Palm isn’t doing particularly well, even though it has an impressive product with the WebOS. Last quarter they sold just over 400,000 smartphones and lost $22 million. With a refreshed Palm Pre / Pixi and new carriers going live, Palm would have expected better sales, but they had cut the guidance a while back. IMO part of this can be blamed to the poor advertising of the Pre compared to the Droid or Nexus One and at the same time as Jon Rubinstein himself points out – delay in getting on Verizon (i.e. going on sale after Droid).
What excited me is the fact that Palm (at-least as per Jon Rubinstein’s statement) is making good progress on future products, and they are looking to come up with new carrier partners when these products go on sale. Another interesting perspective is the possibility of Google (or any other smartphone maker) buying out Palm which would be valued below $1 billion. Given the aggression Apple has shown with patent disputes with HTC and Nokia, Palm certainly has a good patent portfolio to guard itself. Given the fact that Pre didn’t release in India, and I am yet to go hands-on with it, I might be biased when saying that Palm should explore the road alone for a bit longer and see through these bad times, however Phil Kearney has a good case in favor of Google acquiring Palm.
Palm is running on fresh investments made over the last two years and barely managed to keep itself afloat. With better products and innovation happening at Palm, (with loads of ex-Appleites at work) the missing $$ on publicity and slow global push is hurting the performance IMO.
Given the large market that US itself is for any smartphone maker, the victory for Palm has to come at its homeland before it makes bigger strides in the International market. The problem, by the time new products roll out, will Apple / Android take the battle to a new level?
