Palm Infocenter

Word has just come this evening in that Palm has just updated its Palm.com website. The new design is a bold departure from their old layout with a fresh new look which seems to coincide with the upcoming new launch.

The refreshed site places an upfront focus on the products with large high resolution, interactive images and panoramic backgrounds. At the moment the homepage seems to single out the Treo Pro, Centro and Treo 800w as the companies only current products at this time. Handhelds are no longer featured and appear to be absent from Palms online store as well.

Ominous-sounding "do or die" articles relating to Palm are nothing new or surprising these days. However, coming from the San Francisco Chronicle, a local paper from Palm's home turf, such an article merits further inspection. Written by Ryan Kim, who has covered Palm several times in the past for the Gate, the editorial entitled, "Palm Needs Nova to Shine" offers a few interesting morsels of new information and is overall a worthwhile read as the Palm faithful bide their time prior to Palm's huge CES announcement on Thursday.

First off, the piece reminds us that the "Nova" moniker is still very much a codename; the final release of the OS that appears on shipping devices may be coined something else entirely.

PalmInfocenter has been awarded the Best Palm Website / Blog in the 2008 PalmAddict Reader Awards. PIC received the most votes in the category which included over 15 other Palm focused sites. In total over 80,000 votes were cast in PalmAddicts yearlong reader survey.

I also want to give a huge thanks to Kris Keilhack and Tim Carroll of the PIC writing staff, and to the moderators and volunteers who do so much to keep the site in top form, without whom I don't think this award would be possible! All of your efforts are enormously appreciated.

It's been a long hard slog for Palm OS fans, these past five years. Since 2004's grand unveiling of the stillborn Cobalt, Palm OS has been lost in a nightmarish software limbo, with the "latest" iteration, Garnet, caught between the dated design paradigms of the past and the increasingly punishing demands of the future. With PDAs having fallen by the wayside and the always-connected cell phone taking their place as the de facto mobile computer years ago, Palm has been in desperate need of a capable, home-grown platform on which to build their next generation of devices. Following a disappointing false start with the Linux-powered Foleo and with the siren song of flashy new devices from Apple and RIM beckoning users to foreign shores, many were ready to give up on Palm altogether.

The Motley Fool is wrapping up the end of the year with two days of back-to-back "Foolish" coverage of Palm. With one week to go until Palm's big "new-ness" January 8th announcement at CES in Las Vegas, contributor Tim Beyers offers up the second of two nicely-written pieces. This one is entitled "How Palm Could Lose Everything" and offers up an outlook that is not quite as gloomy as the title might suggest. In short, Beyers offers a myriad of reasons why he feels next week's opportunity could be Palm's final chance to recapture some of their former glory.

In a refreshing change of pace from some of the poorly-supported pieces we've seen in the past, Beyers offers a resounding amount of hard, empirical data to substantiate his feelings about Palm. For example, recent Canalys shipment numbers from the leading smartphone vendors are offered to support the sentiment that "closed systems are crushing open systems" and Beyers and his colleages at the Motley Fool see no reason for 2009 to deviate from the trends of the past few years.

As mentioned yesterday, the Motley Fool concluded 2008 with several Palm-related articles. The first of the two covered here is entitled "How Palm Could Change Everything". The article is considerably more optimistic than its following partner piece and rather surprising in that it focuses not entirely on Palm's anticipated Nova OS January 8th announcement at CES in Las Vegas, but rather on Palm carving out an exclusive new niche in the market by revisiting the company's roots.

Long-time Palm OS fans still cling to fond memories of the efficient, speedy Graffiti stylus-based character input system that debuted on the original Pilot handheld and helped that device rocket to the top of the market but died a quiet death amidst heated litigation with Xerox (the implications of which are not addressed anywhere within the Fool article), changes in Palm OS product development, and of course, Treo QWERTY mania.

iambic has released a major new version of its Agendus Suite for Palm OS devices. The new version 13 of the award winning personal information manager (PIM) has many new features and refinements for helping those who carry a Palm Centro or Treo get more done before, during and after the activities that drive their day. There are over a dozen major new features, including time savers like "Smart Agenda" for creating Tasks, Meetings and Memos on-the-fly, and fully editable Meeting and Task templates.

Agendus for Palm OS v13 is available now starting at $29.95. There are a number of versions from standard, professional and premier as well as a Windows Desktop version.

With a little more than a week to go until CES 2009 and arguably the most critical release in the company's history, we cannot overlook Palm's small but still news-worthy contributions to legacy Palm OS Garnet users during 2008. Regardless of what happens in 2009, for all its shortcomings OS 5.x Garnet remains a tried and true mobile OS that still enjoys a fair amount of developer, carrier, and user support. Let's take a few moments to review the most important events from Palm in what was unquestionably a transition year of carryover products and mild tweaks to existing devices.

SplashData has released an update for its SplashPhoto application for Palm OS devices. SplashPhoto is a robust and feature packed photo management utility. The latest version includes a new more finger friendly UI and the ability to share photos on the web with Picasa, Flickr, and Facebook. This new update fixes some minor issues in v5.0 and improves performance with larger photo albums.

SplashPhoto v5.03 is available now with a free trial period. It costs $29.95 for the full version. It is available for Palm OS 4.0 and later as well as Windows Mobile devices. Desktop synchronization apps are available for both WIndows and Mac OS computers.

The smartphone video service, Qik, has just added support for Palms latest Windows Mobile devices. Qik is a software application that allows you to capture and broadcast live video directly from your smartphone. The client application also stores and posts your video to web where you can stream and share it online on on a blog.

The latest version adds support for the Palm Treo 800w and early alpha support for the Treo Pro. The application is free and requires a signup at their website.

The PalmInfocenter Store has just added a 16GB SanDisk microSD card. The microSDHC card is rated SD class 2 with a 2 MB per second minimum write speed. The 16GB card is available now.

With the addition above, the price has also recently come down on other microSD cards sizes in the store. The SanDisk 8GB microSD is now $54.95, various 4GB cards start around $34.95 and there are a number of 2GB's available starting at $24.95.

Palm was just featured in an episode of the History Channel's Modern Marvels program this weekend. The episode was entitled "Retro Tech" and Palm was profiled during a segment of the show that followed the evolution of mobile technology from the cell phone and Palm Pilot, to the Centro and modern Smartphones.

The episode and video clip embedded after the break, devotes a good five minutes to the topic. The taping must have been fairly recent as the Treo Pro and many different colored Centros are highlighted a number of times. Peter Skillman, VP of Design at Palm talks about the transition from handhelds to smartphones and the evolution of the Treo.

Palm, Inc. today announced that Elevation Partners has agreed to make an additional $100 million equity investment in Palm. Under a definitive agreement reached today, Elevation will increase its investment in Palm by acquiring newly issued Series C preferred stock that is convertible into Palm common stock at a price of $3.25 per share, a 31 percent premium to the closing price of Palm common stock on Dec. 19, 2008. The Series C preferred stock carries a 0% dividend rate. Elevation will also receive warrants to acquire 7 million shares of Palm common stock at the same price. Prior to March 31, 2009, Palm may elect to cause Elevation to sell up to $49 million of this new investment to other investors on the same or better terms than on which Elevation invested.

Shares of PALM are up sharply on the news this morning on higher than average volume. At the time of publication, the price is currently trading up 20%, around the $3 mark.

Palm has finally come clean and confirmed what has been widely suspected, that it will no longer develop any new traditional handheld PDAs. Word came straight from Palm CEO Ed Colligan during yesterdays conference call, but it bears mentioning again for posterity. The announcement was made practically off the cuff when asked by a financial analyst about the possibility of shutting down the handheld business.

Read on for the full audio clip of the question and response. In short, he states that Palm will continue to "push them out" as long as there is still sufficient demand. He continues by adding that they are not developing new ones, and as such there is an inevitable end to the product line.

Palm Inc. today reported their sixth consecutive quarterly loss. After pre-announcing significant declines, Palm reported total revenue of $191.6 million with a net loss of $(508.6) million. The larger than usual loss was primarily inflated by a $396.7 million tax provision charge on its U.S. deferred tax assets. On a non-GAAP basis the net loss was still a staggering $(80.2), or $(0.73) per diluted share.

The company also saw a massive contraction in smartphone sell-through, which was down 42% (or about 400k units) from the previous quarter and declined nearly 12% from a year earlier. Stating "We're working through an undeniably difficult period," Palm CEO Ed Colligan squarely placed the blame on the maturing Palm OS line and Centro products combined with the extremely tough economic climate.

Palm, Inc. today reported that total revenue in the second quarter of fiscal year 2009, which ended Nov. 28, 2008, was $191.6 million. Smartphone sell-through for the quarter was 599,000 units, down 13 percent year over year. Smartphone revenue was $171.0 million, down 39 percent from the year-ago period.

"We're working through an undeniably difficult period," said Ed Colligan, Palm president and chief executive officer, "but near-term challenges shouldn't overshadow the fact that we are on track to deliver a breakthrough new platform and products that will bring a truly differentiated smartphone experience to our customers and reestablish Palm as a leading innovator in the mobile industry."

CNBC has posted an article focusing on the expectations for Palm's Quarterly Earnings. Palm is due to report their final Q2 FY09 earnings tomorrow after the market closes. No one really expects many positives, given that the company has already pre-announced that it expects revenue to come in at half of what was expected. However, there should certainly be some interesting discussions during the conference call around the anticipation surrounding the CES announcement and the sudden departure of Palm's CFO at a curious time.

This past year was abysmal for the smart phone maker: late-to-market products, a stock price in freefall, worries that its single biggest investor Elevation Partners may divest its stake in the company, a pricing model for the Palm Treo Pro that raised lots of eyebrows, layoffs, a new chief financial officer with little direct Wall Street experience announced Monday, and true worries about whether Palm even stands a chance as a going concern in 2009.

The Palm OS command bar is a feature that has likely gone unnoticed for many current Garnet OS smartphone users. It has its roots from back in the PDA days as a handy hidden shortcut that provided quick access to common program functions such as Cut, Copy & Paste, Bluetooth status and such by invoking a special stylus swipe. With the disappearance of a dedicated graffiti area, this feature largely fell by the wayside yet remained in the Palm OS. CommandBar is an app that can bring back the handy feature and gives you additional control over how its invoked and used. It installs as a preference pane and brings back and adds to the functionality of the forgotten utility.

CommandBar v0.5.5 is available now for $9.95 (it is currently on sale for $4.95). It comes with a free trial period and is compatible with all Palm OS Treo's and the Palm Centro.

Last week images surfaced of an unidentified device that gained a lot of buzz and circulation due to its uncanny Treo like keyboard and unusual form factor. Of course, the rumor mill immediately began churning out various stories that this was to be Palm's first Nova device while others claimed it was a future Palm Windows Mobile handset. The term "Roteo", previously coined by our very own Pat Horne as a whimsical work of Palm fiction, began making the rounds online as the mystery device's very own code name.

Now some light has been shed on the mysterious handset, as Pocketables has revealed that this is a rather chunky unit is in fact a prototype mobile Internet (MID) device from Compal with the amusing moniker of "Tabasco". The site tracked down the original photographer and gleamed a few of the specs and points to additional pictures of the non-working display unit which was in fact showcased during the Computex 2008 show.

Picking right up where the rumored Sprint Treo Pro story leaves off, Palm has just updated their corporate blog with a strange update focusing on the original GSM version of the Treo Pro. Palm is now claiming that the device has been deemed "AT&T Network compatible".

Carrying the misleading title of "Get Your AT&T Network Compatible Treo Pro on", Palm's blog post is little more than rehashed statement that as a quad-band GSM handset, the device is indeed compatible with AT&T's domestic network in all of its EDGE and HSUPA coverage areas. As of this writing, the device remains available only as a pricey unlocked handset, and is not authorized, subsidized, or supported officially by AT&T in the U.S.