Palm Pre sold 300,000 in June

THE PALM PRE smartphone seems to be selling very well, according to Charter Equity Research.

By ringing up a few of its mates in the channel, the analyst outfit has worked out that sales into the channel in June were more than 300,000 units.

Charter's Ed Snyder thinks Palm sold 70,000 in May and might be suffering from the fact that it has yet to catch up with demand.

Palm had a few start-up problems with manufacturing and some uncertainty about initial demand, and it had only 120,000 units available at launch. That inventory was sold in a matter of days.

Snyder believes that Palm can produce about 15,000 units a day, and that it likely will ship nearly a million phones to Sprint in the first quarter of production.

According to Barron's Tech Trader Snyder claims that a WCDMA version of the phone "appears imminent", which means Palm may be set to make a lot of cash soon.

A Telefonica launch, combined with Sprint and the already announced planned roll-out by Bell Mobility in Canada, should drive Palm Pre smartphone sales above one million units per month, he added. µ