Neither Sprint (NYSE: S) nor Palm (NSDQ: PALM) are willing to say how many Palm Pres they have been able to sell, but that doesn’t stop people from speculating.
A report released today says the Palm Pre is failing to meet expectations and sales are falling, which is in stark contrast to a report last week that said the Pre was holding up in the face of the new iPhone 3GS.
So which is it? The two theories are not even close. Charter (NSDQ: CHTR) Equity Research analyst Edward Snyder said last week that Palm had sold 300,000 Pre phones and that it will ship one million phones within three months. But today, wireless consultant iGR, says there is no widespread shortage of devices and in fact, sales are falling, reports TechCrunch.
iGR got their figures by calling more than 50 Sprint stores and asking them a series of questions. While some of them refused to participate, it did get responses from some of them. It said a majority of stores had plenty of Pres available, compared to 8 percent of stores last week, which had sold-out. In addition, it said 40 percent of stores that answered questions reported fewer than 10 phone sales this week; 33 percent said they sold between 10 to 20 units; and 16 percent reported 20 to 30. In comparison, Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) sold 1 million iPhone 3GS’s during its first weekend, and has reported shortages in its stores and in AT&T (NYSE: T) stores. Sprint would only confirm that it saw record sales during its first weekend of Pre sales.
Regardless of how many phones have been sold, sales are far off from the extravagant remarks made by Palm investor Roger McNamee in March. In particular, he expected the Pre to win over former iPhone users. He said in an interview with Bloomberg: “You know the beautiful thing: June 29, 2009, is the two-year anniversary of the first shipment of the iPhone
Is it just me or does someone else as well find the title of the post quite funny :)
Your comments are uninformative, possibly misleading, and definitly prejudiced! Keep your thoughts to yourself until they are founded in FACT not speculation and subjective fantasy!
Not funny, retarded. Of course the article was supposed to be about the conflicting speculation of sales, and felt a lot more like an apple fanboy giggling in his basement while he writes.
Even if you assumed the iGR report had any value, then you would take away an average per store sales of 10 pieces per week. They have 4000 stores, that makes 40,000 pieces a week. Which gets you close to 200,000/month. That makes sense if they sold 300,000 the first month.