Yesterday, Verizon’s CEO Lowell McAdam said, “Over the next six months or so you will see devices like Palm Pre and a Second generation Storm on Verizon.” This comment resulted in 3 percent drop in shares of Sprint Nextel Corp. Today, Sprint’s spokesman responded, “We have the Pre through 2009.” That means Verizon won’t be getting Palm Pre at least for next seven months. This also means that Verizon’s comment were intended to take spotlight away from Sprint rather than actually sell Palm Pre before end of 2009.

Sprint and Palm are getting all the press coverage for past few months because of the upcoming Pre. And it is very likely that some Verizon customers will switch to Sprint to get Pre. The above comment was mainly directed at those customers, to stop them from jumping Verizon’s boat as soon as Palm Pre is released.

Verizon has been losing high paying smartphone customers to AT&T since the iPhone was launched, the company was hoping that BlackBerry Storm will bring back some of those customers, but the RIM device has largely failed to do that. And, now if Verizon starts losing smartphone customers to Sprint also, it would be bad for their bottom line.