Just recently, I regaled you with my lust for the upcoming HTC Evo as my ideal smartphone cum 3G hotspot. Well, Verizon just went and theoretically blew that lust out of the water with announcements about the Palm Pre Plus:
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First off, you can actually buy a Palm Pre Plus now, as opposed to this summer for the Evo.
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The Palm Pre Plus can be used as a WiFi serving, portable 3G hotspot, ala the MiFi.
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Verizon completely dropped the data fee for using the device as a hotspot.
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Verizon dropped the hardware price to $49.99, two year contract obviously. But the 1 year contract price is a reasonable $149.99.
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Through work, I can get a 20% discount on the voice plan and the mandatory data part of the plan. Bottom line, I’d wind up paying about $70 a month. Quite manageable.
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It’s not on AT&T’s network.
So what’s not to like? Well, the device runs Palm’s webOS. All the cool geeks are on Android and the hipsters on iPhone OS. Besides Engadget drew up a survival guide for Palm. Meanwhile, ArsTechnica just flat out declared Palm dead. The comments on the ArsTechnica are pretty damning as well.
But for a year, it might be worthwhile. Palm can’t die that fast can they? In that one year, something Evo-like might come to Verizon and there could actually be some real rollout of LTE.
Very, very tempting