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What used to be the No. 1 smartphone maker in the US is now a basket case ripe for a takeover, if not a bankruptcy process. Over the last decade, Palm Inc. has lost market share to Blackberry and HTC. Apple's iPhone only took a year to overtake it in third place and so did Android smartphones. It is now in 5th place with a 5.4% market share that has seen it in the red over the past few years. Its share price in NASDAQ once peaked at $95 but now tethers in the $4 to $7 range depending on rumours of a takeover bid or not. It peaked early in April with news that Lenovo or HTC might take over the company. But it was sheer speculation both companies denied. Radical Strategies that Failed The new CEO Jonathan Rubinstein, a former Apple man who oversaw the success of the iPod product line, seems to have come short to make good its mandate to turn around the company in 2009. While revenues were up at $1.05B, it remains in the red with a loss of more than $250M. The year saw him introducing radical measures to maintain the company afloat. On hindsight, they were a case of too little too late and at the wrong time. · Under a different time, the Palm Pre would have been a classic success that could have saved the company. Never mind that it was underpowered at just 5 hours of talk time which is just lower than the Nokia N95 when it launched in 2005 but was still a success. It didn't have microSD slot but had an 8GB internal memory which was good enough had it been released 2 years earlier. There was also no video recording and no radio which was just fine but all these shortfalls were unforgivable when it launched in 2009. No wonder it sold only a lackluster 400,000 under an exclusive Sprint-Nextel distribution deal. · Jon Rubinstein did the right thing when it abandoned both the Windows Mobile OS and its PalmOS platforms. But it failed to take advantage of the Android trend and insisted on developing its own WebOS platform which proved too expensive for a small nitch player. Going Android has been known to cut production cost by as much 25%. As a result, its WebOS phones remain one of the most expensive smartphones in the market, with features that really can't compete with what HTC or Blackberry has. · Non-exclusive sales distribution was adopted when it realized the exclusivity deal with SprintNextel was not working. Its newly released Palm Pre Plus and Pixi Plus go under AT&T under a non-exclusive deal. Without a product that has the same appeal as an iPhone, exclusive deals won't be much of an advantage for the company. Pricing and a complete product line up remain its weakness that can only be addressed by flooding or saturating the markets with more feature-rich smartphones the way HTC and
Blackberry does. It seems Palm has finally accepted its fate and is readying itself for a takeover. Hopefully that happens soon enough.
To find out more about Palm pay a visit to moby1. They compare contracts for all Palm phones.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Simon_Drew
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