Verizon drops Palm Pre Plus, Pixi Plus prices

As of Thursday, Verizon has dropped the contract pricing of the Palm Pre Plus and Pixi Plus to just $50 and $30, respectively. While not as cheap as the $30 Pre Plus at Walmart, the new Verizon prices still represent a huge drop from the respective initial $150 and $100 post-rebate, two-year contract prices just over two months ago. At the same time, the provider announced Verizon subscribers will now be able to access the webOS mobile hotspot service free of charge, instead of the older $40 fee.

The Pre Plus has a 3.1-inch touchscreen display with 480x320 resolution, a 3-megapixel camera, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1, 16GB of memory and 512MB of RAM. The Pixi Plus has many of the same features in a slightly different form factor, and gets a smaller 2.63-inch touchscreen with 320x400 pixels and a 2-megapixel camera. There is also 8GB of memory and 256MB of RAM.

The webOS Mobile Hotspot, meantime, lets owners use their Pre Plus or Pixi Plus as a mobile access point for five other devices. Despite becoming free, the same restrictions carry over: a 5GB transfer cap and 5 cents per megabyte overage fees as a stand-alone 3G modem.

All the cuts represent an increasing pressure on Palm to sell phones at all costs following a large overestimate in demand that has left hundreds of thousands of unsold devices. The presence of the Droid and Droid Eris months earlier may have robbed Palm's webOS phones of much of their potential audience.

By Electronista Staff