“Palm Inc., creator of the Pre smartphone, fell the most in more than 15 months in Nasdaq trading after forecasting sales this quarter that were less than half of analysts’ estimates. Revenue in the period ending in May will be less than USD 150 million, Chief Financial Officer Doug Jeffries said yesterday on Palm’s third-quarter conference call, compared with the USD 300 million average of estimates compiled by Bloomberg. The company also reported its 11th straight quarterly loss.”
Sure, Palm may get a big chunk of change upfront from Bell … but look at how many sales they’ve lost to Rogers, Telus, Virgin, Koodo, Fido, etc customers.
Instead, they should have released a GSM version and made it available to as many people as possible.
Artificial limitations only harm the limiter.
They also have one GSM version of Pre and Pixi, but maybe most of their customers are in the US and use CDMA.
Well, not only did they do a stupid exclusive deal, but they did it with the worst network in the country. Come on, seriously, Sprint? It’s true our GSM networks (AT&T and T-mobile) aren’t anywhere as good as they should be, but Sprint makes them look perfect by comparison. I guess Palm was willing to take absolutely anything they could get, but to choose the worst cel carrier instead of selling the phone unlocked was a typically stupid decision in the best style of Palm management.
I*m waiting for the Pre Plus to be released in Germany. The original Pre just doesn’t have good batterylife.
Doesn’t Palm own the rights to the original BeOS?
So, what have they done with those except sit on them?
Edit – slight correction – from Wikipedia –
“… in 2001 Be’s intellectual property was sold to Palm, Inc. for some $11 million.
After the split from Palm, PalmSource used parts of BeOS’ multimedia framework for their failed Palm OS Cobalt product[6]. With the takeover of PalmSource, the BeOS rights now belong to Access Co.”
Anyway, they did own a jewel like BeOS, and they failed to make anything decent from it.
Chapter 11 bankruptcy, here we come…..
Edited 2010-03-21 22:34 UTC