Watching Palm's August Pre numbers - it's anyone's guess

When it comes to sales of the Palm Pre smartphone, it's anyone's guess how the numbers will look when the quarter ends in two weeks. Even the experts on Wall Street have conflicting outlooks.

Barrons' Tech Trader Daily blog today points to conflicting reports by Wall Street analysts. The first is by Pacific Crest analyst James Faucette whose research suggests that sales of the Pre are "trending up slightly sequentially" for the month, compared to July, and attributes it to "better advertising, improved supply and strong word-of-mouth. By contrast, Barclays Capital analyst Amir Rozwadowski found that "Pre demand has not re-accelerated following what we believe was a noted downshift in the beginning of July."

Neither, however, is bullish about the short-term future. Faucette says sales will really have to kick-in to meet the August quarter sales estimates of 750,000. Rozwadowski thinks the company is more likely to seel between 500,000 and 550,000 units and disappoint Wall Street.

Last week, Morgan Joseph analysts Ilya Grozovsky and James Moore downgraded their rating on Palm because they believe Pre sales have slowed and will miss projections.

Interestingly enough, the news comes at the same time that I was testing a Palm Pre, trying to figure out if the hype for the device was worth a switch. I decided over the weekend that the Pre is not for me. Instead, I said in an earlier post that I'd like to see Palm makes some performance enhancements to the OS for future devices. Faucette, in his notes, said he thinks Palm's WebOS and software development team could be more valuable to a potential acquirer - mentioning Nokia and Motorola - than staying out there as a stand-alone.