Sprint Discontinues Palm Pre

Sprint internal documentation has confirmed that the Palm Pre has hit end of life status and that remaining new inventory numbers in the low hundreds of units while the phone has been pulled from sale as of November 10th. Sprint is still listing the less powerful Pixi for sale for the time being.

This follows the nearly 16 month effort that both Sprint and Palm put into the device with the intention to make the Pre into the iPhone competitor that should have been, owing to the efforts of Jon Rubenstein, the man responsible for taking the struggling manufacturer and helping it through its worst period by developing both the Pre and webOS.

Not long after launch last July a vibrant developer community sprang up behind the operating system and hardware, taking it to its limits and surpassing them in ways that have yet to be attempted on other platforms such as extreme overclocking and large-scale homebrew development, all tacitly encouraged by Palm.

With the forthcoming launch of the Palm Pre 2 on Verizon and no information on the equivalent Sprint variant, it remains to be seen whether Sprint will carry the Pre 2 or shift to Windows Phone 7 via.the Pro 7 and continue its success with Android with its current lineup.