Yesterday, Sprint announced that it would release the much-awaited Palm Pre on June 6th for $199. And today, company’s CEO Dan Hesse said at an investor conference that the Pre would be in short supply initially. He said:

“We don’t intend to advertise it heavily early on because we think we are going to have shortage for a while. We won’t be able to keep up with demand for the device in the early period of time.”

Initial reaction to the above statement was Sprint is just trying to hype Palm Pre launch and they will have lower stock to achieve a sell out to increase demand. But now unwiredview.com is reporting that Palm will only have 200,000 Pre units for whole of Q3 including launch. The website says that shortage in custom displays for the device is the main reason for such a small number.

We don’t believe that Palm will launch their most important product in past five years with just 200K devices for the whole quarter. If the Pre launch is half as successful as iPhone 3G launch last year they will need more than 200,000 devices for the first week itself. However, if Palm is launching Pre earlier with such a small number just to one up Apple’s upcoming third generation iPhone, they are heading in the wrong direction.