Palm itself is not particularly talkative when it comes to Pre market share – and the reason seems to be that the market share is by far not as good as expected by some bloggers. Figures from mobile advertising provider AdMob have just been released – here is a little breakdown of the PDF:
First of all, a look at Palm’s total marketshare (of all handsets, whether dumb or smart):
Unfortunately, most of that still is due to the Centro. It gobbles up 1% of all requests, leaving a rather measly 0.3% for the Pre and all other existing Palm OS handsets combined:
When looking at the marketshares on a per-carrier method, we see that Palm is now one of the largest smartphone providers for Sprint. This has been a traditional partnership which has kept Palm alive for some time…and seems to continue with the Pre:
(netbook users – right-click the image and hit View Image)
These numbers are nice – but what dopes it tell us. First of all, lets assume that of the two million Centros once sold about 1.5 million are still in active use (with a data plan). This means that the Pre can – at best – make up 1/3 of that, which puts their sales number into a range around 300kpcs – significantly below 500kpcs, and far off one million (which would send Palm’s marketing team all bonkers anyways). Looking around the world unfortunately doesn’t do much for Palm either: the Pre has not popped up on Krusell’s bestseller list, and can not be used outside of the USA due to its CDMA transmitter.
Some Palm heads hoped that the Pre could become a success similar to the iPhone: this definitely hasn’t happened (and probably won’t happen in the near future). The real question we have to ask each other is if Palm can live off the Pre sales on the long run…and I am not sure if 300kpcs/quarter is enough to keep them afloat on the long run (especially without a constant revenue stream from apps)…
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That is rather short sighted… the silliest thing first: They will have a constant stream of income from applications as soon as the catalog is complete and development and whatnot is really in full swing. IT WILL TAKE TIME.
Second thing is that you shouldn’t even think about trying to make anything of the pre’s marketshare anywhere but the US, since the pre is not available anywhere else yet. Again, GIVE THEM TIME. Apple simply doesn’t have the resources that apple has to pull off a multi-national launch at the same time. Anyway, it looks like launches internationally will be coming soon, so I’d say we should revisit the marketshare numbers next quarter once we have some more info from palm proper, and once the pre is actually available in more places.