So it's official: The Palm Pre will be available on June 6 and cost $199 with a two-year service agreement and rebate. Here's the Palm statement:

Sprint has announced today that the Palm Pre will be available on June 6. Sprint announced that it will be available nationwide in Sprint stores, as well as at Best Buy, Radio Shack, and select Wal-Mart stores. The webOS-based phone will retail for $199.99 (after rebate and service agreement).

The Palm Pre will provide access to all of the exclusive content on the Sprint Now Network, including Sprint Navigation, Sprint TV, and NASCAR Sprint Cup Mobile Live. More details about Sprint’s service plans and retail channels can be found on the company’s website.

There had been speculation that the Pre might be more aggessively priced to boost demand. But, disappointingly, not so. 

It's very unlikely that the Pre, despite its appeal and buzz, will win many converts to Sprint, which has been losing roughly a million subscribers a quarter. More likely it will prevent some defections to Verizon and AT&T. By contrast Sprint's pre-paid unit Boost Mobile's $50 unlimited plan has proven enormously successful and may be the growth engine for the company in the near term -- so much so that it's opening 50 new retail locations in 2009. 

With other carriers such as MetroPCS and Virgin Mobile trying to go head to head with Boost in pre-paid, that price war threatens to bleed over to the post-paid market. We can only hope so.

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Sprint is very bullish on the Pre:

“It’s the highest confidence I’ve ever had going into a device launch that this is going to be a blockbuster,” said Kevin Packingham, senior vice president for product and technology development at Sprint. He noted that he expects to know quickly whether the device has captured consumer enthusiasm. “I’m pretty sure we’ll know within the first week.”

For Sprint's sake -- but especially for Palm's -- I hope he's right that it will sell well.