Palm Incites Verizon Customers; Enrages Sprint Users

Last week at CES, Palm managed to simultaneously stir up one community while alienating another. With the announcement of Palm's Pre and Pixi Plus models came a slew of backlash from Sprint users who were feeling slighted by the Verizon-exclusive Plus models they were being deprived of.

The Palm Pre Plus maintains the same form factor as its older brother on Sprint, with a few notable changes. The standard back panel is now the touchstone inductive charging cover, meaning you won't have to shell out to purchase it separately. The keyboard has also undergone a slight makeover, dropping the funky orange twangs, and improving spacing making it more like its smaller sibling the Palm Pixi, and the 'home' button on the front is now gone. On the inside, the Palm Pre plus is now rocking 16GB of internal storage as opposed to 8. All this is heading directly to a Verizon store near you on January 25th.

The Palm Pixi Plus also saw a few upgrades, however minor. The most notable of these are the inclusion of 802.11b/g and the swanky looking swappable back covers for the device.

The problem is, Sprint users are feeling taken advantage of. Sprint will not be seeing these two new Palm entries for some time. Not to mention, early adopters are feeling the same kind of betrayal iPhone early adopters felt when Apple slashed the price of the $600 device by $200. The new Palm devices are the buck, with more bang, yet totally unavailable to the first generation of Pre users (without an ETF and new contract anyway). Here's hoping this is one of the last times we see consumers suffer at the mobile industry's current model of Carrier then Device, not the other way around.