ATT Adds New Dell, Palm Plus Phones to its Line-up

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Three new phones–Palm’s Pre Plus, Pixi Plus and the Dell Aero smartphone–are set to debut on AT&T’s network.

The Palm phones are already available on Sprint and Verizon Wireless but AT&T will be the first to offer a Dell phone in the U.S.

The move is unlikely to turn struggling cellphone maker Palm’s fortunes but it could offer a boost to Dell’s entry into the smartphone business.

In January, AT&T said it will have five Android-based smartphones in its portfolio this year, and two devices running Palm’s webOS operating system. Though the Pre and Pixi were launched exclusive to Sprint in 2009, Palm released a new version of the devices called the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus earlier this year.

Palm crammed Wi-Fi support into the Pixi Plus and bumped up the memory and storage capacity for the Pre.

Meanwhile, Dell made its foray into the smartphone business last year with the Mini 3. The phone which runs Android operating system was available only in China and Brazil.

Dell’s Mini 3 phone now has been renamed the Aero. And as seen on other Android phones, the device will feature a custom user interface, in this case developed by Dell.

AT&T hasn’t revealed pricing and exact availability for the Aero. The Palm Pre Plus will cost $150 and the Palm Pixi Plus will retail for $50 after a two-year contract and a mail-in rebate.

On AT&T though, the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus will be missing a key feature. The two phones won’t have the Mobile Hotspot app, available on Verizon’s versions, that allows the devices to become Wi-Fi hotspots themselves.

See Also:

Photo: Palm Pre Plus (Jim Merithew/Wired.com)


Official: Palm Pre Plus and Pixi Plus for AT&T ‘in the coming months’

Yes folks, it’s finally really happened. Today Palm announced that its dynamic duo — the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus — will be making their way to AT&T’s network “in the coming months.” We won’t bore you with too many details on the devices, since you can read our review of the non-Plus Sprint variations here and here, and the Verizon versions right here. What we will tell you is that at an undisclosed time, the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus can be yours for just $149.99 and a deep-discount $49.99 (with a $100 mail-in rebate and two-year contract), respectively. The Pre Plus will be similarly equipped to its Verizon counterpart (16GB of storage, GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth 2.1), and the Pixi should look awfully familiar as well (8GB storage, WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth 2.1), though AT&T will be offering a variation with a blue back plate (in addition to the standard black and other swappable covers). Both UMTS / HSDPA devices will support AT&T’s new Address Book service as a Synergy sync option, and will have free auto-connect access to the carrier’s WiFi +20,000 hotspots. We don’t know when we’ll get our hands on these guys, but Palm will be showing off the AT&T-ified versions of the handsets at the upcoming CTIA… which we will of course be attending. It should be interesting to see if hopping on AT&T’s network will move the needle for Palm, let’s just hope those “coming months” are, you know… pretty soon. Full PR and one more pic after the break.

Continue reading Official: Palm Pre Plus and Pixi Plus for AT&T ‘in the coming months’

Official: Palm Pre Plus and Pixi Plus for AT&T ‘in the coming months’ originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 22 Mar 2010 09:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Palm: this is your survival guide

Oh Palm. Just a little over a year ago your future seemed so bright, so renewed. You walked away from CES 2009 reborn, held aloft by a completely innovative new mobile operating system, a striking piece of hardware, and a feeling amongst the press and investors that you were back in the game and playing to win. Now, less than a year and a half later, you’ve nearly returned to the dark and desperate place you’d found yourself in at the end of 2008; a rapidly declining mindshare, the bottom falling out of your stock, and bad dips in phone sales. All of it is leaving you backed into a corner where the common perception now is that you’ve got to sell to survive at all. So what went wrong? How did such a promising launch lead to such a disappointing reality? And how can you wrestle your way back from the brink yet again? Is that even an option?

In 2007 the editors of Engadget penned an impassioned open letter to the company, pleading for many of the changes we eventually saw at Palm. This isn’t a follow-up, but it’s very much in the spirit. We’re going to take a look at the missteps that put the company in its current spot, and talk about what we think can pull it back out. Palm, it’s time for a little tough love… again.

Continue reading Palm: this is your survival guide

Palm: this is your survival guide originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 19 Mar 2010 17:04:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Palm shares take 25 percent plunge after downer earnings announcement

Remember that wild January day a bit over a year ago, when Palm debuted webOS and shares went wild? Well, after months of setbacks in the sales arena, and a rough $22 million Q3 loss announced yesterday, Palm’s stocks took over a 25 percent dive today, dipping below $5 for the first time since the Pre was announced. At the time of this writing things seem to be leveling off a bit, but it’s the most damage the shares have seen since October of 2009. Morgan Joseph analyst Ilya Grozovsky has downgraded the stock to “sell” and set a target price at $0. Canaccord Adams analyst Peter Misek has set a similar target, saying that he sees a “complete lack of earnings visibility.” So, candlelit vigil time? Imminent buyout? Riots in the streets? Hardly. Palm’s own Jon Rubinstein said in the earnings announcement that the company is “looking forward to upcoming launches with new carrier partners” which should (hopefully) brighten spirits a bit, and we haven’t heard a single credible buyout rumor, despite plenty of wild conjecture. There are also still a pair of analyst hold outs (just two, to be exact) that have buy ratings on the stock, reports Thomson Reuters. As for rioting? Well, that’s up to you. No matter what, Palm has some serious soul searching to do.

Palm shares take 25 percent plunge after downer earnings announcement originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 19 Mar 2010 14:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Palm Posts Poor Sales, Future Uncertain Once Again

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This is getting depressing. As expected, Palm warned again that revenue for the current quarter will fall far below Wall Street’s expectations, Reuters reports.
The Palm Pre and Pixi aren’t selling as well as Palm had hoped, even after introducing (slightly) upgraded versions for Verizon Wireless, to sell alongside the original models on Sprint.
The main problem appears to be inventory: Palm shipped 960,000 smartphones last quarter, but only sold about 408,000 units instead of the 600,000+ many analysts expected. That leaves Palm with tons of aging inventory sitting in stores, which means greater discounts, more sales, and less profit just to move the remaining units.
This casts a pall over Palm’s future prospects once again, after the struggling company delighted tech enthusiasts by introducing the long-awaited, excellent webOS in January 2009.
Will Palm ever get it together? For more, read PCMag editor-in-chief Lance Ulanoff’s latest column.

Why Google Should Buy Palm [Analysis]

Why Google Should Buy PalmWith terrible sales and no sign of turnaround, Palm’s options are whittling down to one: buyout. Ex-Appler Phil Kearney sees a buyer in Google, which, in its looming megawar with Apple, might need Palm as much as Palm needs it.

In looking at the brewing battle between Apple and HTC, it is interesting to me to see everyone asking if and when Google will get involved. I think that Google will eventually have to get involved and that is exactly what Apple is anticipating. I worked at Apple for seven years guiding their home wireless development and innovation and I can tell you first hand that folks at Apple are crafty, deliberate and thoughtful. People are exactly right in assuming that Google is going to have to eventually get involved if for no other reason then the fact that some lawyer worth his salt at HTC wrote the contract with Google such that contract has indemnification clauses which require Google to get involved and Apple knows that.

Even if Google has no indemnification obligations to HTC, the Apple/HTC patent war has to be more about Android and Google than anything else. Apple doesn’t want a cross-patent agreement with HTC because HTC only has a relative handful of patents. Apple has over $30 billion in the bank so they can’t possibly want money from HTC. So what could motivate Apple to want to sue HTC? I’m in agreement with those who theorize that Apple’s HTC suit is to warn hardware manufacturers against using Android in their new product offerings. But in thinking about this issue, the one way I see that Google might be able to combat such a move would be to acquire some good patents of their own. In perusing some of the articles on the web about the Apple/HTC battle, a couple of them referred to older articles that talk about Palm and the possible patent battles between Palm and Apple. It is interesting that an Apple/Palm patent battle has not materialized thus far and, combined with Palm’s recent announcement about cutting guidance, it got me thinking: Why doesn’t Google just buy Palm, it’s a no-brainer?

I understand that some people might think it would be too expensive for another company to buy Palm just for their patents, but when you get right down to it Palm is a cheap acquisition, even at a premium over the roughly $800 million that they’re worth today. With a market cap of over $180 billion, Google would be spending less than 1% of their market cap on Palm and they would get a lot more in return than just the patents. Nokia or Motorola too could both easily afford to buy Palm with a hefty premium just to get their patents and it wouldn’t be an overly large investment either company. To me, the price is right and the opportunity cost of not buying Palm is just too high for anyone, including Google, that wants to compete in the post-PC world of the second decade of the 21st century and beyond.

There are a myriad of other reasons too why it makes sense for Google to buy Palm and this looming patent war with Apple simply adds impetus to such a decision. Think about all of the good things that Google would get out of buying Palm. Google gets every tool which it currently lacks but needs to successfully try to compete with Apple in the smartphone and other post-PC businesses over the long haul.

First and foremost, Google gets all of Palm’s patents and we know their patent pool is both large and effective. Palm has been at this for nearly twenty years, giving them lots of patents including some older patents which nicely counter any patent claims Apple could make. It could be very likely that the reason we’ve never seen any direct patent battles yet between Palm and Apple is because Apple’s legal folks looked over the Palm portfolio and decided that Apple infringed on as many Palm patents as Palm did on Apple patents so that a patent war with Palm wasn’t really a good idea.

If this is the case, then Google getting ownership of Palm’s patent portfolio could be paramount given that Apple’s attack on HTC looks to me personally a lot like the Austro-Hungarian invasion of Serbia or the German invasion of Belgium at the beginning of World War One. Like the start of that awful war, this Apple/HTC battle could lead to a much larger conflict especially given that there was already a Nokia/Apple battlefront opened earlier. If for nothing other than their patents, Google should buy Palm. But beyond the patents, Google would get many more tools that they need if they hope to compete with Apple in the long term in the smartphone arena.

Google would also get a solid group of WebOS software developers, many of whom actually developed the first iPhone OS while at Apple and could have been involved in filing many of the original iPhone patents. In addition, if we look under the hood of WebOS and Android then we can see that they are cousins in terms of architecture and implementation. Both WebOS and Android are children of Linux and pretty closely related which means that the folks who developed WebOS could jump right in and augment the core developers of Android. Or perhaps Android and WebOS could be molded together to form one operating system that Google could formally license to all of the hardware manufacturers out there who are looking to use Android on their platforms today. Using the WebOS team, Google could combine all of the great WebOS features with Android and would have an even better operating system for their own hardware and potential licensees.

But that’s not the only software advantage that Google gets through a Palm acquisition. By making Google employees of the entire WebOS team, it also gives Google a ready group of new shock troops to help them go to battle with Apple. Yes the WebOS folks at Palm would be a welcome addition to Google to help staff up their increasing Android development needs, but let’s not forget that the key folks who left Apple after creating the original iPhone OS all jumped off the Cupertino Mothership to go to Palm for a reason. They were evidently unhappy with something, so I bet they’d have no problem contributing to any war effort against Apple.

Beyond augmenting Google’s Andorid OS development capabilities with an influx of new team members, the acquisition of Palm also gives Google a brand new capability. It gives them the mobile phone hardware design capability that they’re currently relying on folks like HTC to do for them. Farming out one’s hardware development is no way to compete with the iPhone. Heck, neither is farming out your software development and the mobile phone design incumbents like Nokia and Motorola have finally woken up to this fact. To directly compete with Apple in any credible way over the long term, a company needs to own and control all of the engineering components needed to create a good smartphone platform. There is a crack team of hardware engineers & designers over at Palm, some of whom came over directly from Apple too. Google needs a hardware group for future Android products and the Palm hardware team fills that need very nicely. I know some folks have gotten Palm phones with bad screens or keyboards, but let’s not confuse bad design with bad manufacturing. I think the Palm hardware designs are good but the contract manufacturer in China may not be not doing enough quality control on parts and assembly.

Google also gets a couple of other pieces of the business about which I think people who have never developed mobile phones always seem to forget. First among these is Palm’s entire carrier relations team. Having a whole department full of people with years and years of experience in managing the relationships with all the carriers such as AT&T, Verizon, China Mobile and Vodaphone is a business capability that shouldn’t be taken lightly and, come to think of it, had Apple had such a group when originally developing the iPhone perhaps all of their U.S. customers might not be stuck to only being on the AT&T network.

Then there is the technical support capability and support infrastructure that Palm has built over the years to teach the carriers how to support each new mobile phone that Palm releases. I’ve heard a couple of the support horror stories about the Nexus One and if they are true then Google needs all of the help it can get in training and supporting the technical support organizations of each mobile phone operator that decides to carry their Android phones.

I have lots of friends at Apple and I have lots of friends at Palm so I don’t want it to seem like I’m just trying to paint Apple as the bad guy here or trying Palm as desperate. I want more than anything for my friends at Palm to be successful. But I can’t believe for a second that I’m the only one thinking this Palm acquisition idea over. I have to imagine that there’s a team at Google, one at Microsoft, one at Nokia and Motorola too and even one at Apple who are going through this same analysis. I have to also imagine that they are all coming up with the same conclusions. Acquiring Palm could do a lot to shore up any smartphone business and make that company a serious competitor in the marketplace over the coming decade. To me though, only Google just seems to be the right fit at the right time for a Palm acquisition. Palm gives Google everything they need to make Google-branded Android smartphones serious competitors to the iPhone. But will it happen? Only time will tell.

Phil Kearney is the wireless networking geek who built the AirPort Extreme, AirPort Express and Time Capsule when he worked at Apple. He got his first Apple II computer in 1980 at age 13 and has been an Apple fan ever since. In his spare time he drinks great wine, eats fantastic food and is known to play a good bit of online poker.

Palm posts $22m Q3 loss, says it liked its chances against Droid had Verizon launch been sooner

Palm gave us a heads-up back in late February that its upcoming earnings report wouldn’t exactly be cause for celebration, and today the news has become official: the outfit recorded a net loss of $22 million during its fiscal Q3, which still looks rosy compared to the $98 million loss it suffered this quarter a year ago. All told, the firm shipped 960,000 smartphones in the period, which represents a 23 percent uptick from Q2 2010 and a nearly 300 percent increase compared to this quarter in 2009. Unfortunately, sell-through wasn’t exactly stellar, with just 408,000 units changing hands — that’s a 29 percent decline from last quarter and a 15 percent drop year-over-year. We get the impression that it’s waiting for carriers to get down to replenishment levels, but it’s hard to say when that’ll happen. Jon Rubinstein, Palm’s chairman and CEO, was obviously not thrilled about the news, but he’s mirroring statements made to employees just over a fortnight ago with this quote:

“Our recent underperformance has been very disappointing, but the potential for Palm remains strong. The work we’re doing to improve sales is having an impact, we’re making great progress on future products, and we’re looking forward to upcoming launches with new carrier partners. Most importantly, we have built a unique and highly differentiated platform in webOS, which will provide us with a considerable – and growing – advantage as we move forward.”

We’re listening into the earnings call right now, and so far we’ve heard a few choice quotes. Jon mentioned that Palm has “aggressive roadmaps on the software front that we’re working on,” and that there were “no changes to our planned carrier launches.” We’ll let you know if he introduces the Pixi 2 or anything.

Update: The call’s over. PreCentral points out a choice quote from Rubinstein:

We had an arrangement with Sprint that when we launched with Sprint that they would invest in marketing and carry the product and for that they would get an exclusive for a period of time. That really determined when we could do our launch at Verizon. I agree with your premise that if we could have launched at Verizon earlier, prior to Droid, that we would have gotten the attention that the Droid got and since I believe that we have a better product, I think we would have even done better.

In other words, Palm — regardless of Verizon’s positioning — feels like the Pre Plus could’ve been a legitimate contender as a halo phone for the carrier had it been able to launch sooner, though that opportunity has obviously long since passed. We’re not so sure we agree that the Droid and the Pre Plus play in quite the same space, but if nothing else, we like the chutzpah — now it’s time to deliver some new hardware.

Palm posts $22m Q3 loss, says it liked its chances against Droid had Verizon launch been sooner originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 18 Mar 2010 17:19:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Microsoft takes a note from Palm in new Windows Phone 7 Series ad

We’ve held no punches in sharing our thoughts on Palm’s recent ad campaigns, but the one spot that was actually not heinous has seemingly served as the basis for one of Microsoft’s first-ever WP7S commercials. Debuting here at the tail-end of MIX, the ad spotlights Anna — a fictitious gal we’ve certainly heard of before — using her new smartphone to share photos with her dear lover Miles. It also features Luca, a kid with an undying love for playing Xbox LIVE titles, who seems to be caught somewhere in between the world of nature and nurture. At any rate, it’s worth your while to give the new Microsoft commercial and the Palm ad which it has oh-so-much in common with right after the break.

Oh, and Palm — we guess “Windows Phone 7 Series was your idea,” right?

Update: Yes, that definitely looks like an HTC HD2 at the 0:43 mark, but you can rest assured WP7S won’t ever come to that gem in native fashion.

[Thanks, Sean]

Continue reading Microsoft takes a note from Palm in new Windows Phone 7 Series ad

Microsoft takes a note from Palm in new Windows Phone 7 Series ad originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 18 Mar 2010 11:36:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Palm’s AT&T launch pushed back to summer?

Palm might be able to use a bit of good news right about now, but it looks like it may not be able to count on that coming from AT&T. As AllThingsD‘s John Paczkowski reports, Canaccord Adams analyst Peter Misek is now saying that Palm’s still as yet unconfirmed launch on AT&T has been pushed back from its rumored April debut to June or July. What’s more, Misek says that the delay isn’t one of the usual variety, with AT&T reportedly citing a “long list of technical issues with the Pre and Pixi,” and even going so far as to decrease its initial order size and “sharply reduce” its marketing budget for the launch. Of course, we are still taking about a rumored delay to an unconfirmed launch, but we should be hearing directly from Palm soon enough — it’s scheduled to report its third-quarter earnings after Thursday’s closing bell.

Palm’s AT&T launch pushed back to summer? originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 17 Mar 2010 14:28:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Overclocked Palm Pre is just what the doctor ordered

800MHz overclocked Palm Pre is just what the doctor ordered

Is your Palm Pre feeling a bit down? In the dumps? Not as snappy as it used to? Maybe what you need is a megahertz boost! This custom kernel, demonstrated in a video below, comes courtesy of two hackers called unixpsycho and caj2008. One quick install will make your dull and lifeless 1.3.5.1 Pre come alive. Warning: use of this software may “frakk” your Pre if deployed on a 1.4 device. Side effects include reduced battery life and increased pocket warmth. If your Pre develops excessive heat see a doctor immediately — or just turn it off for awhile.

Update: caj2008 dropped us a note to point out that battery life is “not significantly affected” by this patch, but we’re still waiting on the FDA ruling on that one.

[Thanks, Darren]

Continue reading Overclocked Palm Pre is just what the doctor ordered

Overclocked Palm Pre is just what the doctor ordered originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 15 Mar 2010 08:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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