Palm Infocenter

Wallmart has dramatically lowered its price on a new Palm Pre Plus this week. Online bargain hunters can now find the updated version of the Palm Pre on Verizon for $29.99 after the usual rebates and contract commitments.

Wallmart.com started offering the Pre Plus for only $29 after rebates yesterday. The site also offers a free Pixi Plus (after rebates) as well. Amazon.com has also lowered its intro prices on Palm devices as well, where a Pre Plus can currently be found for $39.99 with a new 2-year service plan.

comScore, Inc. has released its latest data from the comScore MobiLens service, reporting key trends in the U.S. mobile phone industry during the three month period between October 2009 and January 2010. The report ranked the leading mobile original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and smartphone operating system (OS) platforms in the U.S. according to their share of current mobile subscribers age 13 and older, as well as popular activities and content accessed via the subscriber's primary mobile phone.

The January report found Motorola to be the top handset manufacturer overall with 22.9 percent market share, while RIM led among smartphone platforms with 43.0 percent market share. During the period Palm Inc. dropped 2.1 percentage points to settle down at 5.7% of the US mobile market.

Palm, Inc. has announced that a public beta version of the Palm webOS Plug-in Development Kit (PDK) is now available at the Palm Developer Center. Palm is demonstrating new games from early PDK developers in its booth at GDC (No. 2016).

The PDK complements the Palm webOS Software Development Kit (SDK), letting developers use C and C++ alongside the web technologies that power the SDK and mix them seamlessly within a single app. The PDK enables new functionality, including immersive 3D graphics, and gives developers who have built games for other platforms an easy way to bring their titles to the webOS platform. Developers can download the beta PDK and start developing today, but distribution of games built with the beta PDK will require functionality provided in an upcoming Palm webOS update.

In a rather unusual move for a carrier long fond of sizable mail-in rebate offers, the Boy Genius Report brings news that, as of Friday, March 5th, Verizon Wireless is immediately offering their two Palm webOS devices without mail-in rebates. The carrier will instead offer the Palm Pre Plus for $149.99 out the door with a two-year contract. The Palm Pixi Plus will now ring in at $79.99 under the same terms.

While a great deal for would-be Verizon webOS owners everywhere, especially on the heels of last week's webOS 1.4 update release and the ongoing "BOGO offer", the pricing still comes in above Best Buy's in-store pricing of $49.99 and $99.99 for the two smartphones.

Palm Inc. has released an updated version of their Facebook app for webOS. The application is being billed as new major version, as it was rewritten from scratch by Palm's own developer team this time around.

The new v1.1 Facebook app brings an improved interface and much improved functionality allowing users to do all that Facebook stuff. Highlights include an enhanced inbox, improved news feeds (shake to refresh), profile views, better photo albums and photo video uploading, events and birthday support, people search and more Palm Synergy integration.

The application is free and is available from the Palm App Catalog and online.

Palm Inc. has released an updated version of their software development kit for the webOS platform. Release v1.4 coincides with the recent OS update and brings a number of changes and makes some new functionality available to developers.

Some of the highlights of the release include:

• webOS now incorporates WebKit 4, which features enhanced CSS support and numerous other improvements.
• The webOS implementation of the HTML 5 Media API has been updated, bringing closer conformance to the specification, and improvements to audio performance.
• The Camera API has been extended to let an application initiate video capture, in addition to image capture.
• The V8 JavaScript engine used in webOS has been updated.

Palm has release the long awaited webOS v1.4 update early Saturday morning. Users on the Sprint network in the US and on the O2 UK, O2 DE, O2 Ireland, and Movistar networks in Europe can now find the OTA update via the Updates app. Palm says on its blog that other networks (namely Bell, Telcel and SFR) will see this "soon."

The full changelog is now posted on Palm's support page. Major new features include: video capture and clip editing, performance and battery life changes, various new messaging, contacts & calendar changes and options and updates, LED based notifications, new ringtone/alert options, mail improvements and various other system tweaks and such.

webOS 1.4 also brings support for the Adobe Flash 10.1 Beta plugin. Adobe will presumably release their Flash beta for the Palm Pre sometime soon via the Palm App Catalog.

Update: Verizon users are reporting that the update is now available for the Pre & Pixi Pluses.

CNBC tech reporter Jim Goldman published a scathing piece on Palm Inc. late Friday. The article conveys the frustration among some investors and analysts have with Palm's management over ill timed misleading statements and the recent financial warnings. Goldman points to a perceived increasing lack of credibility which has been accentuated by recent disclosures.

Palm's got a credibility problem, and it's the kind of thing that seems so insidious, and so systemic, that it might pose a deep threat to the company's ability to keep going. [...]

If the company knew three weeks ago that Verizon and Sprint were stopping orders, why not just announce it then? Why dribble the news out, and attribute a manufacturing stoppage to the Chinese New Year, which would ultimately not pass the smell test since the work holiday typically only lasts a week and Palm's manufacturing has been suspended for the entire month?

The Wall Street Journal has published a memo sent out to all Palm employees today by CEO Jon Rubinstein. The letter goes into more detail behind they days financial readjustment press release and provides some background on Palm's current initiatives to drive sales. The letter also discloses that Verizon felt the webOS launch was below expectations, but remains committed to working with Palm.

Sprint has quietly lowered the introductory price on the Palm Pixi. New customers can now purchase the Pixi direct from Sprint for $50 after the usual rebates and new contractual discounts.

Sprint was the first carrier to offer the Palm Pixi back in mid-Novemeber. It's initial asking price was $99. Earlier this month Verizon began offering an updated Pixi Plus version which includes WiFi at the same price point. That too was initially offered at $99 and has already been reduced to $79.

Palm, Inc. issued a press release early this morning to warn investors of that its financial performance will not meet its previously stated expectations due to soft demand. The revision laid out below estimate a 30% reduction in quarterly revenue. The full release follows...

Palm, Inc. today indicated that it expects that revenues for the third quarter of fiscal year 2010 will be in the range of $285 million to $310 million on a GAAP basis and in the range of $300 million to $320 million on a non-GAAP basis. Revenues for the quarter and full year are being impacted by slower than expected consumer adoption of the company's products that has resulted in lower than expected order volumes from carriers and the deferral of orders to future periods.

Accordingly, Palm expects fiscal year 2010 revenues to be well below its previously forecasted range of $1.6 billion to $1.8 billion. The company will provide more detail on its financial results during Palm's third-quarter financial results conference call currently scheduled for Thursday, March 18.

Shares of Palm Inc. hit a 52-week low on a double dose of analyst downgrades early this week. Three Wall street analysts issued gloomy reports for the company sending shares down to close around $8.45 Tuesday on overall sales and market penetration concerns.

The biggest blow came from longtime BOA/Merrill Lynch analyst Vivek Arya who remarked in a note to clients that Palm's newest webOS phones have seen "sluggish" sales since debuting on Verizon.

PocketGear, Inc. today announced the acquisition of Handango, the leading provider of smartphone applications globally, creating the world's largest cross platform, open app store and content marketplace with a catalog of more than 140,000 paid and free titles. PocketGear and Handango are the two largest independent app stores and combined to date have generated over $400 million in mobile application revenues from customers living in more than 175 countries and using over 2,000 unique mobile devices.

With the acquisition, PocketGear's mobile app marketplace has been expanded to connect more than 32,000 developers in the PocketGear Developer Program with over 40 PocketGear-powered storefront and distribution partners, including 4 of the world's top 5 handset manufacturers, 4 of the top 5 mobile operators in the US, 3 of the top 10 mobile operators globally, and leading media and ecommerce companies including Samsung, LG, Sony Ericsson, Research in Motion, Microsoft, T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon Wireless.

Worldwide mobile phone sales to end users totalled 1.211 billion units in 2009, a 0.9 per cent decline from 2008, according to Gartner, Inc. In the fourth quarter of 2009, the market registered a single-digit growth as mobile phone sales to end users surpassed 340 million units, an 8.3 per cent increase from the fourth quarter of 2008.

"The mobile devices market finished on a very positive note, driven by growth in smartphones and low-end devices," said Carolina Milanesi, research director at Gartner. "Smartphone sales to end users continued their strong growth in the fourth quarter of 2009, totaling 53.8 million units, up 41.1 per cent from the same period in 2008. In 2009, smartphone sales reached 172.4 million units, a 23.8 per cent increase from 2008. In 2009, smartphone-focused vendors like Apple and Research In Motion (RIM) successfully captured market share from other larger device producers, controlling 14.4 and 19.9 per cent of the worldwide smartphone market, respectively."

Rumor: The Boy Genius Report has posted a rumor from one of their "solid connects" that T-Mobile is in the "final stages of planning out their WebOS device launch with Palm". The report is very light on details but it suggests that a "Pixi-like handset" is in the works. No word at this time if this will be a GSM version of the original Pixi as seen on Sprint or the improved Pre Plus with Wi-Fi currently available on Verizon. Of course, the term "Pixi-like" could suggest a different model entirely, as rumors have been swirling for some time about a 3rd potential WebOS handset. It's possible that T-Mobile could end up with the same mysterious C40 device spotted in Sprint's inventory system last year.

With a version of both the Pre and Pixi possibly heading to AT&T at some point within the next few months, Palm could achieve the major coup of wrapping up all four major domestic carriers with the addition of T-Mobile, a position the company has never held.

With less than a month of market availability under its belt, Verizon has already seen it fit to slash the retail price on the Palm Pixi Plus. Verizon has lowered the intro price by $20, after new customer discounts, to $79. This deal can also be used with the carrier's recently updated buy one get one free promo as well.

The Palm Pixi Plus smartphone is Palm's svelte, lightweight model that packs in WiFi, 8GB of storage and an included Touchstone cover. The Pixi Plus also supports Palm's new WiFi router functionality via the Palm mobile hotspot application.

Ever since the launch of the Palm Pre Plus and Pixi Plus on January 25th, Verizon Wireless has been continuously running a BOGO ("Buy One, Get One Free") promotion. Now TechCrunch brings news of an offer already confirmed to be live on Verizon's web store.

In what should both address the grumblings of customers hoping to have a two-Pre household and give a nice boost to Palm's sales figures for the quarter, Verizon has now re-launched the BOGO promotion with more flexible terms. Effective February 15th, customers can choose any combination of Verizon WebOS and Android-powered handsets alongside a handful of non-smartphone "multimedia phones" as eligible devices for the promotion. So, in short, you can now get a "free" Pre Plus with the purchase of another Pre Plus or even tip a toe into the competing smartphone OS waters and get an Android phone alongside a WebOS device.

Ever since the launch of the Palm Pre Plus and Pixi Plus on January 25th, Verizon Wireless has been continuously running a BOGO ("Buy One, Get One Free") promotion. Now TechCrunch brings news of an offer already confirmed to be live on Verizon's web store.

In what should both address the grumblings of customers hoping to have a two-Pre household and give a nice boost to Palm's sales figures for the quarter, Verizon has now re-launched the BOGO promotion with more flexible terms. Effective February 15th, customers can choose any combination of Verizon WebOS and Android-powered handsets alongside a handful of non-smartphone "multimedia phones" as eligible devices for the promotion. So, in short, you can now get a "free" Pre Plus with the purchase of another Pre Plus or even tip a toe into the competing smartphone OS waters and get an Android phone alongside a WebOS device.

Mark/Space has updated its Missing Sync desktop software for webOS devices. The Missing Sync for the Palm Pre (and Pixi) now offers two way calendar synchronization on Macs and Windows machines. Users can now sync their Outlook calendars from their PC with their Palm webOS device and vice versa. The software also offers the ability to exchange contacts, docs, files, photos, music, ringtones, videos and more from your desktop computer.

The Missing Sync for the Palm Pre works with Windows XP, Vista and 7 and Mac OS 10.5.6 and higher. The software retails for $39.95 USD.

Last week we covered Palm's market share gains as well as a new report suggesting Verizon's order for WebOS devices was possibly as high as 600,000 devices, up from the 400,000 previously reported. Now a new report from Kaufman Brothers analyst Shaw Wu (via Electronista) gives a bit more credence to that number.

By Mr. Wu's estimation, Palm will ship 1 million total WebOS phones this quarter, with Verizon's refreshed "Plus" models potentially comprising up to 550,00 to 600,000 units of that total. Wu goes on to assert that the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus are being chosen at the expense of competing Verizon smartphones running not only BlackBerry and Windows Mobile but the high-profile Android Droid and Droid Eris, though it is unclear exactly how one determines which handsets were considered but ultimately not purchased by consumers.