Mobile Insiders

Earlier this afternoon, Jon Rubinstein, Palm's new CEO, spoke at the Palm’s fourth quarter conference call, and made a strong statement: Palm remains on track to meet Pre supply to working with application developers. However, Rubinstein did not address any questions regarding many Pres the company had sold to date. A link to the Earnings call is here.

According to Rubinstein, over 150,000 applications have been downloaded in the first weekend. More impressive, over one million applications have been downloaded in the follwoing three weeks. This last stat is impressive, given that it’s still in beta,” said Rubinstein. When put against iPhone's one billion downloads, this may seem miniscule, but consider how quickly the downloads have been compared with the iPhone in the first month. But also consider that consumer behaviour has since adjusted to the notion of paying for applications on the device, so this has definitely helped the Pre achieving these impressive numbers.

When asked about their approach to working with developers, “We’ve approached this methodically. We started off with 30 developers, and got tremendous feedback. We evolved the SDK, and then we let in hundreds of developers, and that’s what we have going in right now." Rubinstein also added, "We are feeling really good about it, and are about to open it up to thousands. We haven't had an issue - as of yet - with interest out there. The goal is for it to be accessible to everyone by the end of summer." 

With regard to its current relationship with Sprint, Rubinstein said, "Sprint is our exclusive launch partner for the Pre, and they’ve done a phenomenal job…The factory is ramping really well…There’s been a short wait for products, and we are working as fast as we can. If it keeps increasing, we’ll have to chase it a bit, but we are doing the best we can.”