I guess it was too good to last. The Unlocked GSM Treo 650 has just been marked up by $100, after going on sale for $599 only two days ago. Perhaps Pa1mOne got so many orders in those first two days, they decided to play a little supply-and-demand-flexible-pricing, doh!
I’m not sure about this, but I can’t ever remember a situation where a company decided to increase the price of a released product just a couple days after it was released! Pa1mOne has really been making some major stumbles lately in terms of its PR. We had a bunch of leaks or initial releases of information before they pulled it back in, the memory debacle, and now this. Pa1mOne, really, you need to get your act together. Raising the price after releasing it just does not look good at all.
Luckily, I purchased my phone from Pa1mOne on Tuesday when the price was still $599, and that’s what I’ve been charged, but I do think it’s a bit unfair that others are going to suffer a $100 surcharge for not buying within the first couple of days. Hmmm, maybe I shouldn’t be that disappointed? Often it is the early adopters who have to pay through nose for the priveledge of playing with a new gadget before most people. Now for once this isn’t the case. Except of course that you could be an early adopter who just took a couple of days before ordering it and have to deal with this increase!
Gizmodo has some additional insight into this suggesting that Cingular may have convinced Pa1mOne to increase the price. Perhaps the differential was just not big enough and they felt they were losing too many people who would have rather bought an unlocked phone. If this is true, it really is a shame, but I don’t think we’ll ever know for sure, it’s just speculation. But if it is true, I think this shows the ridiculousness of the whole locking issue, and how the phone subsidy and contracts work. It all serves to give the consumer fewer choices and to lock them into contracts for long periods which they have to pay hefty penalties to break out of. Number portability can only go so far in promoting competition, but the mergers have provided a definite counter to this. Of course the fact that we can get an unlocked phone at any price is better than what CDMA offers with no such portability, but the U.S. still has a long way to go before getting to the competitive environment in the European mobile industry, and when was it that Europe became a more competition-friendly place for consumers?
Link: Treonauts (it’s also all over the forums at myTreo.net and TreoCentral)
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