Out the door Palm has been doing pretty well as far as earnings with their new Palm Pre but recently sales have slowed and we are finally getting to see just how the Pre will pan out. Too bad the news we are getting isn’t really the best of news.

Reports coming in from all over the place state that the Palm Pre has a return rate of 40 percent overall. While we are not sure how accurate this number is but we are well aware of the many defects the Pre is having. While dead or missing pixels, loose slider, broken screens, broken volume buttons, loose batteries and a variety of software bugs plague the Pre now we have to remember that this is only first generation hardware and we are bound to see defects.

Palm seems to have a lot of promise with their new revolutionary webOS but do they have what it takes to roll out an even better handset hardware wise in the future and by the time they do will it already be too late for the company? Let’s just hope that the Pre does not soil the Palm name once and for all. We would love to see many more handsets with webOS on them.