It's December of 2003 and Motorola has just released three new camera phones. You might have already guessed what happened, but let's find out anyway.
Recently, tech journalists have made speculations as to whether Palm and Sprint would deliberately keep the production of Palm Pre units at a low level, in order to boost pre-order sales. For some reason, these tech journalists / bloggers forget to mention the hundreds of cell phones and smartphones in the past that have also had similar issues.
The most common issue is the lack of key components, and last year HTC had some serious challenges to build all their new smartphone models. Even Apple has had problems getting hold of all the components they need in time for its iPhone launches. Especially phones that are incorporating bleeding edge technology can easily get in trouble. For instance, the Palm Pre will ship with a brand new Texas Instruments chipset that is likely not stocked up in the millions yet.
Back in 2003, Motorola got in trouble when releasing three new camera phones. They simply couldn't get hold of enough camera components to match the customer demand. Today, camera components are obviously produced at a totally different scale, but as long as you want the latest and greatest phones to include brand new technology components, and perhaps in a tight stream of releases, supply shortages are inevitable.
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