<img src="https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/01/she claims is the legit, honest-to-gawd deal for the Palm Treo 680 for Cingular. You can get yours for less than $200 in less than 2 weeks. Sweet, yah?
Previously, this same mole had indicated that Cingy and Palm weren’t finding any agreements in the pricing of the anticipated smartphone. Palm wanted to produce a bare-bones, consumer Treo, something that would give them (and the Palm OS) the market share it’s missing. Thusly, it wanted to forgo certain software packages to save money, as certain professional features (Documents to Go, BlackBerry Connect, etc.) wouldn’t be much use to the newly forged “casual smartphone user”.
Cingular, on the other hand, is said to still have the mindset that smartphones are for business people, and should have the support (and price tag) that these high-end customers need.
This tug of war has apparently been going back and forth for several weeks, with some sort of a compromise coming in the form of the Treo 680’s final price via Cingular being $175 with a 2-year unlimited data plan agreement. This is considerably higher than the original price the source had given us (free with a 2-year data agreement), though it’s still within the realm of “affordable”, at least as far as full-featured smartphones go.
This price may indeed drop in the first few months after the Treo is unleashed, since pricing on this type of product generally does. In addition to the convoluted story and pricing information, our source also gave us his/her confidence that Cingular will make the Treo 680 available in a little over a week, on November 5. That’s plenty of time to send your favorite CrunchGear scooper one as his Xmas gift.