UPDATE 05/20 – Best Buy gets it! Just one day after the announcement that Sprint would sell the Palm Pre for $299 with a $100 mail-in rebate, Best Buy said today it’ll offer the Pre for $199 flat out. So there is hope for the Pre if Best Buy keeps word and maybe Sprint starts to see the light too.

PALM PRE – RELEASE DATE

So it was announced that the long anticipated Palm Pre smartphone will be available to Sprint vict…subscribers on June 6th.

The price is a penny shy of $200 …. after $100 mail-in rebate.

SPRINT AND PALM STILL DON’T GET IT

And that’s where the problem is: Sprint doesn’t get it. I’m betting Palm doesn’t get it either.

Mail-in rebates are bullshit. They’re inconvenient, and often mean you’re losing money because those rebate vouchers magically disappear in the mail, or the company hired to validate the vouchers goes out of business (happend last year, remember?)

Companies doing the mail-in rebate crap are betting on their customers being forgetful or dumb enough to not send in the rebate voucher on time.

So Sprint and Palm, on the verge of biting the dust, expect customers to shell out $300 and deal with the hassle of getting a rebate check some time this century.

No! Sprint needs to kiss its customers’ collective butts and do everything possible to make becoming or staying a Sprint customer as convenient and economically advantageous as possible.

Charging three hundred bucks for a crap shoot of a phone at the same time when one can get the leader of smartphones, the iPhone, and its other main competitor, the Blackberry Storm, for about two hundred bucks right out of the gate.

I’m sure there are lots of folks who’ll spend the money on the Palm Pre anyways. But will the numbers be large enough for Palm and Sprint to turn things around? This mail-in rebate stunt certainly doesn’t help.

This is really too bad because I think the Palm Pre is actually a great little gadget. I love the Touchstone, the wireless induction charger. And I’ve had good experiences with Palm products in the past. But pricing is often the make-it-or-break-it factor in the world of gadgets and smartphones (unless you’re Apple in which case you can charge a fortune for mediocre junk with shiny surfaces).

We’ll see how this pans out for Palm and Sprint.