Precentral found that "an anonymous report" claims that due to security issues, testing on the Pre is going to take longer than expected. Also in their forums, the Pre is rumored to have two more rounds of testing, with the first not beginning until April 1st. Both sources say a realistic release date is in June.
This follows on the heels of rumors at PrePoint posted earlier this month that the Pre may not have passed FCC testing. The Pre is widely known to have a release date in the first half of 2009, with some leaked EOL reports suggesting a May release to replace the Treo 755P.
In trying to get something akin to an official date, RCR Wireless had a talk with Sprint CEO Dan Hesse yesterday. In the interview, Hesse reiterated the vague "first half of the year" target, and stated "The guys at palm are working 24/7 and we're working 24/7 to bring it out as soon as we can". He went on to say they wanted to be confident that the launch would be a "really successful" operation. He then touched on the issue of supply and demand:
Clearly it’s going to be a device that’s going to be in high demand and it is going to be in shortage no matter when we launch it, but we don’t want it to be too early where there’s only a handful of Pres in the whole country. We want to make sure that we can also have production ramped up at a reasonable level before we launch the product.
So what does this mean for us? On the upside, at least the device should be solid and ready to go on day one. The downside is that with each passing month we're finding it harder to wait any longer for it to arrive.
0 Comments