So much for exclusivity, eh? Sprint is staying toe-to-toe with Verizon in the race to get the BlackBerry Tour to market, launching the consensus hottest RIM device to date on July 12 for $199.99 on contract after rebates. It's awfully refreshing to see an ominous statement like "later this summer" morph into "early summer" instead of slipping into the "dead of winter" as is all too often the case with hotly-anticipated phones, and we have a sneaking suspicion the Tour's gonna sell like a remastered Bonnie Tyler live album (that's a good thing, by the way). Who's in?

Screw the Pre -- government contracts are where the real action is at, and Sprint's got to be thrilled to know that it's the first, the last, and the only carrier to be used by the US Census in its 2010 once-per-decade review of the nation's denizens. We've known for some time that HTC would be supplying custom hardware to data collection folks in the field -- a device cleverly codenamed Census -- and indeed, Sprint's press release makes mention of the fact that about 140,000 workers started using the Harris-branded devices with integrated fingerprint readers and GPS back in April of this year. Sprint's also supplying a bit of infrastructure and about 1,500 wireless data cards, all told making this by far the most wireless Census in history. Makes you wonder what kind of equipment they're going to use in 2020, doesn't it?

Sprint subsidiary Boost Mobile got first dibs, but now it's the parent's turn -- which means Sprint proper will be taking delivery of the Motorola Clutch i465 for its Direct Connect iDEN network this summer. No exact release date was given, but interest parties are welcome to sign up now to be informed when they can drop the cash -- $39.99 on contract, to be exact, after the application of a total of $70 in rebates on a new two-year agreement. The little beast gives you full QWERTY (a Motorola first for iDEN), mil-spec 810F compliance for withstanding the worst you can throw at it, Bluetooth, GPS, and a VGA camera that isn't likely to win you any photography awards. Of course, if you want it that badly, you could just make the leap to Boost today -- but otherwise, stay tuned.

When the teaser went up, we knew the hotly anticipated BlackBerry Tour for Sprint was right around the corner, but the only hint of a release date was "later this summer." Lucky for us, the, um, insiders at Inside Sprint Now have clarified the vague window for all of us mere mortals. They confidently state that the Tour will be available on July 20th, just over a week after the purported release date on Big Red. This hasn't yet been confirmed by Sprint, but we're sure they want this baby out sooner rather than later, so quasi-mark your calendars, quasi-set your alarms, and get your $199.99 ready.

From the look of it, our BFF Roger McNamee stole himself a copy of Adobe InDesign and has gone wild in Sprint's ad department, calling out the iPhone for its unitasking nature and spendy contract price. All we have to say is that if this is really going to turn into this generation's Sega vs. Nintendo war, we'd better see a whole lot more licensed Joe Montana titles.

[Via PreThinking]

While some interesting things may or may not be happening under the hood, the freshly announced BlackBerry Tour for Verizon and Sprint (pictured in Verizon garb on the left) is hardly a departure on the surface. It mostly appears to be a minor modification to the Curve (right), though it does seem inexplicably thicker. The Bold seems positively overwrought in comparison. We didn't get much time to play with the OS, but the screen and the keyboard are pure new-generation BlackBerry charm.

Say you've been cooped up in your domicile for the past three-odd weeks, which means you blew right past the Pre launch -- and you've been unable to bring yourself to put on pants and trudge into a store. That's a big problem considering that Sprint's only been willing to offload Pres through retail locations so far -- but the tide's turning, and they've now let it known through the company's official Twitter account that telesales are a go. You still can't buy one online -- which would mean that in addition to avoiding the store, you'd also be able to avoid any interaction with a human being whatsoever -- but we're getting close, and we'll drink to that. Alone.

[Via Palm Infocenter]

You've been able to find the Exclaim and Snap for a while now if you've dug through third-party retailers hard enough, but Sprint's finally selling them directly from its own site. The Snap -- which we'd already known would hit this week -- is a portrait QWERTY handset running Windows Mobile 6.1 with support for HTC's Inner Circle functionality to block out email noise when you feel like you're about to lose your mind; it runs $149.99 on contract after rebate. The Exclaim is a low-cost QWERTY side slider designed to do battle with rival LG's Rumor 2; it'll set you back $79.99 on contract. Finally, the LX370 is a basic numeric slider with a 2 megapixel camera, running $99.99 with your name on the dotted line.

[Via Phone Scoop]

Well, that was fast. Just a couple hours after we noted Palm warning against hacking webOS to allow data tethering on the Pre, the first set of instructions has popped up. It's not the cleanest hack we've ever seen -- you need to root your phone, enable SSH, and then configure your browser to run through a SOCKS proxy -- but it'll certainly get the job done in a pinch. Just don't go crazy, alright? We've got a feeling Sprint's watching Pre accounts with an eagle eye.

We've seen a tremendous explosion in the webOS hacking scene ever since the Pre's firmware image leaked out -- between the easily-accessible restore more, Linux foundations and the directly-accessible HTML / CSS / Javascript application code, we've already seen everything from minor tweaks to full on NES emulation to Sprint activation hacks. In short, things are wide open at the moment, and people (including us) are excited by the possibilities -- but that doesn't mean Palm has to play along. In fact, two recent developments have us worried for the future of this happy little scene -- first, Palm's apparently forbidding the Pre Dev Wiki from posting any information about data tethering during the Sprint exclusivity period, and apparently threatening to have the site shut down if it happens:

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.

Yeah, that's pretty aggro for a company that needs to court all the developer support it can. We're not sure what'll happen after Sprint's exclusivity runs out, but we can't imagine any other carriers are going to be thrilled about hacked tethering options either, so we'd say Palm's going to keep the pressure on until unlocked GSM webOS devices hit the scene -- and we can almost guarantee that tethering hacks are going to make it into the wild regardless of Palm's actions.

Even worse for hackers, Palm's taking an unusually aggressive approach to webOS system updates -- they're mandatory. According to the support docs, webOS updates are automatically downloaded in the background within two days of being available, and they're required to be installed within a week of the download -- after seven days and four install prompts, the phone will give you a ten-minute countdown and then automatically begin installing the update. Sure, we can understand why Palm would want all of its devices to be updated, and we know that a lot of webOS system foundations are in flux while the Mojo SDK is being finalized, but forced updates seem extremely heavy-handed to us -- it's one thing to try and maintain control over a platform, it's another to keep it with an iron fist. Of course, it's probable that we'll see a hack to bypass all of this extremely soon, so maybe it'll all work itself out, but we'd really like to see Palm develop an official policy friendly towards hacking and homebrew and stick to it -- the Pre and webOS have attracted a lot of talent in the past two weeks, and it'd be a shame to lose it.

[Via PreThinking; thanks, Justin]

Read - Pre Dev Wiki tethering policy
Read - Palm webOS updates support doc

Sprint's fight with iPCS continues to wage on multiple fronts, all of which have been ongoing for eons -- especially the whole iDEN tussle in the wake of Sprint's merger with Nextel. Most recently, that little soap opera had seen an Illinois court rule that Sprint's got to divest some iPCS-controlled iDEN markets to bring it back into contractual compliance and restore Mother Nature's balance, and now Sprint's gotten around to announcing how that process is going to work. In short, it seems like a free-for-all -- the company has apparently put out a few feelers for buyers, but anyone it hasn't contacted is invited to hook up with Citi, who's managing the ordeal on Sprint's behalf. The carrier says that it expects everything to be squared away by January 25 of next year, which is when the court-imposed deadline falls; in the meantime, subscribers, stay cool, because Sprint says that service will continue uninterrupted and expects any transition to be seamless.

Some folks are already having luck scooping these things up at Best Buy and / or Radio Shack (you can snag it from the big box for $520 off contract), but if you like your phone sales direct, hang tight -- the Snap isn't far off. Sprint has told InformationWeek that the WinMo Standard device -- likely the first version of it to launch stateside in front of T-Mobile and Verizon -- will be launching on the 21st of this month for $149 on contract after rebates. That still puts it a solid $50 behind the E71x's aggressive $99 on-contract price over on AT&T, but if you're a WinMo diehard or you've got to be on Sprint, this might be your best option going.

[Via Phone Scoop]

So the HTC Snap missed its rumored June 7 date with destiny on Sprint, but don't count it out -- it might still be available before the weekend comes around. Word on the street is that Radio Shack is gearing up to offer the S511 Snap alongside Samsung's Exclaim QWERTY slider as soon as Friday for $149.99 and $79.99 on contract, respectively. If true, that would almost certainly make Sprint the first US carrier to offer a version of HTC's latest WinMo Standard device, beating out T-Mobile and Verizon -- the two others currently rumored to have eyes on it. Anyone planning on camping out at their local Shack Thursday night?

[Thanks, anonymous tipster]

If you find the idea of 5 gigabytes of wireless data positively disgusting and excessive, perhaps this is a little more to your liking: Sprint has now introduced its ridiculously-named "$39.99 Connection Plan for Corporate Liable accounts," which is targeted specifically at companies whose mobile data needs are "moderate." Right now it's only available to corporate clients, but the carrier plans to expand it to other channels this summer; as Sprint says, the offer brings 2 to 10 times the data that Verizon and AT&T offer at similar price points, but considering that we'd burn through 500MB on a data card (or even better, a MiFi) in about half a day, we think this one's better left to the truly infrequent users -- even at the fairly reasonable 5 cents per megabyte of overage.

We've yet to see Palm or Sprint confirm these numbers, but a quote from JPMorgan found in a Wall Street Journal roundup this morning asserts that "sales [of the Pre] in the first two days probably exceeded 50,000." The report continues by mentioning that said figure was "aligned with expectations, but probably fell short of the 146,000 reported first-gen iPhone sales" during its opening weekend due to "capacity constraints in manufacturing." By and large, most analysts are deeming the Pre launch a success, though it's hard to say whether the suits at Palm and Sprint agree or disagree. No matter how you slice it, 50,000 units in a single weekend ain't nothing to scoff at, but we'd say next weekend's sales could be even more telling. You know, if anything goes down today at 1:00PM ET.

[Via ZDNet]

Update: A new WSJ report now says analyst ranges are between 50,000 and 100,000. Heck, maybe Palm sold eleventy billion.