Hasta La Gadget!

Let’s face it–no one expected Palm’s most recent earnings report to be spectacular. And the fact that the smartphone manufacturer hasn’t exactly been churning out handsets recently certainly hasn’t helped its case with investors.

Trusted Reviews points out a fairly interesting irony in all of this, however. It may in fact be the Palm Pre–the same device that Palm is banking on to save itself from certain doom–that ultimately helped caused the company’s numbers to take such a tumble. After all, with such a coveted device being announced during CES, who really wants to buy an old Treo in the time leading up to its release?

“The much-anticipated launch of the Palm Pre remains on track for the first half of calendar year 2009, but as expected we’ve got a difficult transition period to work through,” Palm CEO Ed Colligan said in a statement. “Despite the challenging market environment, the extraordinary response to the Palm Pre and the new Palm webOS reaffirms our confidence in our long-term prospects and our ability to re-establish Palm as the leading innovator in the growing smartphone market.”

Palm has yet to announce the official release date for the touchscreen iPhone killer, though it’s expected at some point in the first half of this year. The Palm Treo Pro, meanwhile, is expected on March 15. No telling how many users will be tricked into buying the latter thanks to poor reading comprehension.