Palm Pre By the Numbers

Hard sales numbers on the Pre are hard to come by, so we're going to grab whatever we can. In the great news departments, medialets dug into App Catalog numbers and found [via Engadget Mobile] that as of a week ago, there have been around 700,000 downloads of webOS apps from the App Catalog. Even though everybody loves free and that's nearly all you can get on the webOS store, it's actually a fairly impressive number for reasons we'll get to in a moment.

Update: New numbers from Medialets: make that 1 million downloads as of today!

In the "just an estimate but it sounds ok to us" department, All Things D notes that though we don't have real numbers yet, an analyst has pegged the current sales numbers for the Pre at around 150,000 units sold.  Analyst predictions for how many they'll sell over the next year number in the millions (anywhere from 4 to 7.7), but Palm will need to get over their thin inventory issues to make that happen.

Back to those app download numbers -- they sound fine to us.  We're looking at roughly an average of 7 or more app downloads per person. That's a healthy amount given the slim selection so far and it also shows that Palm Pre users are ready, willing, and able to give third party apps a try.  Release that SDK, Palm, and let's start earning some money for developers and building out that ecosystem to support the millions of Palm Pre Phones everybody expects you to sell.