Comparing the sales of the Pre to iPhone 3G sales makes little, if any, sense. There was never any chance that the Pre’s sales would match the iPhone 3G’s sales. That’s a completely artificial expectation, given that the iPhone 3G was the successor to the massively popular original iPhone. The Pre, in contrast, is a brand new product, with no legacy behind it. Not to mention the fact that the Pre had nothing even close to the ad blitz that was behind the iPhone 3G (or even the original iPhone). Comparing the Pre to the original iPhone would probably make more sense, but even there, comparing apples to apples is difficult, because Palm is in a very different financial position than Apple was when they released the iPhone.

The lack of apps (relative to the iPhone) is similarly unsurprising, given the fact that the iPhone App Store has had such a long head start. But with the release of the SDK, the number of Pre apps should increase rapidly. (At least, it should increase rapidly in the homebrew arena. There’s no telling how long it’ll take the App Catolog to introduce new apps. The barrier to getting the App Catalog fully up and running seems to be the question of just what form compiled apps are going to take on the Pre. At present, the apps are all on the Pre in plain text form, which isn’t going to be acceptable once people start selling their wares. And of course, there’s still the issue of native access to the hardware that has to be worked out. (I actually see this as a relatively small problem, considering the Linux underpinnings of WebOS. There are plenty of mature programming languages that can be used to access the hardware.)