Palm reports dire numbers and is up for sale

The crunch came with Palm’s third quarter earnings, reported yesterday. It made a loss of $22 million, which while a vast improvement over the $98 million loss reported for the same quarter last year, should have been a substantial profit stemming from the company’s rolling out of its smartphones - the Pre and Pixi - over the past year or so.

But Palm has missed the boat.  While it shipped 960,000 units into the supply chain it actually sold only 408,000 units to customers. That was a drop of 29 per cent from the previous quarter of 2009 and it probably spells ‘the end’ for the company in its current form.

Palm of course made the original Palm Pilot, one of the first handheld or palmtop personal assistants that actually gained traction.