Palm Pre Merchants: Past & Present

The Palm Pre Plus was finally released for AT&T Sunday which meant it was finally time for my Girlfriend to upgrade her old Palm Treo. Our first stop at the mall lead me to the Sprint store to try to solve the random clicks on my original Pre. While I was there an employee told me that the Palm Pre Plus WAS coming to Sprint and would be available hopefully in October this year! No word on a new device but the Plus on Sprint is something many of us have been waiting for. (A new Palm Pre is being shipped to me to replace my old one, no word on what caused the random clicks.)

Now, off to AT&T... There were no lines, no huge displays, and the only display model there wasn't turned on and had no signage saying what it was. I would have taken pictures but my phone was back at Sprint. The only saving grace about the lack of visual support was the enthusiastic staff member who had been using a Palm Pre Plus for two months before AT&T's official release. He egged me on about my Girl having a "better phone" than I did now (trying to get me to switch to their service no doubt). With the purchase she received a Touchstone charger and a bluetooth headset for $150 (after a $100 mail-in rebate).

Now that we both had Palm Pre's we thought we'd take a look over at Radio Shack to get her a leather case. They had one left and we purchased it. We opened it to find that the ribbon had been ripped from the case making it useless. We went back to return it and started to talk about Palm with the clerk. He told us that we should return the Pre and get another phone and that Palm was going under. He went on to say that if we had come in looking to buy a Pre, when Radio Shack was selling them, he would have shown us other phones instead saying that webOS was "out of date". I did my best to bite my tongue. Another employee there said that the Palm Youtube videos she saw looked "cool". Mixed reactions but obviously Radio Shack employees need better training on the phones they sell and shouldn't be bias against certain manufactures.

To recap the main points of today's trip: The Palm Pre Plus should becoming to Sprint by October, AT&T needs to promote the Palm Pre better in their stores, and Radio Shack employees are extremely uninformed on the phones they sell.