Palm Z22 Permanent Price Drop Soon?

Rumor: As of last week, the Palm Z22 has been spotted at Franklin Covey retail stores sporting a new $79.99 pricetag and a sticker proclaiming "new lower price!". This updated pricing, according to a Franklin Covey employee, appears to be permanent and not a limited time sale. The same price change is also present on the company's online store. This could signal a nationwide price drop just for the Franklin Covey chain as they begin to wind down their PDA efforts and clear out older stock. Or such discounting could be a move by the retailer to prematurely adjust their own prices prior an official price cut announcement by Palm. Palm's most recent SRP price list, dated January of 2007, still shows the Z22 at $99.99, as does the Palm.com online store.

Adding fuel to the fires of the Z22's days being numbered was a recent sighting at my local CompUSA. One Z22 box remained behind the doors of the glass lockup cabinet in the GPS/PDA/digital camera department. The Z22 had been marked down to $89.99 and had a handwritten note on the taped-on pricetag proclaiming its clearance pricing and "final one" status. On a nearby accessory clearance table at the same CompUSA, several Z22 cases were also marked down drastically with clearance pricing.

If this is a hint of a new Palm PDA on the horizon, Palm could possibly be planning to consolidate the T|E2 and Z22 into a single model and simply its non-Treo lineup. The main criticism surrounding the Z22 since its introduction was that it lacked several key features present on the previous entry level Palm, the Zire 31. By launching the Z22 at $50 less than its predecessor, Palm had to remove the multimedia-oriented features such as an SD expansion slot and a stereo headphone jack. A new device touting those features could essentially combine the featureset of the Tungsten E2 with the $100 pricetag of the Z22.

The Z22 is Palm's only sub-$100 PDA and its entry level product overall. It was introduced alongside the Palm TX in October of 2005. It has 32mb of NVFS memory, a color 160x160 DSTN color LCD, a 200mhz Samsung ARM CPU, and runs version 5.4.9 of the Garnet OS. You can read our Palm Z22 review here.