Sprint HTC Touch Pro Now Available Online!
Sprint customers will be overjoyed at the news that the Sprint HTC Touch Pro is now available online! The QWERTY slider can be snapped up at the Sprint site for $299.99 with free shipping and free activation of a new line.
Context & Ripple Effects
The Touch Pro's online debut caps a year in which Sprint leaned hard into touch hardware — the carrier had already teased plans to introduce a touch-screen phone back in October 2007, following the Palm Centro onto Sprint.com. The $299.99 price with free shipping and activation is a classic holiday-quarter push to move premium Windows Mobile sliders off store shelves and onto the web channel.
First-order effects
- Sprint customers can immediately buy the HTC Touch Pro QWERTY slider online at $299.99, with free shipping and free activation on a new line — lowering the effective switching cost for new activations during the holiday season.
- HTC gains another US carrier storefront for its flagship slider, extending distribution beyond retail doors just as Sprint's touch-screen lineup (announced the previous fall) matures.
Second-order effects
- The Touch Pro's pricing sets a benchmark Sprint will have to defend against its own successor — the Touch Pro2 launched ten months later at $349.99, forcing a discount cascade on the original to keep the lineup tiered.
- Rivals like T-Mobile, which was pushing cheaper Android hardware such as the myTouch 3G at $199.99 on contract, face pressure to match Sprint's web-channel incentives as QWERTY sliders compete against emerging touchscreen-first devices.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, carriers increasingly use their own web stores as a price-incentive channel, eroding the role of third-party retail and normalizing subsidized flagship pricing near the $300 mark.
- Sprint's steady run of HTC Windows Mobile sliders — from this device through the EVO 3D era and the Windows Phone 7 Arrive — foreshadows the deep carrier-HTC co-dependence that defined the pre-iPhone-duopoly smartphone market, before platform shifts restructured both companies' fortunes.
The trend: This is one data point in the late-2000s shift of smartphone distribution from carrier retail floors to direct online sales, where subsidies and free-activation incentives became the primary lever for moving premium hardware.