Palm, Sprint to declare Pre launch date May 19th in WSJ; right venue?

While this bit of news is minor at best, it does reveal an interesting strategy for the Pre: Namely that Palm and Sprint are targeting the white collar business crowd first.

This may not be a revelation to you, but the Pre is many things to many people: to some, it's an antidote to the poisonous Apple iPhone, RIM BlackBerry cage match; to others, it's the way a smartphone should have been designed in the first place; to many, it's the first time an innovative mobile OS has been paired with innovative mobile hardware.

So it strikes me as interesting that Palm sees the Pre as intended for the WSJ set.

The ad pages of the Journal, long the paper of record for business journalism, has lately served as a bit of a ring for the smartphone brawl. Readers of WSJ are generally of the BlackBerry school of thought, but Apple's made a visible push to put its iPhone in conspicuous places in the paper, including full-length ads, to perhaps try to gain market share from dominant RIM.

That unbalanced battle was fought slightly more evenly with the introduction of the BlackBerry Storm; still, the war wages on, with the occasional salvo from the HTC Touch Diamond.

Like Amazon with the Kindle, Palm has been fairly savvy with the way it's been playing the gradual release of Pre information, and choosing its venues carefully for big reveals.

No pun intended, but if the Pre's launch date is revealed in the Journal, it means business.