If you’ll think back to Palm’s last quarterly conference call, they revealed that around 810,000 Pre phones had been sold. Now today despite the pleasant surprise in sales numbers that beat most estimations, one of those unruly analysts has reared his head and claimed that Palm is indeed not doing as well as we all thought. David Eller of Town Hall Research (whom we have heard from before) said in a recent note that Palm’s sales figures were inflated by reporting the number of units sold by Sprint plus those that Sprint shipped to third party resellers (e.g. Best Buy) instead of the actual number of activated units. Eller went on to say that “channel inventory is currently about 11 weeks, which we believe will pressure reorder rates and make it more difficult to sell high [average selling price] products going forward.”

Palm would have nothing of it, and in a response to John Paczkowski of Digital Daily said, “The sell-through data we post reflects carriers’ sales to their customers. For example, Sprint customers include consumers who buy in a Sprint store, and Sprint retail partners such as Best Buy and RadioShack. We rely on our wireless carriers to provide us with sell-through data, and we note this fact in our 10Q.”

[via: Gizmodo]

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If JNK wireless consultant iGR (quoted in TechChrunch) is to be believed, Palm Pre sales are not as high as other analysts seem to think. As expected, the sales rate has dropped somewhat since the launch date, but iGR is estimating that Pre sales have dropped to and stabilized around 22,000 – 25,000 units a week, from a launch week high of 140,000, adding up to a to-date total of around 320,000 sales. Sprint’s inventory of Pre phones has reached a supply-demand stabilization point (which bodes well for Bell customers in Canada).

Speaking of analysts, Barron’s is quoting TownHall Research analyst David Eller, who has echoed Kevin Dede’s statement that Pre returns are running at higher than expected levels. Eller claims that “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.” Honestly, that makes no sense to us (friction causing battery problems?), though we think he might be discussing the battery fit-related slider crashes that afflicted some early purchasers.

Eller’s numbers point to 250,000 active Pre phones as of mid-July, and that less than 50,000 have been sold this month. The problem there shifts to Sprint, as the carrier’s exclusivity agreement with Palm apparently includes a clause requiring that Sprint sell 55,000 units a week to maintain their exclusive. Feeling the pressure, Eller also claims that Sprint has considered lowering the price of the $99 Simply Everything unlimited voice/text/data plan to $79 (presumably for new customers and for a limited time) in order to pump up the Pre’s sales rate. Of course, advertising for the Pre has been a touch on the anemic side until fairly recently, so things could pick up again.

In short – it does appear that sales of the Pre just may be slowing down a bit.  Then again, as always, estimates from analysts are to be taken with a healthy dose of salt.

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