Well, it seems many of our readers had been scratching their heads regarding the ridiculous number of G1s that T-Mobile allegedly sold during pre-orders. If you compare those numbers to the iPhone sales for their first weekend, there is a big discrepancy. The iPhone 3G hit a million during its first weekend, but it was launched in 20 different countries. For the G1 to hit those numbers where pre-orders are available to T-Mobile customers only is, well, a little ridiculous. You also have to consider the fact that everyone and their mother knew the iPhone was coming a little over a month before it was released – has your mother even heard of the G1?
The astronomically ludicrous number was formulated by a mathematician at The Motley Fool by taking a little speculation, adding some basic arithmetic, and then setting the blogosphere ablaze. T-Mobile and Google were probably grinning ear-to-ear when they saw this news burning the Internet like an uncontrolled wildfire. Unfortunately, the numbers are PROBABLY closer to 200k – 300k in terms of actual pre-order sales, and that is a BIG maybe.
Information Week decided to contact the folks over at The Motley Fool and this is what they came up with:
I contacted Anders Bylund, the author of the original Motley Fool article that hundreds of stories are citing. I was curious as to how he got these figures and he gave me his rationale.
He cited a Cens.com article that said, “according to industry insiders, T-Mobile is planning to order a total of between 1.5 million and 2 million units of G1 with HTC in the near future, including 400,000 to 500,000 to be sold in the fourth quarter of this year.”
Then, Bylund cited T-Mobile selling out of pre-order units, and tripling the number of phones initially available. He then tripled the 500,000 number to get 1.5 million.
There you have it, folks. A likely miscalculation sent everybody nuts about just how well the G1 was really doing. Don’t get us wrong, the G1 is probably selling like hot cakes and it’s a new device with a platform we really like, but it seems that it’s not going to be dethroning the current champ of best first week sales.
[Via InformationWeek]
