Comments on: Palm Q4 FY08 Conference Call Highlights

Way to go Palm, you just keep repeating the same mistakes over and again; even you *are* actually doing something right this time you're certainly don't have anything to show for it, which is the story of the last 6 years: nothing worthwhile to show. Way to go.

Palm Vx (a classic) -> Palm 505 (*yawn*) -> Dell Axim (slooow...) -> Palm TE (great) -> Qtek 9090 (great idea, lousy platform) -> Nokia 6630 (a toy) -> iMate SP3i (not bad) -> Nokia 9300 (can't sync notes!!) -> Treo 650 (awesome) -> hw6915 (almost perfect)

Nah.

He said on schedule to release what they said they were going to release and have products out within first half of 2009.

No, he did NOT say what they had said they were going to release, nor did he define "products".

One interesting closed-mouth thing he didn't say was in answer to "Have you sent a Nova beta out to developers yet" was "I'm not going to say". IMHO, that's a solid "No".

After playing with our friends' iPhones and seeing the news releases about new software for Android, how many of us are going to be staring at our nifty, new non-Palm devices and miss the release entirely?

I haven't lost my giveadamn yet, but it might easily get misplaced when the Android phones come out.

-
PalmPilot Pro (1997) -> III (1998) -> Vx (1999) -> m500 (2001) -> m515 (2002) -> Tx (2007)

I still think that's the Celio Redfly. Probably announced as a bundle with the 800w.

and

> Of course the Centro will stay hot!...

They were asked exactly that question:

== "...Michael Walkley - Piper Jaffray
==
== Great, thanks. Just a little more color in the Centro
== sell-through. I think last quarter you were sharing a
== run-rate per week. Could you update that now that you
== are at multiple carriers, just to help us in thinking
== about modeling?
==
== Edward T. Colligan
==
== Well, I mean, it's clearly increased. You know, we are
== seeing - during the quarter we saw the full benefit of
== AT&T coming online, along with Centro and as we'd
== mentioned last quarter, it was accelerating through the
== quarter. We just don't want to get into specifics of
== sell-through at this point in time..."

That latter sentence is a giggle since they went out of their way last time to tout their 30,000 Centros/week number - VERY specific.

IMHO that means the numbers aren't beneficial to Palm - either declining NOW or showing essentially zero Treo sales. Or both.

== "...Needless to say, you know, the sell-through - when
== you look at our sell-through, we had a nice up-tick,
== 19% quarter over quarter and the vast majority, if not
== all of that, was the Centro product..."

Note that "quarter over quarter" is not "week by week" - time
IS of the essence as they say.

But if it works, good for them... Right?

http://tinyurl.com/2ooncg

Palm's got to be concerned that their $99 Centro is going up against a $200 iphone (at least in the US). That's not the same customer demographic, but it's close enough to pinch.

And within days of each other.

With the iPhone released FIRST.

Great move.

It's like Slick vs Brick and we're losin'.

Pat Horne

About the million number, look here. This is the total of smartphone+pda sales since 2004

Q204 ………… 1,400,000
Q304 ………… 1,303,000
Q404 ………… 960,000
Q105 ………… 945,000
Q205 ………… 1,082,000
Q305 ………… 1,279,000
Q405 ………… 1,120,000
Q106 ………… 977,000
Q206 ………… 1,143,000
Q306 ………… 1,334,000
Q406 ………… 1,014,000
Q107 ………… 1,059,000
Q207 ………… 1,117,000
Q307 ………… 1,194,000
q407 ………… 1,064,000
q108 ………… 1,014,000
q208 ………… 1,014,000
q308 ………… 1,014,000
q408 ………… 1,072,000


The average is 1,110,789 with a standard deviation of only 133,248. This means Palm is so predictable shipment-wise that you could say with 66% certainty they would sell between 850,000 and 1.4 million in a quarter, and 95% certainty they wont sell more than 1.5 million in 1 quarter.

Please correct me if I am wrong but Palm/Handspring has not revealed EITHER sell-in or sell-through consistently from quarter to quarter. They started off with the TREO 180 by revealing both but clammed up pretty fast when the Treo 270 came out. Then they varied with the wind revealing one or the other. For a number of consecutive months they revealed sell-through numbers in a nice graph until that graph started leveling off, then stopped.

But I believe for a few years now BOTH numbers have not been simultaneously released by Palm in any consistent manner.

I think the numbers prove the general point though - selling 1 million of everything is par for the course for Palm - just because is now smartphones does not actually mean anything.

Surur

NEXT (summer/fall)...New Windows Mobile Treos. (increasing revenue)

FOLLOWING (end of year)...New OS platorm. (showing potential for more revenue)

THEN (by end of first quarter '09)...New hardware running new OS. (delivering revenue lines)

If they don't deliver on this, you can whine then. Until then. STOP IT! They are doing just what they said. (If my memory serves me right, you predicted that the Centro was ugly and would fail.) If you don't like it, you can sell now. But whining about revenue when EVERYONE KNEW that any success would be tough to come by dating back to the debacle of last summer is just crying last year's tears.

Finally, J. P. Morgan knows something about what's coming. Be patient or get off the bus.

Better load that PALM wagon. Oops they changed the ticker didden they.

Pat Horne

No, actually they're doing worse than they said.

Again, I suggest that you sell now and move on. Go find something else to incessantly rant about. ;)

I hope your not loaded up in this position. Not only don't put all your eggs ... you would be wise to keep very few here IMO. A lot of the leadership of this company has taken them into a horrible downward spiral in the past 5 years. Marketshare is a pretty horrifying subject with Palm if you look at the 5-7yr model. Unless they have had a major league culture change, then I would just run for the hills.

Just my $.02

Pat Horne

Shouldn't it be the best yet?

Except use WiFi

Except have a *real* web browser

Except have a REAL screen

CENTRO: For Those Who Can't Afford The Very Best

many here vociferously disagree that it is not the best, hence my pronouncement.

Maybe Nova changes that equation, but that's a BIG leap of faith.

Of course saying nice things about Palm here could get me linched.

WTF? This is the 21st Century. We don't use crude ropes.

Now roll up your sleeve ...

Worse, Nova be starting with zero installed devices as a base for developers to sell to. The iPhone will be on, conservatively, 15-20 million devices, RIM's phones many more than that. Who knows about Android, but that can't be less than millions. It's a big stretch to expect the kind of application development that Palm has had in the past. How is Palm even going to be able to compete on price against that kind of economy of scale? Isn't Apple the biggest purchaser of flash memory in the world now?

It's not that I'm hating on Palm. It would be great to have some more use for the folder full of Palm applications and data languishing on my hard drive. It's that the situation is so grim, and the company is so catatonic, it's hard not to watch with the same sick fascination as watching a car wreck in slow motion.

Colligan indirectly touched on that...sort of...during the earnings call:

== "...this new platform and its accessibility to the developer community..."

Not unless Palm is porting the same Java-like API and VM that Android is using (which given Palm's recent track record, is a good decision I would not expect them to make).

Centro has shown that price will make even OS 5.x Near-Death Edition sell.

People who are happy with a phone, SMS, and the basics still aren't going to buy Palm's Nova devices. They'll buy one of the swankier dumbphones, or else whatever has the biggest brand name.