Hasta La Gadget!

A dubious rumor from The Street floating around about how Verizon was snubbing the Pre due to lackluster sales and no outlet for its VCast Store (which was a bit too thin to make it onto these virtual pages, in fact) has been questioned by a couple of analysts today. According to Deutsche Bank’s Jonathan Goldberg and Morgan Keegan & Co’s Tavis McCourt, a combination of supply chain orders and Palm’s own 2010 financial projections — not to mention Verizon’s long history with Palm — all point to a Pre launch on Verizon early next year, as previously rumored by the WSJ and confirmed by Verizon itself in July. Jonathan specifically called the new rumor “off base” and “incorrect,” while Tavis says that “We do not have insight as to the marketing support Palm will get from Verizon, but we see little risk in not getting a placement at this carrier.” Analyst fight!

Read – Analyst debunk on AllThingsD
Read – Original story on The Street

Filed under: Cellphones

Rumors of a Pre-less Verizon “off base” according to analysts originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 25 Sep 2009 11:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Aching to get your hands on the Palm Pre after four months of patient waiting? If you live in the UK, Ireland, and Germany, your wait is almost over. Palm today announced release dates for the three markets.

The first WebOS handset will be out in the UK and Ireland on October 16. The handset is Free in the UK with a two-year data plan on O2–and with select 18 month plans, as well. The phone will be landing in Germany a couple of days earlier, on October 13, priced at a steep €481, without data plan.

Palm’s App Catalog for the Pre properly launches tomorrow, and right now the question on most peoples’ minds is just how many paid apps will be in there when the doors open. Based on the latest word from the development team, the answer could be quite a lot. Apps submitted late to the party are apparently being added to approval queues so long Palm is having a hard time keeping track of them all. Developer Community Manager Chuq Von Rospach has indicated the approval group has “more applications than we could handle well,” apologizing because they have “dropped some things on the floor.” We’re hoping they’ll be picked up and dusted off quickly, because the five-second rule is not something to be messed with.

[Via PreCentral]

Filed under: Cellphones

Palm’s App Catalog is swamped with submissions, bursting with flavor originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 23 Sep 2009 09:46:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Palm just announced its first quarter results — the first to really include numbers from the Pre — and they’re positive (well, depending on how you look at things), with a $2.8m gross profit on $68m in revenue. Actually, that’s a little low, since Palm uses the same sort of subscription accounting for the Pre as Apple does for the iPhone, so the unofficial numbers are higher: $100.6m gross profit on $360.7m in revenue. Still, we should point out that according to GAAP (you know, the rules that matter), the outfit had a net loss in fiscal Q1 2010 of $164.5 million, while the non-GAAP net loss was pegged at $13.6 million. Although Palm wouldn’t include break out specific sales data, they did say that the “vast majority” of the 823,000 phones they sold in Q1 were Pres, so take that as you will. Oh, and if you were still holding out hope for more Palm WinMo phones, it’s all over — Palm is doing 100 percent webOS development from now on. (Shocker!).

Update 1: Rubinstein deftly sidestepped the question of why Pixi was launched on Sprint as opposed to another carrier, saying “They’re a great partner and we’re looking forward to a great holiday season.”

Update 2: Asked about MOTOBLUR, Jon said “I don’t know much about MOTOBLUR, but I think to build really great products, you have to control the entire experience — you have to own the OS and the services around it.”

Update 3: Jon just said “We’re on a web schedule with updates — you’ll see a steady stream of updates and features.”

Update 4: Revenue on accessories and anciliary products were “really very small, immaterial to overall trends.” When pressed if it was in the low, single-digit millions, CFO Doug Jeffries emphasized, “very, very small.”

Filed under: Cellphones

Palm announces first quarter results: $164.5m net loss, 823k phones sold originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 17 Sep 2009 16:51:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Palm may have divulged most of the details about its new Pixi phone when it got official with it last week (and let us get our hands on it), but it was unfortunately staying mum about a few key specs, including the mystery processor at the heart of the device. Thankfully, Qualcomm has now come out and clarified that situation so Palm doesn’t have to, and detailed the complete specs for the MSM7627 chipset that powers the Pixi. The big news there is that the chipset packs two ARM cores on a single chip, including one dedicated 600MHz applications processor, and a separate 400MHz modem processor to offload some of the heavy lifting. Otherwise, the phone is said to pack a 200MHz, OpenGL 2.0-supporting GPU for some decent gaming capabilities, and a 320MHz application DSP to handle multimedia on the device, including full 30 fps WVGA video encoding and decoding. Hit up the link below for the complete rundown.

[Thanks, Fernando]

Filed under: Cellphones

Palm Pixi processor, chipset specs get detailed at last originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 14 Sep 2009 18:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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