Palm Inc. (NASDAQ: PALM) reported a dismal third quarter, losing $95 million or 89 cents per share. Although the company's Treo handheld wireless handset products are being beat into the ground by competitors like Research in Motion Ltd. (NASDAQ: RIMM) and Apple, Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL), its bargain basement Treo Centro helped save the day last quarter. Not so much in the latest quarter.But good news is coming. The company (and a whole community of pre-release fans) is expecting the new Palm Pre smartphone to be the device that would save the company in the current quarter. The new handset, which is shaping up to be a true, functional competitor to the iPhone, looks like a handset worthy of that stated comparison.
Since Apple released the iPhone almost two years ago, a slew of touch-screen handsets have cropped up from almost every wireless carrier in the world. Still, very few (if any) have really challenged the iPhone's dominance. The Pre may change that, finally.
Palm's entire existence may well hinge on the launch, marketing and sales of the new Pre. The company really does not have much more in its arsenal of software and hardware. Many of its new handsets have featured the Windows Mobile operating system, so aside from the "WebOS" operating system on the new Pre, there's not anything there to replace it. New hardware? The tired Treo designs of the last three years won't cut it for Palm -- or its customers -- any longer. It's the Pre or bust.
The good news is that the Pre is not just another handset, it's the best revival product from any wireless tech company in the last five years (maybe longer).
Closing Bell: Economic Catapult for Thanksgiving & Black Friday (WMT, TGT, GRMN, GOOG, MSFT)
Deere up on Q4 earnings performance
Reid Hoffman: LinkedIn will go public (at some point)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
3-24-2009 @ 8:43PM
Beltway Greg said...
a. Palm, the "Pre", and Steve Prefontaine.
Q. Name one thing that is dead, one that is nearing death, and one that is DOA.
5-28-2009 @ 7:50PM
dg said...
I've been a Palm OS user for 10 years, and still use a Treo 680. I will not be upgrading to the Palm Pre, because Palm has
- betrayed the values I placed on function over form in deciding form was more important and dumping expansion
- dismissed the value I place on having my data on a local disk
- attempted to force me to put my personal information in "the cloud" without recognizing that cloud concept may not work for all the people out there like me
- sold out to the telcos who can't wait to charge exorbitant data transfer rates for every time I wish to update my data online; rates they won't get from me because I'm not getting one
- set up so that, if I need more than the 8GB of space, I must spend more money on an entirely new device rather than provide an expansion card so I can do what I want more affordably
- forgotten that before there was iPhone, there was Palm Pilot, and the loyalists who've waited for something that makes sense to us are evidently not worth Palm's attention.