The Wall Street Journal has published a memo sent out to all Palm employees today by CEO Jon Rubinstein. The letter goes into more detail behind they days financial readjustment press release and provides some background on Palm's current initiatives to drive sales. The letter also discloses that Verizon felt the webOS launch was below expectations, but remains committed to working with Palm.

Sprint has quietly lowered the introductory price on the Palm Pixi. New customers can now purchase the Pixi direct from Sprint for $50 after the usual rebates and new contractual discounts.

Sprint was the first carrier to offer the Palm Pixi back in mid-Novemeber. It's initial asking price was $99. Earlier this month Verizon began offering an updated Pixi Plus version which includes WiFi at the same price point. That too was initially offered at $99 and has already been reduced to $79.

Palm, Inc. issued a press release early this morning to warn investors of that its financial performance will not meet its previously stated expectations due to soft demand. The revision laid out below estimate a 30% reduction in quarterly revenue. The full release follows...

Palm, Inc. today indicated that it expects that revenues for the third quarter of fiscal year 2010 will be in the range of $285 million to $310 million on a GAAP basis and in the range of $300 million to $320 million on a non-GAAP basis. Revenues for the quarter and full year are being impacted by slower than expected consumer adoption of the company's products that has resulted in lower than expected order volumes from carriers and the deferral of orders to future periods.

Accordingly, Palm expects fiscal year 2010 revenues to be well below its previously forecasted range of $1.6 billion to $1.8 billion. The company will provide more detail on its financial results during Palm's third-quarter financial results conference call currently scheduled for Thursday, March 18.

Shares of Palm Inc. hit a 52-week low on a double dose of analyst downgrades early this week. Three Wall street analysts issued gloomy reports for the company sending shares down to close around $8.45 Tuesday on overall sales and market penetration concerns.

The biggest blow came from longtime BOA/Merrill Lynch analyst Vivek Arya who remarked in a note to clients that Palm's newest webOS phones have seen "sluggish" sales since debuting on Verizon.

PocketGear, Inc. today announced the acquisition of Handango, the leading provider of smartphone applications globally, creating the world's largest cross platform, open app store and content marketplace with a catalog of more than 140,000 paid and free titles. PocketGear and Handango are the two largest independent app stores and combined to date have generated over $400 million in mobile application revenues from customers living in more than 175 countries and using over 2,000 unique mobile devices.

With the acquisition, PocketGear's mobile app marketplace has been expanded to connect more than 32,000 developers in the PocketGear Developer Program with over 40 PocketGear-powered storefront and distribution partners, including 4 of the world's top 5 handset manufacturers, 4 of the top 5 mobile operators in the US, 3 of the top 10 mobile operators globally, and leading media and ecommerce companies including Samsung, LG, Sony Ericsson, Research in Motion, Microsoft, T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon Wireless.

Worldwide mobile phone sales to end users totalled 1.211 billion units in 2009, a 0.9 per cent decline from 2008, according to Gartner, Inc. In the fourth quarter of 2009, the market registered a single-digit growth as mobile phone sales to end users surpassed 340 million units, an 8.3 per cent increase from the fourth quarter of 2008.

"The mobile devices market finished on a very positive note, driven by growth in smartphones and low-end devices," said Carolina Milanesi, research director at Gartner. "Smartphone sales to end users continued their strong growth in the fourth quarter of 2009, totaling 53.8 million units, up 41.1 per cent from the same period in 2008. In 2009, smartphone sales reached 172.4 million units, a 23.8 per cent increase from 2008. In 2009, smartphone-focused vendors like Apple and Research In Motion (RIM) successfully captured market share from other larger device producers, controlling 14.4 and 19.9 per cent of the worldwide smartphone market, respectively."

Rumor: The Boy Genius Report has posted a rumor from one of their "solid connects" that T-Mobile is in the "final stages of planning out their WebOS device launch with Palm". The report is very light on details but it suggests that a "Pixi-like handset" is in the works. No word at this time if this will be a GSM version of the original Pixi as seen on Sprint or the improved Pre Plus with Wi-Fi currently available on Verizon. Of course, the term "Pixi-like" could suggest a different model entirely, as rumors have been swirling for some time about a 3rd potential WebOS handset. It's possible that T-Mobile could end up with the same mysterious C40 device spotted in Sprint's inventory system last year.

With a version of both the Pre and Pixi possibly heading to AT&T at some point within the next few months, Palm could achieve the major coup of wrapping up all four major domestic carriers with the addition of T-Mobile, a position the company has never held.

With less than a month of market availability under its belt, Verizon has already seen it fit to slash the retail price on the Palm Pixi Plus. Verizon has lowered the intro price by $20, after new customer discounts, to $79. This deal can also be used with the carrier's recently updated buy one get one free promo as well.

The Palm Pixi Plus smartphone is Palm's svelte, lightweight model that packs in WiFi, 8GB of storage and an included Touchstone cover. The Pixi Plus also supports Palm's new WiFi router functionality via the Palm mobile hotspot application.

Ever since the launch of the Palm Pre Plus and Pixi Plus on January 25th, Verizon Wireless has been continuously running a BOGO ("Buy One, Get One Free") promotion. Now TechCrunch brings news of an offer already confirmed to be live on Verizon's web store.

In what should both address the grumblings of customers hoping to have a two-Pre household and give a nice boost to Palm's sales figures for the quarter, Verizon has now re-launched the BOGO promotion with more flexible terms. Effective February 15th, customers can choose any combination of Verizon WebOS and Android-powered handsets alongside a handful of non-smartphone "multimedia phones" as eligible devices for the promotion. So, in short, you can now get a "free" Pre Plus with the purchase of another Pre Plus or even tip a toe into the competing smartphone OS waters and get an Android phone alongside a WebOS device.

Mark/Space has updated its Missing Sync desktop software for webOS devices. The Missing Sync for the Palm Pre (and Pixi) now offers two way calendar synchronization on Macs and Windows machines. Users can now sync their Outlook calendars from their PC with their Palm webOS device and vice versa. The software also offers the ability to exchange contacts, docs, files, photos, music, ringtones, videos and more from your desktop computer.

The Missing Sync for the Palm Pre works with Windows XP, Vista and 7 and Mac OS 10.5.6 and higher. The software retails for $39.95 USD.

Last week we covered Palm's market share gains as well as a new report suggesting Verizon's order for WebOS devices was possibly as high as 600,000 devices, up from the 400,000 previously reported. Now a new report from Kaufman Brothers analyst Shaw Wu (via Electronista) gives a bit more credence to that number.

By Mr. Wu's estimation, Palm will ship 1 million total WebOS phones this quarter, with Verizon's refreshed "Plus" models potentially comprising up to 550,00 to 600,000 units of that total. Wu goes on to assert that the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus are being chosen at the expense of competing Verizon smartphones running not only BlackBerry and Windows Mobile but the high-profile Android Droid and Droid Eris, though it is unclear exactly how one determines which handsets were considered but ultimately not purchased by consumers.