Palm’s Pre has been getting price cuts all over the place since launch, proving at once that Palm really wants to get the phone into your hands and that consumers don’t like it enough to pay more than they would for a messaging dumb-phone. There’s even a deal for the next couple days to get a Pre for free. Palm could be selling the Pre for full price, though, if they would just get it together already.

By get it together I mean release a full-fledged app store. The App Catalog is still a pathetic shadow of what it could be, with too few apps and no paid support. With the 1.2 WebOS update that just went live users can finally re-download previously purchased apps for free, but the update really didn’t do much else. Nevermind that enormous changelog, which is mostly just optimization of existing features, Palm needs a major update to make the phone desirable. Until that happens, they can plan to watch Apple’s own store grow exponentially, shrinking Palm’s potential user base one iPhone at a time.

In one of the quickest price reductions I’ve ever seen on a flagship device, the Palm pre has been cut once again to just $80. You can get that deal at Walmart, which beats the previous best from Amazon at $99.

I have to wonder just how low retailers can drive the price of a Pre to offer it for just $80 less than four months after launch. Sprint must be dying to sell these things if it’s willing to cut the price by so much. We went from $299 with a $100 rebate at launch to a flat $199 to a $150 deal in some places to the scattered $99 deals and now this. I’m going to guess there will be at least one thoroughly angry customer who purchased back in June and thinks a lawsuit is in order.

Earlier this week Palm held its Q1 earnings conference call for the 2010 fiscal year. Most everyone in the industry was looking forward to the call because it meant we might get some hard numbers around the Palm Pre sales speculation. Unfortunately, that’s not the case, and from the sound of things the Pre may not be doing the bang-up job some people thought.

You may recall this quote from Roger McNamee, one of Palm’s most prominent investors.

You know the beautiful thing: June 29, 2009, is the two- year anniversary of the first shipment of the iPhone. Not one of those people will still be using an iPhone a month later.

Well, according to Palm, the company shipped 823,000 units this quarter, and its carrier partners “sold through” 810,000, of which the “vast majority” were the Palm Pre. Now vast could mean anything, but for argument’s sake let’s put Pre sales at 500,000. That’s really not bad, and better than some analysts expectations, but Palm and its investors obviously overstated the success of this phone from the beginning, and that can’t make the company happy.

Palm goes on to say that success isn’t tied to a single device and that the WebOS platform will be the golden boy of the smartphone industry. Blah blah blah. Unless Palm can woo some talented developers and stop squelching the ones it has, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the company change hands in the next few years (see, I’m getting good at this research thing).

In its bid to compete with Apple, it looks like Palm will be embracing even the worst of business practices. Despite an already meager offering in the App Catalog, Palm has banned its first application, NaNplayer.

The problem came when Palm noticed the app using an undocumented API call. It’s actually a call already used by the integrated music player to create playlists, but its not something Palm wanted to see in third-party apps. In a response after the media got wind of the story, Palm’s Developer Community Manager said the API was scheduled to change in future versions of WebOS so current apps shouldn’t rely on it.

I suppose that makes some sort of sense, but why not let the developer know and encourage them to make the switch instead of enforcing the change through rejection. If the API is going to break playlists, wouldn’t it do the same in Palm’s current app? And if Palm can write a way to migrate those playlists couldn’t NaNplayer’s developers do the same?

Regardless of the what-ifs, NaNplayer’s developers have said they’ll be going the homebrew route with their app, a decision Palm apparently supports. I suppose that’s better than suggesting homebrewing is illegal.

A couple days ago I posted the latest deal from Sprint – a $100 credit over three billing periods if you bought a Pre and ported your number. Well the deal’s over. In fact, it wasn’t even supposed to begin.

Sprint issued the following statement on the matter:

After further internal review today, the offer of a port-in service credit of $100 to new customers who buy the Palm Pre has been pulled because it was put into the system in error.

That’s a hell of an error. Sprint did say that it would honor the deal for anyone who signed up while it was live, but after that, no dice. I’d be curious to see what the subscription numbers looked like while the deal was running, and whether they looked any different from the usual.

On the upside, maybe Sprint doesn’t need as many customers as I thought it did.