If, like us, you’re rather keen on a physical keyboard, then Palm are hoping to entice you into their hardware QWERTY keyboard’s world of joy with their latest blog post bigging up the ‘option’ key.
Written the day before HP announced their intention to buy Palm, this article reveals the kind of mountain that their new owners are going to have to climb.
In the UK, Palm sales have been disastrous, with their Pre webOS device failing to gain the traction it deserved – something not helped by the company’s frustrating inability to communicate.
The news from across the Atlantic is looking grim for Palm, with sales well down on initial estimates, and a profit warning issued – and if things are bad there, it’s hard to imagine how much worse they must be in the UK.
Put bluntly, you’re more likely to see a juggling polar bear unicycling down the High Street than see a Palm Pre being used in the UK.
So what happened? Why did such a great phone not get the attention it deserved in the UK?
The collection of apps available in Palm’s App Catalog store in the US has now risen to an impressive 1,500 apps, and is growing at a rate of more then 10 apps a day.
On top of the 1,500 officially available apps there’s also nearly 450 ready for downloading from the Homebrew catalogue, giving Palm Pre and Pixi users a wide range of apps to play with.
We’ll have to wait a while for these updated models to make it over to the UK, but the first reviews for the new Palm Pre Plus and Pixi Plus smartphones are coming through from across the pond.
Physically, there’s only been a few minor tweaks to the Pre, with the glowing round button on the front of the phone being replaced by the same ‘invisible’ touch-LED as the Pixi, making the handset look even more like a “polished stone” and reducing a bit of clutter from the gestures area.
To round off our coverage of Palm’s slamdunk of announcements at this year’s CES 2010 show, we’ve listed all the key points and posted up their video presentation so you can get the full story direct from the head honcho.
Leaked ahead of the anticipated announcement at Palm’s CES event today are the specs for the new Palm Pre Plus and Pixi Plus handsets, headed for the Verizon network in the States.
The leak comes courtesy of a Verizon-branded spec sheet, and there’s no real revelations to be found: the Pre Plus increases the storage to a more useful 16GB, while the Pixi Plus sticks with the 8GB storage but gets Wi-Fi bolted on.
It hasn’t made it to the UK yet, but Palm’s low cost Pixi smartphone has been on sale in the States for a few weeks now and we’ve been keeping an eye out for reviews as they come in.
The crew at PreCentral have been doing some digging and have uncovered features not listed in the Palm webOS 1.3.1 documentation we posted last week.
Of course, us UK users are still having to sit about and whistle while we wait for the update to be made available to European GSM users (some time this month is the official word), but here’s the other tweaks and goodies we can expect.
Eventually.
The guys and gals at Engadget are the first out of the gate with a review of Palm’s budget Pixi handset, and overall, they’re pretty positive about it.
Describing the Pixi as “an incredibly sexy piece of hardware,” the reviewer suggest that consumers would be “hard pressed to deny the sheer attractiveness of this phone.”
It may not have the greatest spec sheet in the world, but there’s something about the Palm Pixi handset that tugs at our ‘want’ chords.
Perhaps it’s the mixture of a super-slimmed down Treo form factor combined with the delightful webOS that does it for us, or maybe it’s that neat little physical keyboard, but either way it looks like us Brits are going to be Pixi-less for a while.
However, it’s about to launch in the US, and the first TV advert has been released – and it’s rather a good one.
It may be five days until US consumers are able to get their mitts on the pint-sized Palm Pixi, a mini-me version of the well reviewed Palm Pre smartphone, but a video of the phone in action has already leaked onto YouTube.
Running the innovative webOS and coming with a Treo-style keyboard, the Pixi runs a lower spec processor (Qualcomm’s high-performance MSM7627) but still seems a fairly nippy performer on the video.
Palm seems to be making some progress on its long road to recovery, with web use from Palm owners in the US up by 22% from August to September 2009.
The figures come from mobile metrics firm AdMob, whose monthly report show Palm’s slice of mobile internet traffic leaping from from 4.1% in August to 5.0% in September, during a downturn that saw global smartphone traffic sliding by around 3%.
The good news for Palm extends past the US borders too, with their worldwide share of mobile traffic increasing smartly from 1.9% to 2.4%.
Palm has posted a smaller-than-expected loss in its first quarter results, with sprightly Pre sales forming the “vast majority” of the 823,000 phones shifted.
The figures paint a rather confusing figure for investors. Palm said it had unadjusted losses of $168m for the last three months, with revenues plummeting 82% down to $68m from the same period last year.
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