Tuesday, July 07, 2009

About bloody time

The announcement was made this morning that O2 are going to get the Palm Pre in the UK, Ireland and Germany, with fellow Telefonica subsidiary Movistar getting it in Spain.

But while this confirmation is nice to have, the carrier information was already more or less a given - very few people doubted, especially in the last few weeks or months, that O2 would be the one to take the Pre to market here. The arguably more important information about pricing and the release date - which was also rumoured to be getting a reveal this week - hasn't materialised yet.

I'm still hoping to get a Pre on release - and in fact the later it lands, then the easier it should be to get out of my current Vodafone contract - but it's frustrating to have so little firm information. They'll apparently be bringing the phone to market before the end of the year (in time for Christmas, allegedly), which is certainly pointing towards the end of November or start of December, if the verbiage used to describe the US release is anything to go by. Palm spent the first five months of 2009 telling people that the Pre would be out "in the first half of the year", and released it in early June - so it's a fair bet that a "second half of 2009" release won't materialize until early December.

(I realise this is turning into a bit of a one-track posting habit, but hopefully I'll stop talking about the bloody thing once I finally get it.)