Palm chief: no new Treos until summer

No new Treo smartphones are expected to appear until the summer, Palm chief Ed Colligan said late yesterday during the conference call for the company's latest quarterly results. The company founder warned that quarterly losses were likely to continue during the spring quarter as the Sunnyvale, California-based company would not have an updated model during the period, which runs until the end of May. Palm will primarily focus on expanding the reach of the Centro to Europe and other carriers until it can release a new Treo before the end of the summer, Colligan said.

The remarks by the CEO most directly affect the launch of the Treo 800w, the company's long-awaited replacement for the 750 and the 755p. Reports have indicated the 800w will be the first to offer faster EVDO Revision A access on CDMA versions and give all models a 2-megapixel camera as well as a microSD slot in place of Palm's previous miniSD.

Colligan has not explained the reason for the extended development of the phone, though former iPod co-designer Jon Rubinstein is believed to have had a significant impact on reengineering Palm's lineup and is known to have had at least a slight impact on the Centro's late debut in November last year.

The move also creates further troubles for Palm's marketshare, which took damage from Apple's iPhone price cut late last year and hovered at approximately 9 percent for the last calendar quarter of 2007 versus marketshare roughly three times larger for Apple and its rival Research in Motion.

Filed under: industry, gadgets
Other story tags: Palm, Treo, Centro