SERO 500 + Palm Pre, part II

In my previous post, I discussed somehow squirreling a Palm Pre onto my excellent SERO 500 plan.

As promised, I went to a local Sprint store and asked one of their sales agents if I could activate a non-contractual Palm Pre (purchased at the full retail price) on the SERO 500 plan. The agent was very understanding, and agreed that they were all instructed to NOT activate any Palm Pre’s unless the plan has the word “Everything” in it. He also said that while Sprint stores would be well stocked, Best Buy locations would be getting around a max of 5 per store. He then told me that if I did want to get a Palm Pre activated on SERO I should buy one at Best Buy at the non-contract price and attempt to activate it online.  

Apparently he doesn’t know if there are any specific checks in their system to disallow activating the Palm Pre yourself, but it would most likely not work and ask you to call customer service. What he said next suprised me: apparently there are around 35000 customer service reps in call centers – he suggested that not all of them know the policy or care about the policy and I would have a very good chance of getting it activated that way.

To add some relief – he then told me that the Palm Pre should be available for employee-referral type plans after 60 days from launch, much like the Instinct was. Happy Pre-hunting!

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SERO 500 + Palm Pre

The Palm Pre – supossed real competition for the iPhone with true multitasking and oodles of other cool features – isn’t going to be available for SERO users. For those that don’t know, SERO is an older employee referral plan that has:

  • Unlimited data
  • Unlimited text messaging
  • Unlimited picture and MMS messaging
  • between 500-unlimited voice calling
  • Unlimited roaming
  • 7PM Nights and Weekends
  • Unlimited nights and weekends

The most basic plan of $30 (around $35 after taxes) is for 500 minutes, which is plenty for me.  Most of my calls are nights and weekends anyways, and I have never exceeded 100 minutes of peak usage. 

The downside is that Sprint says with the upcoming Palm Pre, you must upgrade to a plan with “Everything” in it such as “Simply Everything” or “Everything Plus” – this is assuming that you want the $200 in rebates and the $150 in instant discount for extending your contract to get the Palm Pre at a decent price of $200 in contract. So…what if I don’t want to extend my contract? What if I pay full price for the phone and activate it, will it work?

So I started a chat session with an online Sprint CSR to see if I could purchase a Palm Pre out of contract at full price ($549) to activate on my (awesome) SERO 500 plan. After explaining that no, I wasn’t interested in extending my contract, I got this response back:

…no guarantee that this will allow you to work with this plan due to the plan being out of before the device came out.

At this point I gave up and decided I’ll go to a Sprint store and ask in person. Results soon!

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