Yes, you read that correctly. According to a ‘most-trusty of ninja’ at the Boy Genius Report, Best Buy will only receive 4,250 phones from Palm for the June 6th Pre launch. With an estimated 1,000 stores (estimate from a Best Buy Mobile rep), that’s just four phones per store for launch.

The story doesn’t get much better for other retailers. Radio Shack is only expected to see the Pre at 721 of their stores, each of which are expected to receive two units. The 721 stores fall in the highest expected consumer base for the Pre.

This is looking like terrible news for Palm, and it’s definitely the wrong way to go about generating hype. It makes me wonder what happened. Did they short-order touch screens? Are they worried about network stability? Was this just really poor decision making? Whatever it was, it’s bad, and I’m guessing this will go down as a bad year for Palm.