Pre could launch with less than 150,000 units available

Sweet mother of whatever you find holy, I thought that 400,000 was bad! If Ashok Kumar of Collins Stewart investment bank is to believed, Foxconn manufacturing of Hong Kong is having major problems building the Palm Pre. He was quoted in Barron’s saying:

“About two weeks ago, Foxconn was having problems with the flexible printed circuit board for the Pre and having trouble getting adequate yields for the capacitive touch-screen display. Now, it appears Foxconn has found more hardware problems, and it’s not clear if the problem is with Texas Instruments’s OMAP application processor, or with some basic design issue.”

Apparently the problems have forced Foxonn to check each Pre by hand instead of running the devices through an automated testing process as normally be done for such a high-volume production run.

It is worth noting that Mr. Kumar does not officially cover Palm as part of his duties at Collins Stewart. One of his areas of concentration is Qualcomm, which manufactures the radios for the Pre, and Kumar does not expect that any problems the Pre may be facing will have an appreciable impact on Qualcomm’s shares.

[Originally posted at precentral.net]