So I’ll admit that for you United States people this is old news. But I am in Asia I can’t keep up with the gadget news in the US. Anyways I just heard that the Palm Pre’s official release date is June 6, 2009. I don’t really care about the release date since I will not be able to get one until I come back to the US in mid august but what has made me extremely happy AND extremely pissed is the price!

The Palm Pre will be released at a low low price of $200 US with a two year contract (I added the US just in case some random person outside of the United States ever reads this). I think that this is a great price and will go a long way to bringing Palm out of the coffin (it currently has one leg in). But even though this is a great price I am pissed! the Palm Pre will be $200 AFTER MAIL-IN REBATE. WTF!?!? MAIL-IN REBATE? yes, mail-in rebate. If there is one thing I hate about black Friday it is mail-in rebates and the same goes for phones. In my mind this is now a $300 dollar phone because I automatically assume that I will get cheated out of my mail in rebate. I don’t even understand the point of mail in rebates!

Lets ponder the inner workings of the mail-in rebate. I am a business man and I want to make the most money possible. So instead of just lowering the price and getting more people to buy my product I will not lower the price and then say here is a $100 dollar mail in rebate. Now that I have this stupid mail in rebate I now have to have one of my subordinates notify people of this rebate AND I have to hire a staff or direct my staff to process all these damn things coming in. I now have to deal with the form, the original UPC code, and the receipt from the purchase. In order to deal with it I have to verify it somehow, who the hell knows how they do it or if they do and then I have to spend money writing checks and mailing them out! And then after all that damn work you have customers like me friggin pissed that they had to go through all this trouble! If I was that business man I would just say “F that! I am just going to lower prices!”

Oh well, I searched Google and the website I found says that they are gambling that people will not send them in. Whatever, that is stupid. Apple never did this crap with the $200 dollar iPhone. I still think that what really happens is they process half of the rebates and then turn the rest into that 100% recycled paper. The last thing that pisses me off about mail-in rebates is that you have to wait EIGHT WEEKS to get your money. Jesus Christ it’s ridiculous!

So in my mind the Palm Pre is a $300 dollar phone which is now a crappy price but maybe, just maybe I will fill out my rebate form 125% correctly and it will be a $200 dollar phone when I finally get IN OCTOBER because I will have to wait 2 months for my money. Ugh! Bad form Sprint and Palm, BAD FORM!

Anyways I am glad that the phone now has an official release date because from the what I have seen out here on the internets (Bushism) This will be an amazing phone and it will make me happy that I got rid of my iPhone. Ugh the iPhone was crap.

If by some odd circumstance you are one of the 4 people that read this blog and you don’t know what the palm pre is or what it looks like here is a picture!

Jeez I’m so pissed about the Mail-in rebate. Oh and still no Red Vines in Asia, life is harsh, very very harsh.

**update 5/25/2009 6:21PM**
I just found out! no mail-in rebates at best buy and radio shack for the palm pre. I also found out that the mail in rebate ends on 7/11/09. So who knows what I will get the phone for in August. Maybe by then the price will just be $200 and I won’t have to worry about anything.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 24th, 2009 at 10:10 am and is filed under Gadgets, Gripes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.