Originally Posted by SharonW:
What I also find interesting, or just indicative of the laissez-faire analysis conducted by analysts is that nobody seemed to notice the difference between the sell-in rate of 823,000 versus the sell-through rate of 810,000. It is my understanding, and I could be wrong, that sell-in is the figure showing the number sold to the carrier, i.e. sold into the channel, and that sell-through is the actual number sold to the subscriber. If so, the disparity is remarkably tight and would mean that with the exception of 13,000 units, every phone they've produced has been sold.
This flies in the face of all those analysts who were saying that the Pre was languishing on store shelves.
Moreover, it would also explain why Best Buy, Radio Shack, Walmart and Amazon hadn't shown full-blown advertising positioning for the Pre on the web or in their fliers (for Best Buy and Radio Shack) until the last couple of weeks. This week was the first time I could find an available Pre on Amazon WITHOUT entering my zip code which means that availability was limited and they were constraining shipments to areas more lacking in stock.
I don't think I've ever seen a Pre in either a Radio Shack, Best Buy or Walmart flier here in CT. I know because I look. 
I think that supply constraints existed for most of the last three months and only recently broke through to a more balanced available inventory.
Palm is like Apple in the sense that they don't sit on inventory and they can tailor production on a short term basis; in both cases, you can expect the difference between sell-in and sell-through to be small. That's just a reality of the system, independent of overall or long-term supply-demand numbers.
We just can't conclude anything (pro or against your theory) with overall numbers. I think the best we can say is that supply is not outpacing demand by a whole lot when spread over the quarter. It doesn't really tell us if the Pre was languishing on shelves, day to day, during the middle of the quarter, or not.
I will say this, if they were having trouble keeping up with demand, we surely would have heard about it during the conference call. While it's not a 100% bragging point (since it may indicate they didn't plan properly or setup sufficient production), companies almost always trumpet when they are having trouble keeping up with demand.
I think if you look at the lack of specific numbers and milestone press releases, the price cuts, and the fact that Palm acknowledged that they had demand from the Sprint and Bell launches but lower sales inbetween (which forms the basis of their lowered guidance for the current quarter), it suggests the device wasn't selling as well as they had hoped. I think you'd have to be a real optimist to see it the other way around.