Thanks again.



And to answer your question...





Because of the types of contracts most cell phone service providers have with their customers in the US, certain transition periods occur where customers can change providers without incurring an early termination fee or are able to upgrade their handsets and benefit from new subsidy discounts.



Starting about the time of the Motorola Razor and then reinforced by the timed release of Apples iPhone, a large chunk of the US customer base are affected by these cycles.

An important transition period is about to occur beginning in mid June of this year. Any ideas that a marketer can plant in a consumers mind regarding the future availability of newer features, improved benefits, or more importantly, exclusive deals with the manufacturer could delay a consumer’s upgrade decision and affect the timing of the next transition period.



In this case it seems to me that Sprint may have had more to gain or loose than Palm. Palms reaction may have been influenced by an agreement with Sprint.



I would think that an NDA between companies that each has many millions of dollars worth of assets would be a tad more effective and also might trump any agreement between one of those companies and a dude whose total net worth can be found in the basement of his parent’s house.

(Reposted because for some reason color tags have been added to my posts. The colors make the text unreadable from a dark theme. I can not edit out these tags, I will delete or minimize the first post instead...)