Abysmal Palm Pre Stock Confirmed – 4 Devices per Best Buy, 2 per Radio Shack
By Simon Sage on Thursday, May 21st, 2009 at 1:09 PM PST In Hottest Hardware, Palm Pre, Rumors
Remember when Sprint (NYSE: S) CEO Dan Hesse said that there would be a shortage of Palm Pre phones for their launch on June 6th? He really wasn’t kidding. According to initial reports from retail stores, Best Buys and Radio Shacks will get between 2 to 4 devices at each location. Savvy consumers have already seen this kind of thing with the Wii, and won’t shake the feeling that inventory is being kept purposefully low to crank up demand. That’s a dangerous game to play with a public who has been teased enough with the Palm (NSDQ: PALM) Pre. We can only presume that production will build up and demand will taper off in a month or two, but you’d think Sprint would want to capitalize on the hype at launch as much as possible… If any of y’all are sales reps at any Pre-carrying location, feel free to drop a comment with your stock situation.
[via BGR]
Those are terrible numbers for such a sought after product. If the Palm Pre delivers on all of its promises, then I think things may get ugly when the Palm Pre is released.
No purposefulness to these shortages at all. The problem is with displays. They are non-standard and the supplier could not make more in time.
I’ve written about it few days after Pre announcement in January and yesterday. They only have 200K of them for Q2-Q3. And that includes European and (maybe) even Canadian launch
I’m sure Apple will have plenty of 3rd Generation iPhones available to fill the void.
This has not been confirmed, why are you spreading this garbage? 4 per store is based off of the 1,067 Bestbuy mobile locations, the problem is, not all Bestbuy mobile carry Sprint phones. BGR is hardly a source for confirmation, how did that WSJ review of the Pre by Mossberg go?… Exactly, it never materialized, BGR was claiming one of their “Ninjas” had info on that.
3 days!!!
If I can’t find a Pre by June 9 at a Sprint/Best Buy/Radio Shack/WalMart, I (and I’m sure many, many others) will have to succumb to that evil Apple device!
Yeah my local best buy in San Antonio (ingram store) had 16 phones. They opened at 8am, unbeknownst to me, and I got ticket #24. Awesome. I left.