Palm Pre Tethering: No Discussions, Please!
By James Falconer on Monday, June 15th, 2009 at 6:29 AM PST In Palm, Palm Pre, Sprint
Looks like the folks over at the Pre Dev Wiki have been warned by the execs and legal team over at Sprint (NYSE: S). Why? Sprint has taken up issue with the many tethering discussions found on their site and IRC channel. Me thinks that much discussion will go on anyway… At this point Sprint does not have a plan available for the Pre that allows tethering…However, once Palm (NSDQ: PALM)’s exclusivity deal on the Pre is over, Palm may be forced to change this due to competition and options given from other carriers.
More from the Pre Dev Wiki Tethering page:
“We have been politely cautioned by Palm that any discussion of tethering during the Sprint exclusivity period (and perhaps beyond—we don’t know yet) will probably cause Sprint to complain to Palm, and if that happened then Palm would be forced to react against the people running the IRC channel and this wiki. We want to retain a good relationship with Palm, hence we are not allowing discussion of tethering on the IRC channel, or in this wiki.
Note that Sprint does not have a plan available for use with the Pre which allows tethering under the Terms Of Service.
Once there is a version of the Pre available for a carrier that does allow tethering, or an unlocked GSM version, then we may be able to change this policy.”
The Pre Dev Wiki is trying to stay in Sprint/Palm’s good books. Probably a good idea.
[Via: PreThinking]
There IS tethering on the Pre. Sprint Marketing is just blowing this one BIG TIME. They removed it from the phone specs because they want to charge extra, which makes sense. By allowing tethering they loose the revenue from a separate wireless card account ($50-$70). But they only charge about $15 extra. And there’s a chance you can get that discounted.
So the “no tethering” logo at the top of this article is dead wrong.