From engad­get:

Think you’ll have to wait until June 6^th for all the Pre sur­prises to emerge? Think again. A break­ing Reuters report has just dropped one of the biggest cel­lu­lar bomb­shells of the year: Ver­i­zon Wire­less, America’s largest mobile oper­a­tor, will soon be car­ry­ing Palm’s Pre. Oh, that’s not enough? No wor­ries — it’ll also be sell­ing a “new ver­sion of the touch­screen Black­Berry Storm,” which is obvi­ously the Storm 2 that we’ve been toy­ing around with. The report makes clear that both phones would be cleared for ship­ment in around six months, which cer­tainly jibes with whis­pers we’ve heard about Sprint’s mighty short exclu­siv­ity period. The news came from the company’s Low­ell McAdam, the top exec­u­tive for the ven­ture of Ver­i­zon Com­mu­ni­ca­tions and Voda­fone. To quote: “Over the next six months or so you will see devices like Palm Pre and a sec­ond gen­er­a­tion Storm.” First Sprint, then AT&T, and now Ver­i­zon? T-​Mobile, where you at?
[Thanks, E]
Update: Seems Mr. McAdam con­tin­ued on by not­ing that VZW would get the Palm Pre “and a cousin.” Hmm, Eos, any­one?

So Ver­i­zon is get­ting the Palm Pre, the Palm Eos, the Black­berry Storm 2 (now with­out inher­ently lim­it­ing click screen) and we keep hear­ing rumors from trusted sources about Ver­i­zon get­ting some vari­ant of the iPhone. Prob­a­bly not just a CDMA ver­sion of the 3G, as that would poten­tially vio­late their con­tract with AT&T, but I’ve heard rumors that Ver­i­zon may be get­ting either or both the iPad tablet and the iPhone Mini.

Admit­tedly, this is all spec­u­la­tion, but I’ve pointed out before that each major US car­rier seemed to have a stan­dard bearer smart­phone plat­form. Ver­i­zon pushed Black­berry, Sprint had the Pre, AT&T had the iPhone and T-​Mobile had the Android G1. Now it seems Ver­i­zon might be mov­ing to con­sol­i­date every­one else’s mar­quee phones under their own ban­ner. Any­one got any good Android on Ver­i­zon rumors?

While I will con­cede that Black­ber­ries have become real smart­phones rather than the uppity pagers of yore, I have to won­der at the thought behind this par­tic­u­lar announcement.

AT&T Rel­e­vant Products/​Services is prepar­ing for a Elec­tion Day sales surge on Nov. 4, when Research In Motion’s Black­Berry Bold will launch at AT&T’s stores nation­wide for $299.

Com­mu­ni­ca­tions — Black­Berry Bold Set for Elec­tion Day Launch

So they’re releas­ing a new prod­uct on the same day as the most impor­tant elec­tion in many of our life­times? Because that won’t be a distraction.

There have been rumors float­ing about for a while that RIM has some seri­ous prob­lems with the Black­berry Bold, among them heat and bat­tery life. Despite the hope­ful, happy tone of this press-​release-​masquerading-​an-​article, I have to seri­ously won­der if RIM/AT&T picked this date in hopes of turn­ing what had been a hotly antic­i­pated launch into a safer, lower-​profile “soft launch” in hopes that any early adopter com­plaints would be lost in the hub­bub around Obama’s elec­tion. And if there really isn’t any­thing wrong with the Bold, why choose to launch it on a day when absolutely no one will be talk­ing about it?