FlatironBuilding
Latest
Palm Pre goes on sale nationwide, line forms on the right
Oh, hey, look at that: you can buy a Pre now! As of 8:00AM on the East Coast, the phone went on sale at Sprint stores, with Best Buy, Radio Shack and Wal-Mart also retailing the phone today as Saturday dawns across the country. After Sprint's invite only pre-Pre launch event last night, we still saw plenty of folks lined up outside Sprint's "flagship" New York store in the Flatiron Building before the doors opened. Apparently people started queuing around 5:00AM, with Chris Lee and Randy Williams the first through the door -- replacing a Treo Pro and a HTC Mogul, respectively. Like last night, the process took about 40 minutes, but a lot of that is spent waiting for a small pit crew of Sprint employees to swap over your address book, so if you forgo that we'd say you can be in and out in 30, which should still be plenty of time to savor the moment. Word is that the Flatiron store has about 100 units, but it's clear that inventory varies widely between locations and retailers -- Touchstones seem to be a much rarer commodity. We'll be checking out some other launches across the country, so stay tuned, and be sure to send in your own pictures and impressions! Some word from the wilds: Tipster Brad says that his Best Buy store in Orlando has only 9 Pres available, and they're giving them out one by one on an appointment basis -- he was fourth in line, so he'll be going back at 12:15PM to pick his up. Unfortunately, their Touchstone stock is zero. Kevin C. Tofel was fourth in line at his local Sprint store, which purportedly had 30 phones in stock, but he picked up the last of the Touchstones. We just checked in at the Bryant Park Sprint store in New York City, and while Pre inventory is cool, they are all out of Touchstones. We're starting to think the supply of those is quite limited. We also hear that at least one tenacious gentleman got in line at 6:00PM yesterday, and spent the night outside the store in order to get his first.
