Ruh-roh. Palm just confirmed what we heard from analysts yesterday : sales aren’t going so well. The company’s updated its third quarter financial guidance to say that consumer adoption of its products is “taking longer than expected,” leading to lowered order volumes from carriers and deferral of some orders to “future periods.” That certainly puts that “Chinese New Year” Pre / Pixi work stoppage in a slightly different context, doesn’t it
It doesn’t look like we’ve got any showstoppers here — but just as with any major new smartphone release, Verizon’s Pre Plus is starting to take some lumps after romping in the field for a week since its retail availability kicked off. Of the two biggies being cited so far, one is of particular concern: apps other than VZ Navigator don’t seem to take advantage of GPS augmentation, meaning they’re relying on a straight-up GPS signal alone to get a location lock — something that often doesn’t work on a phone (a reliable workaround seems to be to open VZ Navigator before you open the app you really need, but still, not an optimal situation)
Reports are surfacing that GPS navigation on the Palm Pre Plus is a little janky, with full aGPS only working with the ( recently updated to 5.0 ) Verizon Navigator app, not Google Maps—locks are inaccurate and slow. Personally, I noticed that positioning was a little off this weekend using Google Maps on a Pre Plus in San Francisco, though the lock wasn’t so slow it rung any alarms. It doesn’t seem to be particularly widespread, but if you’ve got a Pre Plus, how’s it working for you?
Congrats, Palm, you’re now officially on a second US carrier . Yep, the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus are now up for sale on Verizon’s website — you’ve read the review , are you taking the plunge? Update : Just noticed that the limited time, buy one get one offer that promised a free Palm Pixi Plus with your purchase of a Pre Plus isn’t active — it’s only being offered along side the Pixi Plus.
Palm has gone and spilled its Verizon pricing info, and the news is pretty encouraging. The Pre Plus is hitting shelves at a cent under $150, closely followed by the Pixi Plus at $99.99 — both after $100 mail-in rebate and on two-year commitments.
It’s been about a year since Palm pulled itself back from the brink of imminent destruction with the announcement of webOS and the Palm Pre , and even less time since the products announced actually hit the market. In that time span, the company has issued another handset (the small, less powerful Pixi ), released a number of over-the-air updates to its OS (nine in all), and created and disseminated a slew of developer tools, including iterative releases of its SDK and a new web-based development environment called Ares . Throughout the ups and downs of the past 12-or-so months Palm has been “back,” the company has stuck with Sprint as its lone carrier partner in the US — so while it’s been innovating and tweaking on its platform and devices, the third-place partner has kept it from the larger audiences AT&T or Verizon might offer.
We just had a chance to play around with the new Palm Pre Plus (and Palm Pixi Plus ), and we must say — they’ve made some solid improvements to these devices. We’re going to focus on the Pre, since it’s really had the bulk of the changes. Firstly, it’s now a Verizon branded (and bound) phone, which should bump the status of the device in many people’s minds
The Palm Pre plus removed the navigation button, has 2x internal RAM, 16GB storage, and a built-in inductive back cover for Touchstone inductive charging. The Pixi Plus is still “thin and lightweight”, but now has Wi-Fi, more colors for back covers (all Touchstone enabled). And both these phones are only for Verizon
