Everyone, take notice: Sprint is very serious about not letting any tantalizing details leak about the upcoming Palm Pre. Apparently, the struggling wireless carrier cannot afford having any good, free press wrote about them. From what we hear, at least three retail employees have been let go for speaking about the Palm Pre outside the store’s walls.

The Wall Street gurus understand that some companies aren’t doing that well during this recession, but Sprint surprised some folks today when the company released its quarterly financials. It seems that the wireless carrier’s $594,000,000 loss wasn’t as much as the experts expected causing the company’s stock to rise. But isn’t it crazy that we’re living in a world where a $594 million net loss is considered a good thing?

If you’re taking the original Palm Eos story with a grain of salt, you’re going to want to find another, slightly smaller grain for this one.

So, Laurence Toney or @lo_toney as he likes to be called on Twitter decided to flaunt the Pre he presumably has in his possession on Twitpic. I don’t know who he is and why he has a Pre but he’s a “busy Internet exec” and is some VP of Product and Marketing at Cake Financial. Anyway, he took some craptacular photos on his iPhone of the YouTube client and what appears to be the e-mail composition screen. Both are too blurry to note any significant details, but it’s out there and it’s just a bunch of random folk with the device.

I don’t see the point of purchasing any new phone on Sprint with the launch of the Palm Pre looming, but if you’re itching to get something new because your old phone was dropped in the toilet after a drunken night out this weekend then I’ll have you know that the mini Instinct is now available.

For $130 ($100MIR) you can get this little monstrosity of a touch-screen device that’s essentially a baby Instinct but now supports 32GB microSDHC cards. Because, you know, those are really affordable right now and everyone has them.

AT&T and Verizon might have the lion’s share of the mobile broadband market, but don’t count Sprint and Clearwire’s WiMAX out just yet. The chairman of Clearwire was nailed down for an interview at CTIA where he championed the high bandwidth wireless solution by talking about the low capacity of VZW’s and AT&T’s 3G network. And how WiMAX can even handle the Skype calls despite the application’s inefficiency.

If you’re lookin’ for a barebones QWERTY candybar on the cheap, Sprint and Sanyo have a handset you should see. Well, they will in May.

We’re not quite sure why they announcing this one a whole month early, but Sprint and Sanyo have let it be known that the SCP-2700 will be hitting the shelves (exclusively at Sprint) come May 10th.

Presumably your Korean is as rusty as mine, so apologies in advance for not taking too much away from Samsung’s official reveal of the Instinct Mini, more accurately known as the S30. There’s a good chance that Samsung will show off the phone sometime this week at CTIA, where Greg is currently running about.

So, there’s this guy named Jim Vance who is the CEO of Logicomm, which appears to be some IT firm and Mr. Vance is claiming to have a Pre and that it’s coming on 4/30. He has a handful of tweets claiming this and that about the Pre, but he’s had it for two days and promises of photos and screenshots of the UI have not yet materialized.

Update: Because this is how I like to spend my Saturday afternoons – following some dude on Twitter for Pre updates. Anyway, Mr. Van claims to have been tipped off by an insider on the price of the Pre.

Sprint spent a lot of money on their network. And why not, right? A nice network is its own reward. Of course, the costs are murder. But when you can’t get anybody to sign up for your cell phone services (waiting for the Pre, thanks), you start to look around. And what do you find? A sea of devices waiting to be connected. Netbooks, cameras, cars, watches — all ripe for the signing.

Here’s a fun hypothetical for your Sunday. Let’s say you’re Palm, and you’ve poured untold sums of money and time into developing the Pre; the early response has been positive. But when you launch the phone, hopefully still sometime before July, it completely and utterly bombs. For whatever reason—people unwilling to give up the iPhone, people unwilling to switch to Sprint—it just doesn’t do the numbers you expected it to, or needed it to. Then what do you do?

Nextel users usually have terrible phones. We don’t get the cool phones like the G1 or the iPhone. Instead, we get mostly Motorola stuff, and even those are typically the ‘industrial design’ versions. Even the smartphones usually stay away. Until recently, the only Blackberry you could get as a Nextel user was the ugly and awkward 7100i, which didn’t even have a QWERTY keyboard. Well, if you’re like me and you were waiting for a newer style Blackberry to be released be happy, the time has finally come.

Secrets, Secrets, are no fun. Well, unless said secrets have to do with a ridiculous number of unannounced devices and details, and said secrets leak all over the internet. Then they’re a blast.

The sun has set on our day of fun in the sun as it pertains to Sprint CEO Dan Hesse appearing in any more TV commercials, according to the Wall Street Journal. As believable as it was watching a guy who cleared almost $4 million in his first year sitting in a greasy spoon diner, walking through Central Park alone at night, and working all day from a taxi cab while pitching the idea that tough economic times call for a $99-per-month phone plan over a bed of classical music, it appears that Sprint will be switching gears with its marketing efforts.

What could this be? Spy shots of the new Instinct? It seems a brave forumgoer got his hands on Samsung’s latest and took a few snaps with his Blackberry. He says it’s smaller, more lightweight, and that the interface is the same. Well! How exciting!

In an interview with BI, Sprint’s CEO Dan Hesse confirmed that the number three carrier in the US was in talks with Google about an Android phone. Hesse wouldn’t divulge any other details like a launch date or handset manufacturer, but stated that it would not be tied into Clearwire. Is WiMAX still around?

Sprint may have lost $1.6 billion in the fourth quarter, but things are looking up, if only briefly. CNBC is reporting that Sprint has the exclusive rights to the Pre in the US for all of 2009.

Perhaps we shouldn’t read too far into this, but here’s what happened. The technical specifications on Sprint.com for the Palm Pre used to list “Phone as modem” with Bluetooth and USB tethering as a feature. Now, however, that feature is gone. You’ll recall that earlier this week, Sprint announced its Simply Everything Plan + Mobile Broadband for $150 per month.

If you ask me (which you didn’t) there are few things more consumer-unfriendly than charging people for 3G data on their handsets and then charging them again for the privilege of connecting their handsets to a computer in order to use that same 3G data.