Palm Pre sales got off to a pretty decent start in the new phone’s opening weekend, with over 50,000 of the little blighters flying off the shelves into the eager pockets of Sprint customers.
The Pam Pre has had an opening weekend to be proud of, although so far at least sales haven’t hit the rather optimistic levels predicted by Palm investor Roger McNamee when he claimed that all the early iPhone adopters would switch to the new Palm Pre. Still, early days, eh Roger?
J.P. Morgan analyst Paul Coster has been reporting on the launch figures and wrote, “Sales in the first two days probably exceed 50,000, which aligns with our expectations, but sales are very probably short of the 146,000 reported for the first generation Apple iPhone, owing to capacity constraints in manufacturing (or imposed by PALM’s balance sheet). We believe the ’soft launch’ is probably proceeding to plan.”
All the same, it is probably too early to tell if the Palm Pre will be a real success. Palm needs to show that it can keep the Pre’s coming and ensure that store inventorys remain stocked. Also, yesterday’s announcement of the iPhone 3G S is certain to affect things, just a little bit.
