- Wednesday, 10 February 2010
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Teeth make smiles, and smiles make sales - Unidentified Harrods person in Alan Sugar's The Apprentice
Palm Pre UK demand outstrips 2007 Iphone takeup
INITIAL DEMAND for the Palm Pre is expected to beat the Iphone at its launch, according to the latest poll.
The Pre is the UK’s most anticipated phone, with 26 per cent of mobile users expressing an interest in buying one. This is almost double the 16 per cent who said they would buy the iPhone before its launch in 2007.
The ‘Iphone killer’ handset, due to launch on Friday, will be available on O2 alongside its Apple rival. O2 will be offering the smartphone free to those on a 24-month contract, which it hopes will boost longer contracts in its users.
This is verified by the figures from TNS which show that the 27 per cent of existing O2 customers want a Pre. Of those polled, 32 per cent who are currently on other networks said they'd consider switching to O2 to get it.
Sales of the Palm Pre are expected to outshine those of the Iphone in its first year, despite lower awareness of the handset overall among the general population.
Kevin Evans, associate director at TNS Technology expects the Pre to shake up the smartphone industry in the UK.
"The figures suggest that once the new handset hits the shelves it has the potential to capture a substantial share of the market,” he said.
Already available in the US, the Pre has been enthusiastically received by both the critics and the users with around a million handsets sold so far. µ
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... in large quantities. This smacks of let's-make-up-some-ludicrous-statistics-to-generate-word-of-mouth marketing to me. I'd love to see the questions on that marketing survey, because this really doesn't reflect the "Meh." that I see greeting yet another entrant to the iPhone runner's-up party.
I have no idea where you get your numbers from, but Palm's total sales since the Pre came out are UNDER one million units. That's including all their other models.
Estimates for the first three month's sales to Sprint, which then sells the phone to other stores has been maybe as much as 550,000 units.
But activations, meaning people who actually went and bought the phone, is estimated at maybe 375,000.
Phone sales have been disappointing, as even the CEO of Sprint admitted.
I can see O2 being forced to give it away for free. That pretty much says it all, doesn't it? They can't sell it.
The iPhone is losing it's luster to just 16% interested in the UK while 26% are more interested in the Palm Pre!
It's no surprise, the Palm Pre can do just about everything the iPhone can do while raising the bar by doing things the iPhone can't: Removable battery, physical keyboard, true multitasking, etc.
The total compatible apps developed for the Palm Pre is now above 400 while more iPhone developers migrate and expand their apps onto the Palm Pre.
The Palm Pre sales and activation for a 1st generation smartphone reached well above 500,000 units while the iPhone's 1st generation only activated about 146,000. 1st gen Palm Pre sales exceeded the 1st gen iPhone by 4x.
It's clear to see that the Palm Pre is now the latest style in high-tech smartphones with the an amazing multitasking operating system.
In the US there were only selected stores with the handset when it was launched, will this be the case in the UK? I've been asking around various groups on Twitter etc but no-one seems to know anything about it
If demand is so high for the Palm Pre why would a greedy telco give them away for free?
Sounds like O2 is just getting ready for a luke warm launch.
The "iphone killer" has no clothes.
Actually, there are only a little over 100 apps in the store. The rest are amateur apps for the most part, and installing them is no picnic. Palm is making it very hard to get apps out there.
When Palm first came out, it was available in all of Sprints stores, and Best Buy, Radio shacks stores and a couple of others.
All told, that was over 10,000 stores, as well as both Sprint's and Palm's web sites.
We don't hear much about it, because almost no one is buying it.
http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20090930/pre-inventory-glut/
~500k Pre sales was for 3 months. 146k activations on 1st gen iphone was what, the first weekend?
First gen iPhone sold over 1.3m in first 3 months....
o2 has sold just 1300 Palm Pres on friday and saturday. Ask o2 if you don't believe me. That's a little over one Pre per o2 store, per day since launch.