting in with no invite, but the Chicago store was staying firm.
• We were told that no store selling Pres this evening would be out of stock for tomorrow, but all bets are off once the floodgates open on Saturday. Company-owned stores got the lion’s share of stock while Best Buys and Radio Shacks were held to lower levels, so your best bet over the weekend is likely a Sprint store.
• We played with our keyboard and then a Sprint employee’s immediately after that had been in use for two weeks; the keys had lost some of their “stickiness,” which we take as a good sign. Fresh Pres have a slightly odd feel across the key surfaces.

Got any other interesting tidbits from your adventures this evening? Throw ’em in comments!

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Palm Pre: takeaways from Premier night originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 05 Jun 2009 21:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This won’t apply to many of you, but just a little public service announcement to members of Sprint’s elite Premier corps: you can get your Pre tonight if you’ve received an invitation to do so and you’re willing to make the trek to one of ten stores around the country where launch parties are being held. Our understanding is that this is strictly an invite-only event and that non-Premier riff raff (and non-Sprint customers) will be turned away, but honestly, if we were in the market for a Pre, we’d probably loiter for a bit just to see what’s up and get a gauge on whether they’re willing to bend the rules — particularly if the Pres end up not selling out by the time the night’s over. Either way, if you want a Pre this weekend you’ll need to leave your basement at some point because the phone won’t be sold online initially — so let us know how it goes out there in the trenches, folks, and we’ll do the same. Stay tuned!

[Image via PreCentral]

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

Palm Pres available tonight to invited Premier customers at launch events originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 05 Jun 2009 15:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The day you’ve been waiting for is here. Sprint just announced that the Pre will cost $199.99 after $100 mail-rebate and 2-year contract and will launch on June 6th as rumored this morning. The phone will go on sale nationwide (US-only for the moment) at Sprint stores, Best Buy, Radio Shack, and select Wal-Mart stores. The Pre will be available under Sprint’s Everything Data or Business Essentials with Messaging and Data plans. Accessories include the optional $69.99 Touchstone charging dock kit that includes the $49.99 dock and $19.99 Pre back cover. June 6th, that’s two days before the WWDC keynote. Poor Apple.

Note: Looking more info? Check out our giant Palm Pre hub!

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Palm Pre on June 6th for $200: It’s official! originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 19 May 2009 07:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Another possible Pre launch date is precisely the last thing the world needs, but that’s what we’re getting, so check it: a Boy Genius Report-leaked slide of some sort seems to indicate that Sprint employees will be participating in a Pre “launch lunch” Friday, June 5 at noon, which raises a few interesting possibilities. First, it could mean that they’re prepping for a June 7 retail launch, which would line up with the Best Buy rumor and fall into line with Sprint’s common policy of launching on Sundays. Second, it could mean that Sprint’s trying to really go for broke with a riot-inducing evening launch on June 5. Third, this could be totally bogus; the typo in “Employee Benfits” trips us up a bit, though we’ve seen typos in legit documents before. Fourth, it’s still entirely possible that neither Sprint nor Palm know the exact date — we’re guessing the firmware still hasn’t gone gold, and until it has, they can’t be putting an immutable stake in the ground. It’s interesting to note that Palm’s Jon Rubenstein will be speaking at All Things D the week before this — which we’ll be at live, coincidentally — so that’d certainly make an apropos place to announce something spectacular like this, wouldn’t it? Stay tuned, friends.

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

Sprint holding Pre “launch lunch” on June 5? originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 07 May 2009 12:54:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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