Palm: Not Dead Yet
Looks like my numbers were off a few days ago when I ripped into PalmOne. I'm not sure what's up with these numbers, because they're nothing like what I've seen else where, and they're not what PalmOne was celebrating (1 million Treos). But if Canalys is right, then PalmOne has a 17% market share over the past quarter, where they've sold over a million Palm devices. Did I read something wrong the other day? Why did no one correct my assumptions? Weird.
These are respectable numbers. Nokia sold five times as many Symbian devices in the same time frame (and 50 times as many phones in total), but we all know that people are buying Nokia phones because they're Nokia's, not because they're particularly smart (and thus aren't really installing native software on them much yet). I still stick with my opinion that Palm is in trouble, they're just not in as much trouble as I originally thought. I was saying like 50,000 a month? It looks like they're actually selling 333,000 a month which is a substantial increase.
Someone also pointed out to me that PalmSource's purchase of China MobileSoft brought quite a few handsets under their control and increased their footing in the mobile world, especially in China which is growing like crazy. That may be so, but I still think the jury is out on Palm's transition to a Linux base. It could be that PalmSource becomes more like CMS than vice versa.
Anyways, this post is a mea culpa. It looks like time will tell what happens to "Palm". Personally, I still wouldn't base a business on the Palm Ecosystem, but that's just me.
-Russ
Update: Reading the comments, it looks like I was right the first time, and these numbers include PDAs as well. I guess I was just feeling guilty about being so harsh on Palm before. :-)