What a week. I just got back this morning from spending some incredibly high quality time with the folks at RIM during their annual analyst event. They were also kind enough to invite us to attend the U2 concert at Rogers Stadium (where the Toronto Blue Jays play). Talk about an impressive event - 70,000 people all singing "Where The Streets Have No Name" and other famous songs.
So while I was having fun up North, Palm had its quarterly earnings call and made some pretty important announcements.
First off, the shipment numbers for the Pre were pretty great - over 820,000 units. I'm really happy to see Palm starting to do well again, and my sense is things will continue to improve as they launch new devices (such as the new Pixi) and develop more relationships with carriers across the globe. All good stuff. The other annoucement was that Palm was no longer developing devices for Windows Mobile and will instead focus those engineering efforts on their webOS platform. Smart move.
I've had a suspicion for some time that this would happen, seeing how the Treo Pro has been out for a while and there were no signs of any updates to the platform. In one sense, it's not a big deal for the Windows Mobile universe, because HTC and Samsung certainly sold more Windows Mobile devices than did Palm, but by the same token, it is a big deal because the Treo Pro remains arguably one of the best Windows Mobile devices out there (even though it doesn't have a skin a la HTC). Palm's rich heritage (regardless of its many historic misteps) makes this news a blow to the world of Windows Mobile. Motorola has skirted the issue by saying they are "waiting for Windows Mobile 7" and while there will certainly be a number of 6.5 devices at launch, Palm is still a brand to reckon with.
The good news for Palm however is that they can accelerate the continued development of webOS. This is goodness, particularly from an enterprise mobility perspective. All those engineers can now focus on developing devices that may be more targeted to a corporate setting, while also ensuring that the software developers can help improve both the OS as well as the SDK to provide the third party community the tools they need to develop their own enterprise mobility management solutions.
