Shoppers sizing up a Palm Pre at a Sprint store. (Robert Mullins photo)
The new Palm Pre smartphone is selling better than even Palm expected, though sales are still well behind those of the new Apple iPhone 3GS.
Wireless and Mobile News reported Tuesday that Palm has sold 375,000 units of the Pre so far and is selling them at the rate of 15,000 a day. The article cites Charter Equity Research analyst Ed Snyder as its source for the numbers.
At this rate, Palm could reach 1 million sales in the first quarter of Pre’s presence on the market. Apple, however, said it reached 1 million unit sales of the iPhone 3GS the first weekend it went on sale June 19.
Wireless and Mobile News reports Palm sold out of its original production run of 120,000 units in the first few days after the Pre’s introduction June 6. Sprint is the exclusive wireless service provider for the Pre in the U.S., selling the devices for $199 after a $100 rebate and with a two-year service contract that starts at $70 a month.
The article also states that Palm has nearly doubled its 650,000-unit order to contract manufacturer Taiwan-based Foxconn, to 1.2 million.
This has got to be pretty good news for Palm, which is really counting on Pre to get it back into the smartphone game after being eclipsed in recent years by the Apple iPhone and RIM BlackBerry.
The Pre is the successor to Palm’s Treo line, which, while successful for Palm, had been on the market since 2003 in various iterations (the 600, 680, 700, 750, etc.) and had an outdated operating system. The Pre runs on Palm’s new webOS operating system, which makes it possible for users to run multiple applications simultaneously, a capability the iPhone notably lacks.
While the initial sales reports are encouraging, Palm still has RIM to worry about, too. Wireless and Mobile News also reports that its new BlackBerry Tour is to go on sale through Verizon Wireless, July 12. T-Mobile is to begin selling an HTC smartphone running on Google's open-source Android platform soon, during a busy summer of smartphone launches.
A Palm spokesman declined to comment for this report; the company does not discuss specific sales figures for its products.
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