Author: Horace Dediu

Palm sell-through down 15% year-on-year

Smart phones sold to retail customers totaled 408,000 units, down 15% from a year earlier and 29% sequentially

By some estimates, Apple pre-sold more iPads online in one week than Palm sold smartphones through Sprint and Verizon stores in 3 months.  What’s more remarkable is that year-on-year decline implies Palm sold more Windows Mobile devices than WebOS which was not on the market a year ago.

link: Palm Narrows Loss but Retail Sales Decline – WSJ.com

  • The company said there are over 2,000 apps in the Palm App Catalog.
  • ASP was $367, down from $375.
  • Almost all volume was from WebOS products (Windows Mobile devices are gone)
  • For Q4, the company expects revenue to be less than $150 million.
  • Q4 gross margin likely in the mid-teens.
  • Guidance for $150 million in revenue, down 57% sequentially.

After hours market cap for Palm is about $833 million down 13%.  Expected revenue and ASP imply about 410k units will be sold into the channel in the following quarter.


Sources tell WSJ iPad to outsell iPhone within 3 months of sales start

Apple Inc. is still negotiating lowered-priced content deals from media companies for its iPad ahead of the device’s April 3 launch, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday on its Web site, citing unidentified sources close to the matter. Apple has already sold hundreds of thousands of the devices on pre-order, according to the Journal. The sources also told the newspaper that the iPad may outsell the iPhone within the first three months after launch.

My emphasis.

link: Apple still negotiating iPad media deals: WSJ – MarketWatch

That does not seem to be quite a huge feat.  The iPhone sold 1 million within 74 days and approximately 1.4 million in the first quarter.

With “a few hundred thousand” pre-sold it seems rather likely to me that an additional million for three months is not a stretch.

Microsoft Taketh Away

Summarizing the new Windows Phone 7 Series:

  1. No Multi-tasking — However, there are going to be notifications.
  2. No App Sideloading
  3. No App store other than the Microsoft App Store
  4. No Cut/Copy/Paste
  5. No Expandable Storage
  6. No Exposed File System
  7. No Shell Customization / Skinning
  8. No native applications (managed code only)

Funny how when iPhone came out and Ballmer laughed his head off, these were the “power” features that most pointed to in WinMo that made the iPhone a “toy”.

Maybe if people want an iPhone copy, they will get an iPhone.

UPDATE:  (via Gruber)

Catching up is hard. And based on what I’m hearing about iPhone OS 4.0, it seems likely that Windows Phone 7 is going to fall further behind before it even gets a chance to ship.

Smartphones nearly a third of all phones sold in fourth quarter

smartphones made up 31 percent of the mobile device market in the fourth quarter, up from 23 percent in the last quarter of 2008

link: Smartphones: Not Just for The Young and Hip – CNBC

40% by end of 2010? 50% by end of 2011? Reason why:

about 75 percent of the smartphones purchased in the fourth-quarter were priced at $150 or less


Analysts scrambling to update models as app download rates explode

Analysts at Yankee Group recently boosted their forecasts for what they call a mobile app “gold rush,” saying that revenue from U.S. downloads alone would reach nearly $1.6 billion in 2010 and would hit $11 billion in 2014. Only six months ago, their analysis indicated that U.S. downloads would bring in far less — about $4.2 billion in 2013.

link: Studies Forecast Rapid Growth in Mobile Apps – Digits – WSJ

These attempts at forecasting are fraught with errors.

For the record, I’ve blown my estimates on this multiple times. The growth of the iPad will put another wrench in the works. I wonder how these “mobile” forecasts will change when the platform consists of a music player, a phone and a pseudo-computer.


Google thinks trying to predict the stock market is illegal

There are many, many things that Google could do, that we chose not to do… One day we had a conversation where we figured we could just try to predict the stock market. And then we decided it was illegal.

link: MacDailyNews

This is so insane that I have to assume he was mis-quoted.


Nexus One: 135k Units Sold

Despite the fact that the Google Nexus One is the most advanced Android handset to date, and enjoyed substantial buzz leading up to its release, the launch has been overshadowed by lower than expected sales.

link: Initial Sales of Original iPhone, Droid, and Nexus One Compared – Mac Rumors

On the heels of the 71% cut in estimates this should not be a surprise. Nor should it be given Rubin’s stated goal:

Rubin hopes his company can sell, at the very least, 150,000 Nexus One devices.

link: Google’s Mobile Chief Andy Rubin on the Google Phone & the Androidification of Everything – GigaOM