Palm Pre's latest facts and rumors
7/1/2009 by: Thomas Gordon
Palm reports its webOS developer community doubled in size overnight after the device maker sent out its first batch of invitations requesting programmers to sign on. Chuq Von Rospach, Palm's developer community manager, wrote on the Palm Developer Network Blog "If you didn't get an invite, please be patient – we're working on it and will continue to work to get as many of you into the program as fast as we can."
Palm Pre's App Catalog storefront topped the one million application download benchmark last week. There are claims that Palm has sold 150,000 units. However, the Washington Post says Charter Equity Research analyst Edward Snyder released a report on Monday saying that he spoke with his sources in the manufacturing and retail channels. Those conversations have led Snyder to believe that Palm has sold 300,000 Pre phones, and that it is struggling to keep up with demand.
Snyder estimates that Palm is currently building 15,000 Pre smartphones a day and will ship one million phones to Sprint in the first full quarter of sales. This isn't close to Apple iPhone 3GS which sold one million units in the first weekend following release. However, Apple's iPhone is on generation three and has been pushing their smartphone since 2007. In their first year, the big mystery was how could they sell 1.4 million units, but over 250,000 were not activated. Now we all know that the GSM iPhone was “off the reservation” from day one.
The next question to ask Palm Inc. managers is, how many have been sold, and how many have been activated on Sprint's network?
Today, at least two sites were crowing about Vietnam having a GSM version of the Palm Pre. The authors were watching a YouTube video. Sadly, my Vietnamese translation ability faded decades ago. However, you can hear the speaker mention CDMA. In 2003, Vietnam launched CDMA service in the 450MHz band. In April 2008, CDMA Development Group (CDG) said that Vietnam's CDMA subscribers had grown by 230 percent in 2007. Vietnam does have GSM mobile carriers and six of them are listed by GSM World. Thus, we really need a Vietnamese speaker to listen to the YouTube video, to verify that it really is a GSM version of the Palm Pre.
The other big rumors are about the Palm Pre's build quality, or lack of same. Everyone seems to be quoting comments from the PreCentral Forum entitled "Horrible build quality". However, if you go past the forum's first page, you will find a cross section of opinions, including many people who are satisfied users.
There are problems with rumor tip sites like Digg, Reddit, TechMeme, Mixx, and everyone’s number one rumor source, Twitter. The information may present only partial facts, or possibly the information is totally untrue. "Caveat emptor – Buyer beware" still applies to anything that is passed along to you.
Tags:
Palm, Pre, Apple, iPhone, smartphone, cell phone, Washington Post, Charter Equity Research, Digg, Reddit, TechMeme, Mixx, Twitter, GSM, CDMA, 450MHz, webOS, PreCentral Forum, Vietnam, Palm Developer Network, GSM World, CDMA Development Group
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