Sprint Offering $50 Credit to Select Customers, Rejects Pre 3

Sprint is currently offering select customers that are out of their contract or close to contract completion an incentive to stay with the carrier with a $50 account credit after renewing with a new 2 year agreement. The idea behind the credit is to reduce the carrier’s churn rate and improve its quarterly results, but it remains to be seen whether the program will be effective enough to achieve its goal, as Sprint is currently waging a battle against AT&T’s purchase of T-Mobile and continues to lose postpaid customers while adding customers through its prepaid division. Read more for unsurprising news on Sprint and the HP Pre 3

In other Sprint news, news has surfaced that suggests that Sprint will not carry the HP Pre 3 due to its previous experience with selling the Palm Pre. Sprint was initially the exclusive carrier for the Pre when it was first released in 2009 and positioned the webOS powered smartphone as a superior alternative to the iPhone, and even included full compatibility with iTunes before Apple shut down Palm’s cat and mouse game.

However, the initial fanfare and promise embodied in the Palm Pre quickly faded after complaints of poor hardware and equally poor developer support led Palm to seek out additional carriers in order to meet its sales targets for the device such as AT&T and Verizon with the refreshed Pre Plus with Wi-Fi, although the addition of two more carriers did little to improve Palm Pre sales to the general public as well as a poorly executed ad campaign.

Ironically, the most dedicated customer base for the Palm Pre and related variants became the crowd that Palm initially wanted to ignore in the homebrew scene, but it wasn’t until the homebrew scene adopted the Pre and webOS that the platform began to see increased developer support. Another factor that led to increased popularity of the Palm Pre and Pixy Plus was Verizon’s former offering of complimentary Mobile Hotspot access included with each sale of a Palm Pre or Pixi Plus included with the monthly data plan, with extensive coverage on the offering.

With the rejection of the Pre 3, Sprint is adopting a once bitten twice shy attitude towards the webOS platform while it increases support for Android and Windows Phone 7 as well as RIM’s BlackBerry with new devices coming later this year, while no HP webOS devices have been slated for release on Sprint at anytime this year or have been tested internally since the new lineup was initially announced in March.