Palm Pre "needs more polishing"

 

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By Reuters

Posted on 20 Mar 2009 at 09:08

Palm claims the Pre is on track for a first half of 2009 release, despite it third quarter revenue tumbling a staggering 70% from last year.

The Pre is seen as Palm's best hope to fight rivals such as Apple and RIM, which have taken a sizeable chunk of the company's smartphone sales in recent years.

Speaking to investors, chief executive Ed Colligan said that the Pre "needed more polishing" but that there were "no showstoppers," standing in the way of launch: "We plan on delivering on the time frame we said we would."

Indeed, Colligan claimed to already be using the Pre on a daily basis, and announced that the company was already looking at ways of tailoring its WebOS for different markets: "There's certainly opportunity for going down stream and taking functionality out and clearly there's things we can do going upscale"

It's clear the Pre can't arrive soon enough for Palm. During the third quarter its loss widened to $98 million from $57 million in the same period last year, while revenue fell to $90.6 million from $312.1 million.