Sprint setting up 'war rooms' for Pre launch

Anticipating a huge response to the barely-advertised Palm Pre launch, Sprint and Palm are setting up tech support “war rooms” to expedite any tech issues customers. As reported by Forbes, Sprint is bringing in extra employees to help manage the crowds and Palm is dispatching more than 100 representatives (that’s a tenth of Palm’s 1,050 person work force) to Sprint stores, and they’ll be hanging out for two months.



Also on tap will be so-called tech support “situation rooms” for store reps to hit up with live chat should they encounter issues during launch. AT&T took similarly strong steps leading up to the iPhone 3G launch, though Sprint and Palm seem to be going a step further in their hopes to have a successful launch.

Training of Sprint employees will be the key, however, to the success of the Pre launch. While many of our readers are already well-versed in how to work their Pre phones (despite not having even touched one yet), Sprint is planning for everybody else to use the Pre launch as the first full-blown test of their “Ready Now” program. While Ready Now has been online since the fall of last year, this will be the first true large-scale test of the one-on-one training orientation designed to make sure that customers are adequately educated on their new devices. Of course, the end goal of Ready Now is to ensure that customers encounter less uneducated frustration with their new phones and don’t return them, but there's one problem if they're planning for long lines: one-on-one training takes time. Probably lots of time with something as new as the Pre and webOS.

That said, Sprint still has customer service reputation issues to overcome. In just over a week we’ll be able to tell you whether the war rooms and time-consuming Ready Now program are as effective as Sprint intends for them to be. One. Week.

[Originally posted at precentral.net]

Palm Pre Users Already Viewing Ads—Even Before The Launch

Despite the fact that the Palm (NSDQ: PALM) Pre won’t go on sale until June 6, initial users running around in the wild have already started viewing ads on the phone, according to Millennial Media, which released its second-ever monthly mobile advertising report today. While Millennial’s report only represents a portion of the overall mobile ad traffic in the U.S., it’s worth looking at its results given that it is one of the largest mobile ad networks in the U.S. Release.

Besides, the Palm Pre, the company reported that the number of ads served to iPhone and iPod Touch jumped by 8 percent compared to the prior month, helping Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) edge out LG (SEO: 066570) as the No. 2 device manufacturer. At that level of ad impressions, Millennial said the iPhone/Touch set an all-time record for company when it comes to most ads served to a single device during a given month. For the second month in a row, Samsung’s plethora of devices continued to hold on to the No. 1 spot when it comes to the number of ads served to a given handset manufacturer.

Other findings:

—The BlackBerry Storm entered the company’s top 20 list at No. 15.
—Qwerty keyboards surpassed the traditional keypad as the top input method.
—The number of Millennial customers interested in targeting very specific audiences vs. certain demographics grew by four times. That means, rather than targeting users based on simple “meta data,” like gender, a very specific audience was crafted based on information collected on an opt-in basis (for instance, a person’s preferred movie genre).

[Originally posted at moconews.net]

Palm Pre expected to launch ahead of iPhone 3.0

Leaked Sprint documents suggest that the US telecoms firm will be launching the Palm Pre in North America in early June, ahead of Apple launching its eagerly awaited iPhone 3.0 in mid-June.

An internal Sprint document showing an itinerary for Sprint executives around the launch day for Palm Pre, scheduled for 12pm on Friday 5 June, fourth weeks’ hence, was published on The Boy Genius Report today.

The three-day itinerary includes a hardware review, a Sprint presentation, a launch lunch, head-to-head training and a study of the operating system described as ‘An OS Above the Rest’.

Interestingly, there’s also a meeting for senior management only, entitled ‘Manager Concerns’.

Palm, which this year saw a 73pc decline in revenue, is placing a lot of hope in the hotly anticipated Pre to reverse its fortunes.

“The much-anticipated launch of the Palm Pre remains on track for the first half of calendar year 2009, but, as expected, we’ve got a difficult transition period to work through,” said Palm President and chief executive officer Ed Colligan in March.

[Originally posted at siliconrepublic.com]