In Greek tragedy, the flaw of hubris was the decisive plot point that brought down many great men. Palm, then, is the Oedipus of a modern tragedy, their efforts to rebuild hampered by a failure to see past their own greatness and a refusal to enter the market on the market’s terms.
To be honest, I was a Palm fan, then I wasn’t a Palm fan, and now am part of the chorus of voices bemoaning the lowly state to which the company has been thrust. Palm recently reported $349 million in revenue with a third quarter loss of $102.8 million. Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein said:
“If we could have launched at Verizon prior to the Droid, I think we would have gotten the attention the Droid got. And since I believe we have a better product, I think we could have even done better.”
No wonder Apple is suing HTC for patent infringement over its Android phones. In the three months between October and January, Android’s overall share of smartphone subscribers in the U.S. rose 4.3 points to 7.1 percent, according to mobile market share data released by comScore. Android showed the biggest single gain of any of the top five smartphone platforms. Apple’s share was virtually flat at 25.2 percent (up 0.3 percent), while RIM’s Blackberries saw a 1.7 percent gain to 43 percent. → Read More
Mobile data is on fire. Despite a few false starts, we are now in the midst of a transformative “Open Mobile 3rd Wave” (remember WAP, and J2ME?). We are just in the early swell of the wave; the iPhone itself is not even three years old, and thanks to continued improvements we’re now seeing in smart phones, mobile OS platforms and 3G/4G networks, the raw ingredients are just getting better every month. Per the views of many mobile denizens and thought-leaders such as well-known internet analyst Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley, I certainly believe there will emerge new industry-transforming Facebooks, Googles, and Yahoos in this mobile wave.
However, a key topic discussed by us mobile geeks and startups is the challenge of mobile platform fragmentation. There is an alphabet soup of protocols, standards, and regional differences by-country which can be daunting for any entrepreneur.
Editor’s note: Richard Wong is a venture capitalist with Accel Partners, an investor in AdMob, GetJar, and SunRun, and a former mobile industry executive.. → Read More
Dwight “The Houston Tiger” Silverman, like so many tech dudes, likes the Palm Pre and Pixi and, in a way, doesn’t understand why Palm is on the rocks. However, he got an email from a reader who described her Verizon experience as sub-par at best. It began poorly: My original salesperson, upon hearing me say I was there for the Palm Pre, immediately mentioned that they were running a special on the Droid. I said terrific but I’m here for the Pre. The salesman finally got one out for me but no one at Verizon had any idea how it worked, how to set it up, or even how the screen functioned. It took Verizon over 3 hours just to the Pre “set up”, apparently because “the guy” who knew about the Pre was not there. I lovingly took my Pre home. → Read More
Poor Jon Rubinstein. After a strong, early push, Palm’s sales have slowed and revenue has dried up with $300-$320 million in Q3. Their “guidance” to Wall Street AKA how much they expected to make? $1.6-1.8 billion. Bloops.
The letter is over at WSJ but here’s an excerpt.
This morning we announced preliminary results for our 2010 third quarter. Since the quarter has not yet closed, it is too soon to offer exact numbers, but we stated that we expect to report revenues for Q3 between $300 and $320 million. We also announced that we expect our revenue for this fiscal year to fall below the guidance we gave to Wall Street, which ranged from $1.6 to $1.8 billion. As we mentioned in our press release, our softer than expected performance is due to slower than expected customer adoption of our products, which in turn has prompted our U.S. carrier partners to put additional orders on hold for the time being. On a positive note, we expect to exit the quarter with over $500 million in cash on our balance sheet. We’re scheduled to announce our full financial results in March.
Handset manufacturer Palm has updated its guidance this morning, indicating that revenues for the quarter and full year will be “well below its previously forecasted range of $1.6 billion to $1.8 billion”. The company 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.
In a statement, Palm says disappointing sales are due to “slower than expected consumer adoption” of its products, resulting in lower than expected order volumes from carriers and the deferral of orders to future periods. → Read More
Last year, Apple’s iPhone nearly doubled its worldwide market share of smartphone sales to 14.4 percent, up 6.2 points from the year before, according to the latest market share figures put out by Gartner. The iPhone still trails behind Nokia’s Symbian-powered smartphones (No. 1), which saw their share decline 5.5 points to 46.9 percent, and RIM Blackberries (No. 2), which gained 3.3 points to end the year with a 19.9 percent share.
Remember, these are worldwide estimates. In the U.S., both Blackberry and Apple are much larger than Symbian. And when it comes to mobile Web traffic, Apple and Android dominate with 81 percent share. According to Gartner, Android phone sales jumped 3.4 points (to 3.9 percent), but Android is still smaller than WIndows Mobile or Linux. Those mobile OSes, however, saw their market share drop 3.1 and 2.9 percent, respectively. Palm’s WebOS barely made a mark with 0.7 percent share. → Read More
Online music service Grooveshark is today announcing the launch of a native app for devices running Palm webOS, or in other words the Palm Pre and Pixi phones.
With the app, Grooveshark users gain access to its vast on-demand song catalog – the number of tracks in there runs in the millions – but also to the personal playlists and favorites they and other users have cultivated on the kick-ass music service.
The app should be available ‘very soon’, according to the startup, although VIP users (who pay $3/month) can get early access. → Read More
Palm’s webOS is certainly one of the more polished operating systems out there; the others being the iPhone OS and Android. It’s clean, simple to use and attractive. However, it was available only on Sprint’s network for the longest time until recently when it arrived at Verizon on the Palm Pre Plus and Palm Pixi Plus. Now it looks like another carrier will be picking up the new OS. → Read More
Holy wow! Relive the 1990s with the Palm m500 PDA in “good condition” for $19.99. That’s right. That’s like $300 less than you would have paid back in the days we still thought Palm Pilots were solid gold! → Read More
Popular location-based social network Brightkite has simultaneously released mobile apps for some Nokia as well as Palm smartphones.
The release of the apps follows earlier launches of Android, BlackBerry and iPhone applications. → Read More
When you think about mobile advertising, you might think the iPhone or Android are the hot platforms (thanks to ads like this). But you’d be wrong.
Some new December data from the mobile advertising company Smaato suggests that it’s actually Symbian that kills both the iPhone and Android. Now, I know what you’re thinking: that’s because Nokia, despite the buzz surrounding the sexier smartphone devices, remains the biggest mobile player in the world. But actually, the numbers are for the all-important click-through rates on the various platforms. → Read More
Not content with the Android Market website (and with good reason), a couple of Frenchmen last year built AndroLib to provide a decent online experience for people looking to browse available Android apps.
As long as Google doesn’t improve the Android Market site (or release a proper desktop app à la iTunes), AndroLib is basically the best website to browse Android apps, period.
Now the team that built AndroLib is attempting to do the same for the Palm webOS applications store, with a new site called HouseOfPalm. → Read More
John is down at the Palm press conference, and we’ll be going live in just a few minutes. Keep your eyes open, we’ll see what they might have up their collective sleeves. → Read More
Someone’s gotta help Palm out. After the somewhat lukewarm response to the Pixi and the Pre, it’s rather surprising that Verizon would decide to place a big order. Word is though, that’s exactly what they did. → Read More
Palm’s App Store has reached a milestone. According to WebOS School, Palm now offers 1000 apps to its mobile users on its App Catalog. Of course, this number has to be taken with a grain of salt. Apple’s App Store has over 100,000 apps and the Android market has over 16,000 apps, making Palm’s achievement a little less thrilling.
The relatively small amount of apps for Palm isn’t surprising; Palm has had a lag in adding apps to its store for some time now and has not been able to match the speed or breadth of Apple’s App ecosystem. But it’s safe to assume that Palm may be adding apps more quickly now, after the company announced an easier approval process for apps and the ability to allow developers to fully distribute their apps via the web. What this means is that developers can simply submit their apps to Palm, and Palm will return to them a URL that they can then blog, tweet, do whatever they want to share it. When a person then clicks on that URL they can easily install the app, bypassing any kind of store. Palm realizes that it has to play nice with developers in order to get them to build on top of its software. → Read More
It looks like a Wi-Fi-enabled version of the Pixi is hitting Verizon next year, at least according to this FCC filing. The filing shows CDMA/1x EVDO and Wi-Fi support along with Bluetooth and matches with the expected P121EWW model number (Sprint’s is P120EWW). → Read More
Hell hath no fury like an GPLed application company scorned. Artifex, makers of Ghostscript (it’s basically a nice, open source PDF viewer) also makes something called muPDF, a tiny PDF viewer for mobile devices. Well, Palm’s PDF viewer is actually a direct infringement on muPDF. → Read More
When it comes to the mobile Web, increasingly there are only two mobile platforms which matter: Apple and Android. According to AdMob’s October, 2009 mobile metrics report, the iPhone/iPod Touch and Android phones accounted for 75 percent of mobile Web traffic in the U.S., as measured by all the mobile ad requests it tracks. That number is up from a combined 65 percent in September, 2009.
The iPhone is miles ahead of everyone else, but Android is quickly rising as a strong second. While Android phones managed to increase their share from 17 percent in September, 2009 to 20 percent in October, 2009, the iPhone and iPod Touch gained even more, going from 48 percent to 55 percent share. Meanwhile, during that same month the Blackberry ‘s mobile Web traffic share went down from 14 percent to 12 percent, and Palm’s webOS shrank from 10 percent to 5 percent (Ouch). → Read More
