Sprint Treo Pro Coming to Best Buy Stores

Posted By: Kris Keilhack Friday, March 06, 2009 9:11:19 AM

The poor Treo 800w has suffered the dual ignominy of both a short lifecycle and being a relatively rare device. It was stocked in the wireless departments only a select few Best Buy stores and appeared on no carrier outside of Sprint. Thankfully, the forthcoming Treo Pro should hopefully remedy this situation, as it has just appeared in a leaked Best Buy phone inventory roadmap featured on Engadget.

The CDMA version of the Treo Pro, announced Wednesday, will hit Best Buy retail stores with SKU 9175689 on March 15th and looks to launch simultaneously with Sprint's web and retail stores. No pricing is given but Best Buy has traditionally very aggressive with its smartphone pricing on new contracts, primarily due to the fact that the company has eschewed mail-in rebates for quite some time.

After a long history of supporting Palm OS handhelds until the bitter end, Best Buy is shaping up to be an important retail partner for both Palm and Sprint, as the retail giant has survived the downfall of competitors CompUSA and Circuit City and is rumored to be the exclusive non-Sprint retail partner for the Palm Pre.

Another interesting tidbit from this release is that the strange trend continues in Best Buy's inventory item description, as the device is referred to as the "Palm Pro", instead of its full moniker of "Palm Treo Pro". With the presumed arrival of the WebOS-powered Palm Pre sometime in May or June, the "Pro vs. Pre" nomenclature appears certain to cause some amount of consumer confusion.