Today brings another Palm-related research note, this one from Pacific Crest analyst James Faucette. He claims that Pre sales are “robust.” According to Faucette’s channel checks, Palm is selling about 40,000 Pres per week, a “normalized” sell-through rate that he says will continue through August.

So who’s right? Piecyk or Faucette? Who knows? Until Palm (PALM) and Sprint (S) go on record with real sales metrics, we’ll have to use our imaginations. Which is pretty much what all these analysts appear to be doing right now, anyway. Honestly, they might as well be issuing research notes on jelly bean jar guessing games.

Oh, and for what it’s worth, Palm and Sprint are not willing to release sales numbers right now. Reached for comment, Sprint told me, “We’re excited by the response to Palm Pre. Demand continues to be strong, and we are working closely with our partners at Palm to meet the needs of every customer as quickly as possible.” And Palm told me me to call Sprint…

“We estimate that sales of the Palm Pre slowed again over the past week compared to the prior week but likely remain over 30,000 compared to less than 40,000 in the prior week and our estimate of 50,000-60,000 in the week ending June 26th,” Pali analyst Walter Piecyk said in a research note this morning.

Now, to be fair, the holiday weekend may have negatively affected sales. And another report from Piper Jaffray suggests that the Pre is cutting into sales of RIM’s Blackberry. So there’s that. Still, if Pali’s estimates are correct, it’s pretty clear that demand is tapering off a bit.

Perhaps it’s time to ramp up the Pre’s marketing. Problem is, marketing costs money and Palm doesn’t have very much of that right now.

“You know the beautiful thing: June 29, 2009, is the two-year anniversary of the first shipment of the iPhone. Not one of those people will still be using an iPhone a month later.”

– Palm investor Roger McNamee

Palm (PALM) seems to have satiated pent-up early demand for its new Pre smartphone, constrained supplies be damned. In a pair of investor notes issued today, analysts at Pali Research and JP Morgan say that sales of the Pre have tapered off to a point where supply and demand are roughly in parity.

“We have concluded our 3rd round of channel checks for the Pre,” writes JP Morgan analyst Paul Coster, who notes that demand for the handset is hovering at about 40,000 per week. “The gap between supply and demand has closed at Sprint and BestBuy stores, waitlists are eliminated or down, and most stores now have Pre devices in stock.”

Pali Research analyst Walter Piecyk also surveyed the Pre landscape and reached a similar conclusion, though he sees the slowing of sales as a bit more pronounced. “We believe that Palm Pre sales have slowed over the past week for Sprint to under 40,000 from 50,000-60,000 last week,” he writes. “…We suspect that if sales continue to moderate, Sprint would increase its marketing budget for the product. The marketing budget behind the product has been somewhat limited to date compared to the marketing push that Apple does.”

Indeed. And let’s not forget that Apple (AAPL) has a new handset on the market that’s been selling quite well. Makes you wonder if this ebb in demand for the Pre is somehow related.

Guess it’s looking like Palm investor Roger McNamee’s hyperbolic predictions about iPhone-to-Pre conversion aren’t going to quite pan out.

And the latest estimates, from Edward Snyder at Charter Equity Research, suggest that the impact is great. Sources in the manufacturing and retail channels tell Snyder that Palm may have sold as many as 300,000 Pres in June and 70,000 in May.

Those are impressive figures if they prove true. After all, Palm shipped just 351,000 phones in the entire quarter prior to the Pre’s debut. If Palm ships one million Pres to Sprint (S) in the device’s first full quarter of production, as Snyder believes, that will be an achievement indeed.

As I’ve said before, turnaround story of the year.

Not bad for an app store that launched with just 18 applications and currently boasts only 30. Think of how many more downloads there might have been, if the company wasn’t so maniacally selective in its distribution of the WebOS SDK.

“Just 18 days after the launch of the Palm Pre, their App Catalog has hit its first major milestone, 1 million downloads,” reports mobile analytics outfit Medialets. “On launch day, Palm sold 50k devices and their App Catalog experienced 100k downloads–that’s an average of 2 apps downloaded per device and 5,500 downloads per app (with a low of 600 and a high of 20k). 18 days later and they’ve tripled the user base to 150k units, averaging 6+ apps downloaded per device and 33.3k downloads per app (with a low of 2.4k and a high of 114k).”

Now, granted, Palm’s (PALM) one million downloads in 18 days doesn’t even begin to approach the performance of Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes App Store, which reached a similar milestone in about a day. But as Medialets notes, it’s not really fair to compare the two. “The App Store hit the 1 million download point about 17 days earlier than the App Catalog, housing more than 16x the amount of apps and was accessible by more than 26x the number of devices than the App Catalog,” the firm says. “Still comparing at the 1 million mark, the average Palm Pre user had downloaded 26x the number of apps that iPhone users had, and the average app in the App Catalog experienced 16x the number of downloads that apps in the App Store had experienced.”

“We still have a backlog of subscribers but it’s not unmanageable and we get shipments every week,” Brust told attendees of the Wachovia Equity Conference. “We’ll be short for a while but we’re catching up.”

Good thing. The new Palm (PALM) handset is not going to be much good at stemming subscriber losses if you can’t keep it in inventory. And as Sprint (S) well knows, there are other phones on the market, including one that’s $100 cheaper than the Pre, without the rebate.

Oh, and speaking of the iPhone 3GS, Brust says Apple’s latest handset hasn’t been having much of an impact on sales the Pre, though Apple (AAPL) sold one million units compared with a reported 50,000 for the Pre during its first weekend at market. “We don’t see any big change since the iPhone came out yet,” Brust said. “That may happen.”

That may happen. Heh.

Interesting. Certainly puts Palm’s claim that “Sprint tells us they have never seen higher demand for a smartphone” in perspective.

Coster’s suggestion for folks intent on buying a Pre but frustrated by the meager supply at Sprint Stores and Best Buy: Try Radio Shack, which “seems to have been neglected by eager early adopters.”

“The key thing was our CEO, Ed Colligan, had the insight that once the [BlackBerry] Pearl came out, the smart-phone business was going to be a consumer business, and Palm was not positioned for that and needed a major transformation, and that’s what we got involved in doing. The whole notion was you wanted to take that cultural legacy of innovation that created the Pilot and the Treo and then apply it to the next customer.”

–Roger McNamee lauds Palm CEO Ed Colligan at our recent D: All Things Digital conference

Now we know why it was Palm executive chairman Jon Rubinstein and investor Roger McNamee on stage at D last month talking up the Pre, and not CEO Ed Colligan: Colligan was on his way out.

On Wednesday, Palm (PALM) named Rubinstein as its new chairman and CEO. Come Friday he’ll succeed Colligan, who is leaving the company after 16 years to join McNamee at Elevation Partners. Apparently Palm, who recruited Rubinstein, a former Apple (AAPL) engineer, to turn the company around has decided it would much rather have him in its highest office than Colligan under whose leadership it was foundering.

In a statement, Rubinstein–who has spent the past two years quarterbacking the development of the Pre and its webOS–welcomed his new role. “I am very excited about taking on this expanded role at Palm,” he said. “Ed and I have worked very hard together the past two years, and I’m grateful to him for everything he’s done to help set the company up for success. With Palm webOS we have ten-plus years of innovation ahead of us, and the Palm Pre is already one of the year’s hottest new products. Due in no small part to Ed’s courageous leadership, we’re in great shape to get Palm back to continuous growth, and we plan to keep the trajectory going upward.”

Reached for comment late Wednesday afternoon, Roger McNamee offered up this rather canned statement on Palm’s leadership transition: “With Ed’s decision to step down, Jon Rubinstein is the natural choice to lead Palm into its next phase of growth. Jon has proven to have exactly the right mix of product vision, organizational leadership and operational capabilities to help Palm regain a leadership position. We are grateful for the leadership role Ed has played in initiating this transformation and getting through the successful launch of webOS and the Pre.”

Palm shares are up 3.75 percent at $12.44 on the news.

Palm (PALM) picked a hell of a day to launch the Pre. Two days before Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference. Two days before the unveiling of the iPhone 3G S, a new version of Apple’s (AAPL) iconic handset that runs twice as fast as its predecessor, shoots video with an improved three megapixel camera and boasts longer battery life and greater storage.

And worst of all, two days prior to the announcement of a new $99 price point for the iPhone 3G, a disruptive move that puts the device in reach of far more consumers and allows Apple to position last year’s iPhone as a competitor to this year’s Pre (and BlackBerry Storm too). And unlike this year’s Pre, last year’s iPhone comes with iTunes, a robust developer ecosystem, access to 50,000+ apps and soon iPhone OS 3.0.

And that may bode ill for a hard-to-come-by upstart handset that’ll set you back $199 after a $100 rebate.

Certainly, a $99 iPhone 3G is a very compelling proposition. Said CL King & Associates analyst Lawrence Harris, “Apple’s strategy appears to be designed to take advantage of the current limited availability of the Palm Pre. It is clear that Apple intends to maintain its leadership position in the smartphone market, given its decision to cut prices.” 

Clear too that Palm’s decision to roll out the Pre this past Saturday was folly and has not only left the company’s most important product release in years washed away in a deluge of Apple coverage, but allowed a powerful rival with a lot of market buzz to undercut the price of its bet-the-company handset within just days of its launch.

Sadly for Palm, it may be that the Pre’s best days are already behind it.