Here’s an interesting story for you. I was all excited like a kid on Christmas this morning. I went to bed knowing the HTC ThunderBolt was going on pre-order and wanted to be at Best Buy as soon as they opened. The flyer on the website that was well rumored posted about 3:00 A.M. Eastern time. When I woke up this morning the flyer was still running, so it wasn’t pulled or another bizarre teaser.
I arrive at Best Buy and there was a full line of people ahead of me. So I waited for about 20 minutes, no problem. I went through the entire ordeal of saying I wanted to pre-order, they looked up my info, and things at this point are going great!! However, the sales associate now tells me that I am not currently eligible for an upgrade. I have three months to go on my contract. I said, I know and thought Verizon would have let me upgrade with no question. He tells me Best Buy does not. And that I can still get my “gift card” to come back and buy the phone in May. Unacceptable.
Bottom line is, if you are getting a new contract or are upgrading and have expired your current contract things will be fine. By all means, go and pre-order this great phone as soon as you can. If you are a contract bearing person like myself then you just need to wait for Verizon to sell the phone on their release date. The price of $249.99 was confirmed to me but they still did not know a release date nor data plan pricing. I believe I could have bought the phone for full price, but with three months to go that’s just silly. Oh and by the way, Best Buy does NOT allow you to purchase a phone with a one year contract. They however have a pretty cool concept with a “Buy Back” program.
If you are still interested in checking out the ThunderBolt from Best Buy here is a nice website that they created which shows off some of its great features. Best Buy ThunderBolt
Sources: Droid-Life, Best Buy