Palm's Treo Pro is a well designed smartphone that only runs Windows Mobile
More bad news coming from Palm.
Last week, The Sunnyvale, Calif., company confirmed rumored layoffs that could slash as many as 10 percent of the company’s 1,050 employees.
And today the smartphone maker announced that it now anticipates revenues for the November quarter to fall between $190 million and $195 million, well below Wall Street analysts expectation of $330.8 million and almost half of last year’s $350 million.
The company blames the abrupt drop in revenues to the “reduced demand for maturing smartphone and handheld products”.
Palm 2.0 is still far away
But the real culprit is simply the lack of innovation.
Palm’s latest phone, the Treo Pro was launched last August. Nicely designed – it’s thinner and just feels better than my Blackberry Curve – the Treo Pro is “just” another Windows Mobile smartphone that I generally find harder to use than most (Blackberry, Android, iPhone, PalmOS).
For 3+ years, Palm has been working on its secretive new “Nova” Linux-based operating system, a successor to the aging PalmOS, still used in all of Palm’s non-Windows powered devices, like the entry-level Palm Centro. But the first Nova-based devices (smartphones as well as non-phones) are not expected before mid-2009. By then, there will probably be another version of the iPhone and many more Android phones.
Unless Nova also dubbed “Palm 2.0″ is far superior than the iPhone software or Google’s Android, Palm’s future looks grim.
