In a rather surprising move considering Verizon’s lack of compelling handsets, the nation’s biggest wireless carrier has decided it’s going to pass on the Palm Pre, if reports are to be believed. This is a serious blow to Palm’s aspirations, and their stock took a 5% hit as if to rubber-stamp it. Although the team here is divided over Palm’s new efforts (and advertising strategy), I think we were all secretly rooting for Palm just a bit. After all, WebOS is impressive and the Pre and Pixi are solid little devices — but Verizon doesn’t think so, or at least not anymore.

Nobody can deny that sales have been underwhelming — half a million is about where I’d place them, which is no way to launch a giant-killer. That’s Verizon’s first complaint, and you can’t really blame them. Okay, strike one.

The story goes like this: A TownHall Investment Research director was quoted by Barron’s as saying that Sprint is seeing almost a 50% return rate on the BlackBerry Tour primarily because of trackball issues. We ran a simple poll where 36% of participants said they have returned a BlackBerry Tour because of trackball problems and another 16% have returned the phone for other reasons – that’s a 52% return ratio btw. But a PR firm just sent us a little note stating that both Verizon and Sprint are calling bullshit (our words, not theirs) on the claim.

Almost 40% of the BlackBerry Tour users who participated in our quick poll voted that they have returned a BlackBerry Tour because of trackball problems. That’s a clear indication of a problem. The dude in this video is on his sixth BlackBerry Tour and shows the difference between the two.

This is strange, even for a wireless carrier. Both the enV Touch and enV3 launched in May at $179 and $129, but then dropped down to $149 and $99, which is about right. After all, non-smartphones generally only stay at their original price for a few months. But now both of these phones are back up to their starting price. Why?

Come September 30, Verizon will completely drop Usenet access. (It had already been limiting access for some time now.) To that end, a number of Usenet providers, including Giganews and Newsdemon, have special deals set up for Verizon users to make the hurting stop.

Oh, Gene Munster. You keep popping up like the loose Cheerios my nine-month-old daughter drops at breakfast. What are you up to this time, you little scamp?

Munster of Piper Jaffray “predicts” that AT&T will lose its iPhone exclusivity by the end of 2010, thereby rendering the company impotent and insolvent. Some contenders for the iPhone throne include Verizon. This ignores the fact that AT&T is fighting like a champ to keep the iPhone until 2011 but it seems the popular perception of AT&T as a pile of fail may put a damper on Apple’s wish to stay put.

The BlackBerry Storm may finally have found its pricing sweet spot. The phone definitely was overpriced at $200 last year and even the $100 price cut a few months ago didn’t seem right, but $50?!? Yeah, I wanna throw mine into a wall and piss on the remains daily, but VZW isn’t going to have any trouble at all clearing out the inventory. You know why it’s only $50 right?

Somewhere out there, a VZW employee was tasked with making this “Coming Soon” presentation. As they began their work, they likely thought to themselves, “Hey. If this leaked, it would reveal a whole lot of crap we probably don’t want revealed yet. Given our history, it will probably leak.” and then proceeded to make the slide so as to not get yelled at.

There’s two ways to look at the story that many of the country’s biggest ISPs have refused government stimulus money for broadband infrastructure investment. One, the ISPs patently don’t need the money, and are more than capable of delivering broadband to as many Americans as possible with their own capital. Two, the ISPs could use the money, but they’d prefer not to accept it lest they be beholden to all sorts of government-imposed restrictions, one of which relates to net neutrality.

J.D Power and Associates just issued Volume 2 of their Wireless Customer Care report, which runs from January to June of 2009.

It’s a big three-way tie this time around, with T-Mobile, Alltel, and Verizon all taking a victory lap. AT&T follows behind with an “About Average” (3/5) rating, while Sprint stumbles with a paltry 2/5.

What do we have here? The new hotness? mhmm. The HTC Touch Pro 2 is still a while away from being launched but somehow it was placed in front of a camera lens. Overall, it looks great with a clever eatching of the world on the backplate, a 3.5mm jack on the bottom, and a sleek design when it’s closed. Hopefully the keyboard works as well as it looks. According to the tipster, Verizon will probably have the phone sometime in early September. Check the video after the jump.

Remember last year when everyone was stoked about the new touchscreen BlackBerry called the Storm? Oh man, the hype was huge. There was iPhone-ish lines, media coverage, the works. But then the first reviews came out and we all realized the truth: the phone sucked. It’s now a lot better thank to firmware updates, but the upcoming BlackBerry Storm 2 will hopefully recapture some of the original anticipation..

Huzzah! Verizon knows what’s up. The prices of its smartphones have been slashed, cut, and discounted down to iPhone 3G levels. Every single smartphone – expect for the new BlackBerry Tour and Samsung Saga – can be had for $99 or less on-contract. This means that the HTC Touch Diamond, HTC Touch Pro, and Samsung Omnia are now only $99 straight up. It’s like Verizon is talking right to those feed up with AT&T’s shenanigans.

Last week Verzion pushed Slacker Radio onto the BlackBerry Storm. This time around, the BlackBerry Tour is getting the same treatment. Why you ask? Well, Slacker Radio has put a little icon within the app that links available songs to the VZW V-Cast music store. So when a tune plays through Slacker Radio, customers will be able to purchase the song right there.