AT&T Mobility and Verizon Wireless are each starting new promotions today aimed at getting customers to snap up smartphones (and their attendant data plans) in a final push for the holiday shopping season.

AT&T is halving the price of its BlackBerry devices from Research In Motion, including the new BlackBerry Bold 9700, with a two-year contract and after a mail-in rebate. Additionally, the carrier is offering the Samsung Solstice for free after a $50 mail-in rebate. An AT&T spokeswoman said there is currently no end date for the promotion, but that it would run through at least the rest of the holiday shopping season. The action may be a holiday response to Verizon's long-running buy-one-get-one BlackBerry promotion.

Separately, Verizon is launching an Android-focused promotion, which runs today through Dec. 7. Customers can buy either the Motorola Droid or the HTC Droid Eris, and can get another Droid Eris for free--that is, with a new, two-year contract and after rebate. In another bit of Verizon Android news, Verizon spokeswoman Brenda Raney confirmed to FierceWireless that the Droid Eris, which currently runs Android 1.5, will be upgraded to at least Android 2.0 sometime in the first quarter.

Currently, the Moto Droid is the only smartphone on the market running Android 2.0.

For more:
- see this release
- see this Verizon offers page
- see this Mobile Burn article

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