According to Bob Brust, Sprint Nextel's CFO, the release of the new iPhone 3GS on AT&T's airwaves hasn't impacted the sales of the Palm Pre, which the carrier has exclusively for 2009. The Palm Pre, the newest mobile phone from the company, comes to the market with a brand new operating system, webOS, and has been touted as an iPhone killer by most industry watchers. As per Brust, the sales of the Pre haven't been impacted by the release of the fresh iPhone, though he doesn't exclude the possibility that this might happen in the future.

Even so, we should note that the sales of the Pre during its first weekend of availability (June 6-7) have been far weaker than those registered by the Apple iPhone 3GS, the third iteration of the company's device, which was announced to have sold in more than 1 million units during the first three days of availability.

Although the new iPhone handset does not bring too many hardware improvements, its platform, the iPhone OS 3.0, is reported to come with a wide range of new features, meant to close the gap between the Apple device and the Pre, which already included some of the functionalities in question.

“We still have a backlog of subscribers but it's not unmanageable and we get shipments every week,” Bob Brust, Sprint’s CFO, said during a webcast of an investor conference. “We'll be short for a while but we're catching up.” According to him, both Sprint customers and new users are choosing the Palm Pre. As many of you might already know, Sprint hopes that the handset will help it stop losing postpaid subscribers.

Referring to the carrier's plans, Burst stated that the company planned to boost its lagging revenue. It seems that the Palm Pre will indeed help the company rise its revenue, and the same should happen with the $50 per month unlimited voice and data plan that is available with Sprint's prepaid subsidiary, Boost Mobile. “So sometime out into the future, not years but quarters, I hope we'll see that revenue flatten out and then hopefully turn around, and it'll look like a different company financially when that day comes,” Burst said.