God, will everyone stop the damn ranting and arguing?
For one thing, coverage and quality assurance is important. If you here will switch over a cheap TP2, I direct you to the T-Mobile TP2 via
htc online store (Who, IMHO, will not even switch for a free TP2)
Honestly, carriers are VERY important when it comes to picking a phone. Verizon put it well with their Blackberry commercials (Want this 3G capable device to be a PDA or a smartphone? Well I hope your coverage penetrates the office building!), and it's up to you to decide how far you will go.
Now, for the record, Verizon and Sprint are the only two carriers I negotiate with. That being said, the only one left for you to hop the wagon is Verizon, but that's useless. Verizon will match, or just go under the offering price of Sprint most likely?
Why? Because neither have their priorities set on luxury WinMo Phones. Sprint has the Pre, and Verizon has (most of) the LG BREW network (The big craze is EnV3 these days). You offer it exclusively, and want to maximize your profits on it. It's a brand new device and they want to make the money they spent customizing it for their carrier and all other costs NOW, rather later in the monthly fees, especially since you can modify the phones to cross carriers.
My point here is do NOT ever say carriers do not matter. Unless of course you only mean two of them (I'm in the American case here) that are CDMA and matter for Smart Phones. In my conclusion, I will tell you that Verizon and Sprint are on the same bandwagon, and neither is interested in gaining us as a consumer group, because they ends don't meet the means for the costs of reducing prices for us. Verizon is running dry on the smartphone market. I'll say that, but thats the only thing that convinces me they will *possibly* lower their price against sprint and try to match T-Mobile instead, but they make their money from the kiddies who use BREW Phones, not smartphones. They make the money through apps, services (like SMS) that they super charge for.
Well, I was hoping for $350, but at 450 (i'm guessing is going to be the verizon price). I'll have to sell my Verizon TP to make up for that.
Welcome to 1984 btw, you never left the bandwagon.