Everyone was wondering if the Palm Pre – amidst all the hype and speculation – would fulfill its apparent potential in terms of sales on June 6th. While there is no telling how accurate the range is, Wall Street Journal is reporting that between 50k to 100k Palm Pre phones were sold on the very first day they went on sale. That would be a pretty big win for both Palm and Sprint.

But how WSJ arrived at these numbers is anybodies guess. Does it include the people who waited in line, didn’t get a Palm Pre but will be called as soon as more shipments come in? Are these numbers coming from Sprint themselves or just an estimation based on loose guestimations? I know EXACTLY what Palm and Sprint are thinking: “Who Cares?!?!”

Palm and Sprint are worried about looking forward, not counting backwards. They need to keep the momentum going and they face a major challenge right this very second as Apple is live at WWDC announcing great new additions to the iPhone. Will Apple steal the Palm Pre thunder?

50k to 100k would be a great start but to keep momentum going Palm needs 2 things:

• Palm Pre Supply
• Developer support

The latter of those two things might finally be coming. Although Palm WebOS was hailed as an open mobile operating ecosystem, it has been anything BUT that up until now. Only private invites have been handed out to the WebOS development platform and Mojo SDK. Many believe it is “all bout the apps” and if that is the case, Palm is still way, way behind. Granted they’ve got plenty of time to catch up, but they haven’t exactly made the best first impression with developers.

I hope they open up the WebOS SDK soon because if they want to keep this momentum going they’re going to need lots of phones to sell that have lots of applications available on them. Right now Palm doesn’t seem to have either one and if they wait too long, the novetly will wear off.