Verizon to offer 2 BlackBerrys for price of 1

(Credit: Verizon Wireless)

Starting Friday, for every BlackBerry purchased, Verizon Wireless will throw in another for free.

It's a buy-one-get-one-free special that will run until March 31, and it applies to all BlackBerrys--including the brand new Storm. That's what makes this promotion kind of surprising: the touch-screen Storm is Verizon's supposed answer to AT&T and the iPhone and they're giving them away now?

Well, not entirely. The second piece of hardware will be free, but you still have to sign two-year contracts on each phone involved in the deal. And in the long run, Verizon extracts more money from customers through contracts than on hardware. Still, we won't see AT&T doing a two-for-one iPhone deal probably ever.

So why now? Perhaps Verizon just needs to clean out its inventory of BlackBerrys. But the Storm is barely 3 months old and has had its share of problems already. Many customers have complained vociferously about the device's buggy software and problems with the hardware.

Maybe it's not a coincidence then that the Storm software update rolls out March 31 (according to a report on the Boy Genius Report blog), the last day of the promotion?