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).
