Don’t quote TechCrunch on the G1 sales

Erick Schonfeld wrote an excellent review about the Android G1 yesterday, saying that it couldn’t compete with the iPhone when it comes to the user interface. But he did mention a figure that isn’t correct, as he picked up the rumor from Motley Fool that 1.5 million were pre-sold. Of course, several hundred tech blogs picked this up.

One of them lived up to his journalistic duty, Marin Perez from InformationWeek. He contacted the mathematician behind the 1.5 million calculation:

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.

I’m glad he did, as almost every other tech blogger just hit copy/paste. Don’t believe everything you read on TechCrunch, Techmeme, or – for that matter – this blog. Because yeah, I’d have probably copied the 1.5 million figure as well.

So let’s all learn from Perez; check everything. Perez:

“This story just didn’t seem right to me, no matter how many times it went through the tech echo chamber.”

Point taken!