While Palm is shipping an increasing amount of Palm smartphones year-over-year, the actual sell-through numbers reveal what we all knew: Palm's sales strategy has turned out to be questionable.
What's the point of making cool phones when you don't have a great plan to sell them? Well, that's what Palm is currently trying to fix with help from Verizon Wireless. According to Palm's Q2 FY 2010 results (September-November 2009), the company shipped a total of 783,000 smartphones in this timeframe, while the sell-through was 573,000 units, down 29 percent from the first quarter of fiscal year 2010 (June-August 2009). That also means Palm sold 4 percent more smartphones in September-November 2008 than what was the case this year.
Palm's CEO, Jon Rubinstein, is confident about the situation though:
We are continuing to execute strongly against our long-term strategy with the delivery of Palm Pixi, the new carrier launches completed this quarter, and the upcoming opening of Palm's full developer program. We're still in the early stages of a long race, and we're energized by the opportunity to compete in this exciting market. We remain confident that Palm's innovative product design capabilities, integrated cloud services and the differentiated and delightful Palm webOS experience will provide the foundation for our sustained success.
It would be great to see Palm get back on its feet through the Verizon Wireless agreement, but as we've said earlier, it should have happened this year already. Android has been taking big steps this year, and a recent comScore report reveals that in November 2009, only 2% and 1% of the respondents were considering the purchase of the Palm Pre and the Palm Centro, respectively. Given the low Palm Pre attention, the Palm Pixi alone might not be able to solve the challenge Palm is facing here, so let's hope Palm will reveal something that will drive attention to WebOS for real at CES 2010.
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