According to Brighthand, there have been over 150,000 sales of the Sprint Palm Pre running WebOS. The Palm Pre went on sale earlier this month and it's been a big hit. Will Sprint sell over 4 million Palm Pre smartphones over the next 12 months? Perhaps this is really dependent on the supply. After all, it seems like the demand is high, but the supply is where things are lacking.
I think the Pre is way overhyped by the media just to sell articles.
ReplyDeleteIf you look at it from a purely business standpoint, Palm has a difficult road ahead. They are competing with Google (Android), Microsoft (Windows Mobile), Apple (iPhone OS), RIM (Blackberry) and Nokia for developers for their platform.
A smartphone is more than an internet, clock and a calender. Its kind of like a laptop if I can use that analogy. No one will buy a laptop with no programs, similarly people will not seek to adopt a smartphone with no apps. A smartphone with no apps has little added utility beyond a feature phone.
With the Pre having only 30 apps, and the smallest established base of users (estimated around 150,000) competing against tens of millions established users on the iPhone and Blackberry and millions of users on Android already, developers will not be running over themselves to spend venture capital money on the smallest platform base supported by the least financially stable company (Palm).
Palm as you may know had a stock price of less than $2 before the Pre announcement and had to get a $450 million dollar capital injection from Bono (of U2) to save the company.
Consumers should look at the big picture, not running after the newest gadget. Look at what happened to the format HDDVD, Blu-ray won. The market can support 3-5 smartphone platforms, I don't think there are enough developers that it can support 6 (Android, iPhone, Windows, RIM, Symbian, WebOS).
In several years time, 1-2 of the smartphone platforms will go under due to lack of developer support. If you look at computers, the general public can only support two platforms, Windows and Mac OS. If you look at gaming systems, there are only 3 platforms. There are simply not enough developers, especially as these apps get more intensive and more difficult to program.