We love a good rumor as much as any blog, but when we get one wrong we want to be the first to correct it. Last month we reported on a teaser site that promoted the HTC Passion was coming to Verizon Wireless this Christmas.
We questioned if the site was official and reached out to Verizon to see if they would comment.
“We don’t discuss phones that we don’t currently sale.”Verizon Wireless
Verizon’s response was inconclusive so our readers kept digging into the website. They found it was registered by the same person who did htchero.com which is obviously not an official site. Another reader performed a reverse lookup on the server IP and finally found the person behind it.
The htcpassion.com website is owned by a guy named Rob Jackson who also owns 193 “other” websites including one called “htczone”. I found this on the whois tracking website. Here is the info.
Enter an IP address or domain name into the form below and click “Look Up” to get a list of domains hosted on the same IP address.
IP/Domain Name: There are 9 domains hosted on this IP address. Here are a few of them:
- Buildandearn.com
- Cheapsmartbooks.com
- Htcozone.com
Whois Record
Registrant Search:
“Rob Jackson” owns about 193 other domainsBigMikeAAM reader
For those who do not already know, Mr. Rob Jackson is a friend of ours and the owner of Phandroid. I asked him to come clean on the Passion site and he responded with a simple “No comment :)”.
So while it appears the teaser site was a phony, the phone is real. New evidence shows that Google has chosen the Passion design and branded it as the Nexus One (which cleared the FCC with T-Mobile 3G bands).
There is a chance we still might see the HTC Passion for Verizon. We have seen multiple Passion names (Passion and PassionC) in the leaked HTC code that included 20 plus product names. Some sites have speculated that the PassionC could stand for the CDMA version of the phone, which would run on Verizon’s network.
Fake.
