Amazon is running a deal on the Palm Pre and Palm Pixi, selling the new-ish Sprint smartphones for $80 and $25, respectively, with a two-year contract and free activation.

The Pre runs for $150 directly from Sprint, while the Pixi normally sells for $100. You have to deal with $100 mail-in rebates on both phones, too, whereas the Amazon deal includes an instant discount. The free activation deal lasts until November 23rd.

Palm Pre Phone (Sprint) [Amazon.com]

Palm Pixi Phone (Sprint) [Amazon.com]

[via Barron’s]

When your smartphone drops from $299 ($199 with contract) to $79 over a summer, you have to wonder what’s going on. Two rumors are circulating this AM, one that Palm is laying off folks, perhaps in the Windows Mobile team.

UPDATE from Palm: “We are not laying people off. As we continue our transformation we are better aligning our staff with our business objectives.”

The estimated sales for the Pre topped out at somewhere under the 810,000 range (Palm reports it sold 810K units last quarter and states at least half of those where Pres) at the end of August and they went from $299 ($199 with contract) to about $79 in about eleven weeks. While this might be normal for a feature phone – the subsidy kicks in once they’re sure that the early adopters who simply must have the LG Chocolate have had their fix – this isn’t good for a smartphone that was supposed to be the lead invasion force for a new WebOS smartphone renaissance.

Finally, Palm has backed off over iTunes Syncing. The latest WebOS update doesn’t sync with iTunes and won’t be syncing with iTunes any time soon. After using brute force and then running to the USB standards body, the company may have finally given up.

The end of Palm will come quickly this time. They’ve been idling for too long – since about 2004, in fact – and if they can’t push through their first year with at least some modicum of success it’s over.

For more info about Palm’s numbers check out Jason’s post about the 810K figure.

This deal is of course for new subscribers that sign a 2-year agreement, but the end price is the cheapest we’ve seen yet. With prices this low, it kind of makes you wonder how much the Pre’s little brother, the upcoming Pixi, will be when it’s finally available. [Walmart via everythingpre]

Pre-thinking brings us the latest Tamara Hope Pre Ad with young Tamara talking more to her Pre than directly at us.

Interestingly, Tamara looks much better when she isn’t Palm’s ghoulish Pre homunculus. Click through for a pleasant surprise.

Didja hear that RadioShack is rebranding? The hoopla will of course include some sales to drive traffic. Apparently the Pre will be part of this upcoming sale and will be only $150 for new customers. Nice.

We’ve seen it lower thanks to a Best Buy snafu and one website offering a one day rebate, but this might be the first legitimate price cut on the Pre. Now just to be clear, this is for new Sprint customers. Current subscibers eligable for equipment upgrades will still have to pay $219 for the handset, which is $20 more than what you’ll pay at a Sprint store, natch.

[...] his significant expertise in strategic brand design and management to Palm’s global advertising, marketing communications, PR, events and web design.

Good enough. Palm doesn’t have to do much on its packaging – the Pre package is really cool – but Zwerner was once the Senior Art Director for Apple and Director of Packaging for the company in 2003.

I think the goal here is to create a unified brand design for the next Palm devices. My hope is that he puts that demonic spirit of a girl killed by an exploding Palm Treo back into its soul catcher.

Advertising and branding are very complicated and very unpredictable fields, and success can be measured according to any number of metrics. Modernista, the ad agency behind the soft-talking-lady ads that only occasionally seem to be talking about phones, seem to be measuring success based on attention. Of course, the attention is almost entirely negative, but that doesn’t faze them.

In an article in Ad Age, Executive Creative Director at Modernista, Gary Koepke, discusses the oft-maligned “Ms. Hope” spots.

The Pre is probably being talked about more than other phones right now because of the marketing and advertising, and that’s a good thing. Could the ads work harder to show exactly how the phone works? Yes, but we knew it would be polarizing people to have a woman not shout at them and tell an interesting story.

“Polarizing” is industry-standard code for “universally mocked,” in case you’re confused.

There’s nobody involved in an iPhone ad, and ‘Your life is on BlackBerry’ — isn’t that great? Instead of having a life? We wanted a middle ground between those two places — what about the people who want a really great smartphone?

Yes, what about those people? I would submit that the first step towards good advertising is knowing your audience. An advertiser must ask first of all, who is the product for and who is the ad for. Is this an ad for women, for men, is it for experts, for novices? In this case, it’s for experts, since he says it’s about people who want a great smartphone. They’re not aiming at the feature-phone set, they’re aiming at established users of smartphones.

Now that that’s established, what is the strategy of the ad? Are you trying to explain? Convert? Attack? Do you want to be direct or indirect? Sell it whole or piecemeal? For Palm, it has to be conversion, because as they’ve always said, this is about taking smartphone users from other platforms (they’ll likely target Eos ads at newer and upgrading users). Let’s see what they came up with.

Okay… so the target is expert smartphone users and the object is conversion, that much was evident from Palm’s strategy and Koepke’s statement. Then why the devil is their ad a soft-spoken lady telling parables about jugglers in the park?

I can only imagine that Modernista felt that Palm’s whole new approach to the smartphone OS required a more meta approach to advertising. But meta-advertising and oblique advertising have a bad reputation for a reason (Welcome to the social, anyone?) — if your meta-idea is difficult to process, your supposedly insidious advertisement gets knocked out of the target brain by the next shiny object that appears on screen.

Welcome to the viral failure

I’m not a director of creative whatever, but as a consumer and writer I’m a special kind of expert on advertising: I know when it’s working on me. And simple observation of the internets after each ad hits reveals that it’s not working on anybody who sees one and can write about it. This wouldn’t be a problem (dumb, weird ads have succeeded before) — except I and people like me, the ones most impervious to this kind of advertisement, are the target audience.

The ads may have been effective if they were promoting something else, I can’t think of what — lotion, maybe, or a really nice oven. Actually, anything with a signal feature that makes it okay to have the majority of a 30-second spot be some lady’s opium-addled face, and only a tiny bit be the product itself (”Woah! Did you see that crazy oven?”). That’s cognitive contrast, and that’s okay if the essence of your product can be gotten across in a moment. Car companies get away with nonsense ads because they show a car. Fragrance ads get away with them because one ad is as good as another when you can’t smell the product. But in Palm’s case, nothing is shown that leads to any comprehension. Just bafflement — and not the kind of bafflement that makes you google things.

This discussion could go on and on, of course, into different theories of this and that, but I think that the smartphone-using set has definitively rejected these ads. They simply don’t work, because the most compelling aspect of Palm’s proposition (the damn phone) is de-emphasized almost to non-existence. And despite the smooth nature of the spots, they don’t fail gracefully.

[via Giz and BGR]

It seems like this deal is exclusive to this retailer as the site is issuing the mail-in rebate itself and not Sprint. You better hurry up and decide if the Pre is right for you though. The deal is only good for today, August 3, 2009.

LetsTalk.com via SlashGear

There is probably a good chance that if you wanted the Palm Pre, you already snagged it at a Sprint store or Best Buy. Amazon now has the smartphone in case though. The on-contract price is the same at $199, but the off-contract price is surprisingly low at only $499. That’s a heck of deal considering the boys in blue have it listed at $749 sans contract. The only kicker is that it will take 4-6 weeks to ship. Sorry.

There’s not much more info than that: they just said it would happen. This confirms rumors that the Pre would break out of its pen at Sprint sooner than later and could mean new Sprint models coming running Palm’s WebOS.

More Pre coverage here…

Not a bad deal at all, considering the $99 price is out the door — no rebates or anything like that.

Looks like you’ll have to actually get in the car and go to the store if you want to get in on this deal, though, but maybe grab the wife and kids and make a day of it!

[Pre Central via FatWallet]

Update – False alarm, everyone. John Bernier is saying via Best Buy’s Twitter help line – Twelp Force – that the price is still $199. Now, you still might be able to get the deal if your local Best Buy hasn’t had the price changed or is feeling rather gracious. YMMV.

I actually bought and use a very similar battery from Seidio for my T-Mobile G1 and I’ve been pretty happy with it (full review here). The Pre version is rated at 1350mAh and promises about 20% extra capacity, which should add a nice bump to your daily usage.

Innocell 1350 Extended Life Battery [Seidio via SlashGear]

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The iPod Comet orbits the Earth in a biannual rotation, bringing new devices and attendant accessories into our view every Spring and Fall. The constellation is followed by a set of third-party developers and manufacturers who bolster the cloud as it swings into view and then disappear as the excitement wears off, relegating the devices to CostCos and Sam’s Clubs until the next rotation. But this season the orbit brought an anomaly: the Palm Pre, a device that is ostensibly compatible with the cloud, namely iTunes, but is definitely not of Apple’s world.

The Pre, as you’ll remember, masquerades as an iTunes-compatible device, a feature that Apple promises will soon be remedied through software updates. To this Palm replied:

“Palm’s media sync works with the current version of iTunes,” Palm spokesperson Lynn Fox told me. “If Apple chooses to disable media sync in a future version of iTunes, it will be a direct blow to their users who will be deprived of a seamless synchronization experience. However, people will have options. They can stay with the iTunes version that works to sync their music on their Pre, they can transfer the music via USB, and there are other third-party applications we could consider.”

So they’re hedging their bets. Like Musavi, Palm is looking for youth support to change to an unpopular regime but if the 50,000 people who bought Pres don’t care – which they won’t – they always can build a syncing app. No big deal.

But it is a big deal. As Devin pointed out, Apple hates freedom and Apple fans support that idea of a closed system with abandon, even if it goes against many of their principles. But why? Because Apple owns its own market and when folks try to horn in, be they Psystar or Palm, they realize how precarious their position is. They diluted their brand once, during the PowerPC days, and the resulting mess nearly destroyed the company. Apple, in short, has done what every CE manufacturer has tried to do for the past two decades but, contrary to their competitors efforts, they have succeeded. They created client lock-in, a sort of smothering bear-hug that convinces customers that they aren’t being slowly choked to death.

We’re big Mactards here at CG and TC. Why? Because, in lieu of hiring an IT support team we just buy Macs. That’s partly due to hardware quality – I rarely have to repair my Mac and they hold their resale value – and partly due to Apple’s marketing. Now that they’ve grabbed us they can push all sorts of garbage down our throats (iPod Shuffle, anyone) and we’ll eat it up, taking the good with the bad. And that kind of brand loyalty costs money and effort and Apple isn’t about to let the Palm Pre ride on its good will and install base.

Third parties can pay to join in the Apple party but they can’t crash it. This we’ve discovered over and over again. Apple acts like a media company more than a hardware company. They have gathered a following and now sell access to that following by allowing manufacturers to create devices to their exacting specifications. Woe betide thee if you try to hack the system. Like a media company, Apple has great lawyers.

We’re not sure if there’s a direct connection here or not, but here’s the way we saw it: PreDev Wiki opens the floor to anyone looking to discuss tethering the Pre, then nixes the topic at the request of Palm. Just hours later, the first tethering solution has gone up. Coincidence? Did someone get a spark of motivation after the discussion got pushed under the rug? Either way – tethering works!

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