Palm Press: Sales Not Too Good

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It’s Thursday, which means it’s time for another Palm Press, our weekly look at the world of Palm. Some disturbing news has come out of Palm this week concerning lower than expected sales numbers. The company warned that current quarter results were going to be low, due to “slower than expected” reception of the new webOS phones on Verizon. The quarterly revenue is now expected to only fall between $285 – $310 million. The way was also paved for particularly bad annual numbers, as Palm is now forecasting revenues “well below” the $1.6 – $1.8 billion originally estimated. It is clear that Palm is not out of the water yet, and the new “Plus” models at Verizon have not moved as quickly as Palm was hoping.

Palm phone owners have been anxiously awaiting the appearance of the webOS 1.4 update. The update was rumored to appear today, but no update has surfaced at the time of this writing. What has leaked out is the changelog that details all the new things that will appear in webOS 1.4. In addition to the expected video recording capability, many of the native webOS apps will be getting refreshed with new functionality. Most significantly, Adobe Flash 10.1 support is included in version 1.4, with the Flash player expected to be downloaded from the App Catalog.

Best Buy is now offering the new Pixi Plus from Verizon for free with a 2-year contract. It can’t bode well for Palm that the latest model is already free. To further show how wacky the U.S. phone world can be, the older Pixi from Sprint is still $79.99. If you can’t move enough phones at no cost to customers, there’s something wrong.

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