SharonW

A Second Opinion on Palm Pre's App Numbers

"So the user base of the App Store was ~7,500,000 phones when it launched. The launch user base of the Palm store was zero — same as the Android Marketplace, which is doing just fine, thank you. This isn’t a throwaway statistic, it’s the main problem with the comparison. An established user base approaching 10 million people and growing the way a hit year-old phone should is more than a slight advantage, it’s a game-changer. So let’s get proportionate." - Devin

Devin, I whole heartedly agree with your premise and would go further to say that Tech Crunch isn't merely biased or savage, but just plain FAULTY in its comparison. Yours would be the proper comparison.

Tech Crunch's comparison would be like comparing the number of calls made on land lines the year prior to the release of cell phones and the number of cell phone calls made in the first month of their release. It's just stupidly and blatantly wrong.

Moreover, Tech Crunch fails to take into account that Palm while still holding on to the SDK for another two months has said "Beginning immediately, we’ll accelerate the growth of the early access program, expanding as quickly as resources allow. Over the next few weeks, the program will grow from hundreds to thousands of developers."

All statistics will change rapidly when those thousands of developers are able to release their apps to the Pre even before the rest of the developer world is granted access to the SDK.

Thanks for a proper perspective. I've grown tired of witless, biased comparisons of apples to oran...palms.

BTW, I stopped by my local Sprint store on Friday, during a down pour. The store was packed. They are getting new shipments of Pres daily, but there is still a waiting list of 70 names which is being added to as well as subtracted from daily as the shipments come in.

Last, but not least, let me remind some here of the some 35,000 odd apps out there for previous Palm products that can still be used on the Pre with the emulator. Apple did not invent the app concept.