Palm Put Up For Sale

When my company moved to Sprint last year, a bunch of my co-workers jumped at the opportunity to get a Palm Pre.  I still find it amusing to hear them curse at their phones in utter frustration.  Hanging up on loved ones and accidentally putting confidential calls on speakerphone is good fun.  Unfortunately, these troubles don't seem to be confined to my company.  With weak sales and so-so reviews for their latest phones, Palm Inc. is looking for a way out.  The company has hired Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Frank Quattrone’s Qatalyst Partners to find a buyer.  It's rumored that HTC and Lenovo might make offers soon.

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Despite Poor Quarter, Palm Presses On With Pre and Pixi For AT&T

Last week, Palm reported their most recent letdown: a $22 million loss. Though, despite terrible numbers, they press on to announce their recent entries to Verizon's lineup are now available on AT&T. (in case you hate making phone calls) Yes, the Palm Pre Plus and Pixi Plus are now available form AT&T in GSM flavors. In fact, not a single feature has changed from their CDMA counterparts, save the GSM receiver.

Palm will have to make some drastic changes if they expect to stay in the game. It feels like only a year ago (it was) that we were all saying the same thing. WebOS was supposed to be their savior, but now over a year later, and we're still running the same hardware, it's looking bleak yet again. Engadget's Joshua Topolsky has got some great ideas on how Palm can save themselves moving forward, but unfortunately many of their mistakes have already been made. Short of brand new stellar hardware instantly available on every carrier, a much richer developer ecosystem, and some major updates to the OS, it seems like we may really be nearing the end.

Palm WebOS Updated With Video And More

Updated on Tuesday, March 2, 2010 by Mark Burstiner

Palm has rolled out their long-time-coming update to WebOS on the Palm Pre. The update includes behind-the-scenes performance improvements, and quite a few forward-facing changes. We're talking: video recording support, richer call logs, media sync changes, notification tweaks and a whole lot more. The update should be rolled out to most users by now, so if you don't have it yet, you'll get it soon. This update is for Sprint users, not Verizon, as the Pre Plus is a separate device.

Pre users, have you gotten the update yet? Let us know in the comments if you notice anything else!

Demo of video after the jump. All media via PreCentral.

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Palm Incites Verizon Customers; Enrages Sprint Users

Last week at CES, Palm managed to simultaneously stir up one community while alienating another. With the announcement of Palm's Pre and Pixi Plus models came a slew of backlash from Sprint users who were feeling slighted by the Verizon-exclusive Plus models they were being deprived of.

The Palm Pre Plus maintains the same form factor as its older brother on Sprint, with a few notable changes. The standard back panel is now the touchstone inductive charging cover, meaning you won't have to shell out to purchase it separately. The keyboard has also undergone a slight makeover, dropping the funky orange twangs, and improving spacing making it more like its smaller sibling the Palm Pixi, and the 'home' button on the front is now gone. On the inside, the Palm Pre plus is now rocking 16GB of internal storage as opposed to 8. All this is heading directly to a Verizon store near you on January 25th.

The Palm Pixi Plus also saw a few upgrades, however minor. The most notable of these are the inclusion of 802.11b/g and the swanky looking swappable back covers for the device.

The problem is, Sprint users are feeling taken advantage of. Sprint will not be seeing these two new Palm entries for some time. Not to mention, early adopters are feeling the same kind of betrayal iPhone early adopters felt when Apple slashed the price of the $600 device by $200. The new Palm devices are the buck, with more bang, yet totally unavailable to the first generation of Pre users (without an ETF and new contract anyway). Here's hoping this is one of the last times we see consumers suffer at the mobile industry's current model of Carrier then Device, not the other way around.