Verizon Claims It Will Sell the Pre in Six Months

As if yesterday’s news that AT&T plans to sell the Palm Pre weren’t enough to keep the Internet buzzing, Verizon’s Chief Operating Officer, Lowell McAdam just announced that his company plans to sell the Palm Pre as soon as six months from now. In addition to their plans to sell the Palm Pre, Verizon also announced that they plan to begin selling the new Blackberry Storm around the same time. That, of course, comes as no big surprise, as they were already the exclusive carrier since last year.

While AT&T and Verizon will most likely benefit from the shared sales of the promising-to-be-popular Pre, it is Palm that is will reap the greatest harvest. Allowing other companies to share in the selling (and having such a short-lived exclusive contract with Sprint) was a smart move on Palms’ part, which is already glowing in the 11 percent uptick of their shares. The increase in their shares came about after yesterday’s announcement that AT&T would also be selling. (By contrast, Sprint’s shares dropped by 3 percent.)
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With the economy in the pits, frugality is quickly becoming fashionable. Not only is the thrifty giving up their landlines; they’re opting out of their cell phone plans as well! As a penny-pinching alternative, they are purchasing prepaid phones—an alternative that was once deemed as financially savvy as taking out a payday loan.

When cell phone rates dropped to under $50 a month, pagers became obsolete. And, although cell phone plans may not become obsolete, they are certainly facing stiff challenge from the prepaid market. In recent months, the prepaid market grew three times faster than the contractual plan market. Affordable prepaid rates along with the flexibility they offer are giving wireless services a run for their money. T-Mobile recently gained a huge book of business from the prepaid crowd. For the first time ever, they had more prepaid customers than plan customers.
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The gaming industry is not winning at its own game, as the recession took its toll over the month of April. After months of weathering the storm, the video game industry saw a sharp dip during the month of April—to the tune of 17%.

The balancing news is that the 17% slide may be a mere hiccup, since it is a decline only when compared to the April 2008 revenue when the market rose a whopping 50% from April 2007 quotes. From an alternate statistical perspective, sale records for all gaming units have gone down by only 5%. The scary 17% drop reflects a general slump in sales for the month.

The good news for Nintendo is that the popular DSi broke the trend by selling 1-million+ units over April. These sales outstripped the Wii, Xbox, Playstaion, and other gaming consoles by incredible margins. In fact, DSi sales were up by 84.7 percent, while every single other gaming unit was in a slump for the month.
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Anti-piracy technology is important—even if it can be annoying. For Microsoft, it has always been known as Windows Genuine Advantage—WGA. Its bad rap in the past is not due to the fact that it foils piracy. We would all agree piracy-busting is a good thing.

The bad thing is that it has often foiled honest users, too. In fact, 500,000 Windows users in early 2007 were understandably enraged when the oh-so-protective WGA software mistakenly identified their copies as pirated. Later in 2007, the over-eager WGA coughed again, once more enraging legitimate users who were consigned to use a humbler version of their Windows software for the duration of the glitch.

Microsoft is trying to dismiss all of that as a bad dream.
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