JRPG handset analyst David Eller “says he thinks there were fewer than 250,000 active Pre units at mid-July because of returns caused by a keyboard issue. ‘While there have not been any significant long term engineering issues, the Palm Pre’s keyboard creates friction when sliding that causes the battery to recycle. This gives the appearance of poor battery life as the recurring powering up cycle drain the battery faster than it would through normal use.’ He says Sprint has considered lowering its ‘Simply Everything’ plan to $79 in order to stoke interest in the Pre,” Tiernan Ray reports for Barron’s.
MacDailyNews Take: The keyboard is also a sharp-edged antique festooned with fixed mechanical buttons and inexplicably locked into vertical position on a device that claims to offer landscape mode on its reportedly easily-scratched and highly-crackable cheap plastic screen.
Ray continues, “The alarming thing is that a 250,000 number for active units at mid-July would mean that fewer than 50,000 Pres were sold since the end of June, which would result in a weekly shipment rate of 25,000 units for the Pre, ‘considerably lower than the 117,000 weekly units Sprint would need to ship to maintain the exclusive agreement with Palm.'”
“In addition to those Palm notes, Eller writes that Apple’s iPhone 3GS had ‘a very successful launch’ in June, and he estimates that AT&T activated 2 million or so iPhones in the June quarter of which 1.4 million were the GS model. He says data points from China indicate that supply has now reached 6.5 million units of the 3GS,” Ray reports.
Full article here.
