Verizon Slashes Palm Smartphone Prices to the Bone

April 2, 2010 By Geoff Duncan

Verizon Wireless has cut prices on the Palm phones: the Palm Pre Plus is now just $50, the Palm Pixi is $30, and buying either gets you a second one free.

Fresh off Palm reporting a 29 percent drop in sales for its third fiscal quarter, Verizon Wireless is getting even more aggressive with pricing on Palm smartphones in an effort to get consumers to give them a shot: the carrier has cut the price of the Palm Pre Plus to just $50 from $150, and the price of the Palm Pixi to $30 from $50…and buying either one gets you a second at no charge.

And that’s not all: Verizon is also offering the Mobile Hotspot application for the Palm smartphones for free: the application lets customers use their smartphones as mobile Wi-Fi hotspots for up to five devices at once. Verizon used to charge $40 per month for using the mobile hotspot software; not that charge has been eliminated, and Palm has extended the boon to existing Palm customers too. Effectively, the application turns the Palm smartphone into the equivalent of a MiFi router without the $60 per month cost. Verizon hasn’t mentioned any data limits on the Palm-based hotspots, though: MiFi’s get 5 GB of data transfer per month, then pay $0.05 per MB overage.

Despite Palm’s recent woes—which saw the company ship a record number of units into retailer channels—reports have Verizon Wireless spokespeople denying the company is holding a firesale on Palm devices to clear inventory. Late last month, Palm announced the Palm Pre Plus and Palm Pixi would also be launching soon on AT&T.

Showing 3 comments

Ian Bell at 10:11am 2nd April 2010 Is the WebOS exclusively owned by Palm? If the company does start going out of business (which analysts are predicting), they could always try to sell the OS like other companies have. Palm could be a software-only company.
Joel_Fiser at 10:08am 2nd April 2010 The Palm Pre is an excellent smart phone. It would be a crying shame if WebOS died. It's by far the best smart phone OS on the market.

Here's hoping this gives enough people the incentive to give WebOS a try!
Ian Bell at 9:54am 2nd April 2010 I read somewhere that Palm has thousands of these phones sitting in their warehouse with nowhere to go. Looks like they are trying to clean them out before going belly-up. Sad, it's a pretty nice phone.