Hasta La Gadget!

We don’t know just how quickly Palm (or Elevation Partners, for that matter) thought it’d become profitable following the release of webOS, but it’s not there quite yet — the company is in the process of outing its earnings for the second quarter of fiscal year 2010 right now, and in a word, they’re still in the red. The good news is that it’s a marked improvement from last quarter — they’ve gone from a $164.5M GAAP net loss to an $85.4M one this time around. On a non-GAAP gross basis, they actually made $5.5M, which is up from $2.8M a quarter earlier. They’ve got $590 million in cash and other “short-term investments” on the book right now, which seems like it should be enough to keep the company going without a profit or additional cash infusion for at least a few additional quarters, but then again, burn rate is going to vary with just how much hardware and software R&D they’re doing and the kinds of carrier deals they’re scoring. We bet they’re looking forward to this Verizon business going down, eh?

Update: Palm’s specifically saying that they’re looking to grow carrier and geographic coverage right now — a good plan, if we say so ourselves.

Update 2: They’ve sold 784,000 phones in the quarter, which compares to 823,000 in the last — a 5 percent drop. That’s up 41 percent from the same quarter a year ago… but yeah, of course it’s going to be way up from the pre-webOS days.

Update 3: Over 800 apps in the catalog so far, once they graduate from the Early Access Program exclusivity, Palm foresees a “flood” of apps. No plans right now to change SDK strategy to a more native development environment.

Palm loses $85.4 million in latest reported quarter — hey, it’s an improvement originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 17 Dec 2009 16:55:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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