Palm CEO feels Pre & Pixi phones could have been like the Droid
Palm recently held its third-quarter earnings call, and while things weren’t quite as bleak as they might have been, things still aren’t looking up for the cell phone manufacturer.
Jon Rubinstein, Palm’s CEO, held the quarterly earnings call, and while the numbers weren’t quite as bad originally predicted, they were nothing to write home about either. The original predictions had placed the number between $285 to $310 million, while the actual final number was $349.9 million with a net loss of $102.8 million on the quarter. While the number did indeed come in higher, Mr. Rubinstein said not to see this as an indicator of the year as some shipments the company expected to happen in the fourth-quarter slipped into this one. This compares with $90.6 million in revenue for the same quarter last year with a loss of $90.4 million.
According to Computerworld, the big hurdle for the coming quarter is the excessive inventory sitting at the carrier partners. Apparently both Sprint and Verizon are sitting on considerable stockpiles of the Pre and Pixi handsets, and the company is going to have to help them work through those inventories.
Speaking on the current problems Palm is facing, Mr. Rubinstein did opine about a very different world where Palm’s handsets had launched on Verizon earlier than they did, and what they could have meant for both his company and Motorola: “If we could have launched at Verizon prior to the Droid, I think we would have gotten the attention the Droid got. And since I believe we have a better product, I think we could have even done better.” It will of course never be known if he is correct, but it seems rather unlikely that the success of the Droid was merely a matter of timing.
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