The LG Marquee, a new budget smartphone from Sprint (and one that we recently wrote about), has suddenly gone missing from their website without warning this week. This happens barely two months after being launched.
Third party stores like Radio Shack and Best Buy still offer the device, and there doesn’t seem to be any sign of a recall. However, there have been reports from corporate Sprint stores that they don’t carry the device and don’t plan to.
According to a user on Sprint’s own message board:
“I was officially informed from the technician at the Sprint Technical store that no diagonstics are available for this phone because the Sprint store does not carry the model and it will never have diagnostics since the phones will never be carried at the store.”
I can confirm that my own local corporate Sprint store also doesn’t carry the device, and the representative I spoke to had never even heard of it. After contacting his supervisor, he said that they didn’t plan to carry it at this location, but couldn’t comment on other corporate stores.
While our initial impressions of the device were admittedly not high, it seems unlikely that Sprint would pull the device out of their lineup so quickly. It’s possible that Sprint is performing some sort of critical update (possibly related to the user experience issues we noticed), but the fact that the corporate stores don’t plan to carry the phone is suspicious indeed.
Allow the conspiracy theories to run rampant with this one. I’m going to try and reach out to Sprint for an official response. Stay tuned.
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