You know how it is, when you see a phone, and you instantly know it’s going to be a hit, way before it even goes on sale? Well, that was me, when I first saw the Palm Pre, and given the rumours of how many it’s sold since it was launched (estimates reckon it’s sold 150,000 units, which ain’t bad for a phone that’s so far only been released in one country, on one, single network), it seems that it is turning into a bona-fide hit.
Well, some new info’s popped up, courtesy of the NY Times, that seems to shed a bit more light on how much of a hit it is…
Y’see, as you’d expect from any modern smartphone, the Palm Pre has also got its own app download store, in much the same way as the HTC Magic has got the Android Market, and every iPhone ever has got the App Store. Palm’s got its own, and this week, according to analysts, they’ve hit the one million downloads mark. That’s a lot of apps.
To make those figures make a bit more sense, we’ll compare them to the benchmark that the iPhone set with the App Store. The App Store hit its millionth download a lot quicker (analysts say it hit that milestone 17 days quicker than the Palm Pre). Taken on its own, that’s not a good thing. Nor is the fact that the Apple App Store had 16 times the number of apps available, and 26 times as many phones accessing those apps, when it hit that milestone.
However, when you think about it, those last two numbers actually paint a positive story, not a negative one.
Conversely, what those last two numbers mean is that each app in Palm’s catalogue is getting downloaded 16 times more than the average iPhone app when it hit that milestone, and because there’s a lot less of them, the average Palm Pre user has downloaded 26 times as many apps as the average iPhone user had at that time.
That, right there, is a damn good start for Palm’s app catalogue! And bear in mind, that all of those were from one country, where it’s only been released on one network, so far.
When it goes global, we are gonna have a legitimate phenomenon on our hands, here!
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June 25th, 2009 at 6:12 pm
I know many will disagree including you techmarkus because people like slide out keyboards.
I cant help find though that this is a really good looking phone, until you slide out the keyboard. I’d be happy if they made it looking just like that above.
Although i agree it should do very well, although probably better if it was put on a real network!