Palm Pre Gets June Launch Date

Sprint Nextel made it official Tuesday, rolling out the smartphone that has generated debate and buzz around the blogosphere since it was announced. The Palm Pre will retail for $199 with a two-year service agreement and after a $100 mail-in rebate.

The Pre will be available to customers on June 6 and will only be supported by Sprint's network.

Palm is hoping that the Pre will bolster the flagging fortunes of its company. Of course, the Pre will be fighting an uphill battle against smartphone titans including Apple's iPhone, Research In Motion's BlackBerry and Google's G1.

Customers will be able to purchase the Palm Pre at Best Buy, Radio Shack and select Wal-Mart stores. The smartphone also will be available in Sprint stores and on the Web at Sprint.com.

In addition to being the potential savior for Palm, the Pre is also an attempt by Sprint to gain relevance again as a competitive telecom company. According to The Wall Street Journal, Sprint has lost more than 6 million subscribers over the past six quarters. The company is hoping that the Palm Pre will do for it what Apple's iPhone did for AT&T.

Of course, the iPhone and BlackBerry—and to a lesser extent the G1— are all already entrenched in the mobile device market. To say that Palm and Sprint will have a battle ahead of it to capture market share from those three is something of an understatement.

However, Sprint and Palm did do two things right with the launch. First, they priced the Pre at $199, matching the cost of an iPhone. If the Pre had been much more expensive—or even more expensive at all—it would have a hard time attracting customers who've already seen the iPhone go through two iterations.

Second, the Pre is being released ahead of Apple's World Wide Developers Conference, which kicks off June 8. The Cupertino crew is widely expected to demo new smartphone hardware, and if the Pre came after iPhone 3.0 was announced, Sprint and Palm would have an even harder time gaining a user base.

But because the Pre will be on the shelves a few days before WWDC, customers who have had a bad experience with the iPhone or are just too impatient to wait for the hardware refresh may consider making a switch.