Upcoming Best Buy Sale on Palm handhelds and Centros

Yes, the best price on the TX thus far was $199 from Palm.com w/ a free wireless keyboard & free shipping. That was right around Black Friday '07. I am sure this holiday season will bring some nice deals, as Palm prepares to really blow out the remaining PDA stocks.

Palm's so deeply in bed with the domestic wireless carriers that they cannot be bothered to care what you or I think.

For starters, the Z22 should be mildly revamped to become the Z33 with an improved LCD, stereo headphone jack & microSD slot. It should be $75 (at most) and hanging in blister packaging on the shelves of every Target & Wal-Mart in the country.

Redo the E2 as the Palm E3 and basically make it a kid's/poor man's Treo. Basically a Treo 90 for the new generation. Give it a 320x320 LCD, decent battery capacity, wi-fi (drop the BT) and a Treo-style thumboard and sell it for $120-$150 and pull the rug out from under Sony's Mylo. Throw in an integrated mic and some solid bundled software and you have a compelling Mylo-style chat/messaging/email/VOIP device for the kiddies who can grow into Centros later on as well as the adult types who don't need/want a smartphone and cannot bother with Graffiti. Offer it in a handful of colors and print on the packaging "NO Contracts! NO long-term contracts! NO monthly charges!" That's the kind of rah-rah marketing that Palm's good at.

Then the TX simply needs a faster CPU, a higher-capacity battery, full SDHC support, a few gigs of internal flash storage, and a software revamp and position it at the $200-$250 pricepoint. Oh yeah, and a second model with a cellular radio as well!

Pilot 1000->Pilot 5000->PalmPilot Pro->IIIe->Vx->m505->T|T->T|T2->T|C->T|T3->T|T5->Zodiac 2->TX->Verizon Treo 700P->Verizon Treo 755p

Can someone with knowledge of the way these things are accounted for please give a (quick) plausible reason why Palm has not cut the MSRP of their remaining PDAs down to "reasonable" levels? I mean, wouldn't $50-$75(Z22), $125-$150(E2) and $175-$225 (TX) make much more sense and at least put these things within striking distance of competing with cut-rate cell phones, mp3 players, PMPs etc?

I mean, if we were to take a stroll through the local BB, I doubt we'd find ANY products/SKUs that had been on there shelves for 3+ years like Palm's handhelds (no, packaging refreshes for the E2 do not count) aside from maybe a pocket calculator or an alarm clock. Certainly nothing in the $200+ pricerange that continues to appear semi-regularly in the weekly circulars!

Would the most reasonable argument be:

1. Palm still plans to introduce new handhelds with more/better/newer features at the $99, $199, & $299 pricepoints and permanently reducing the pricing for the remaining handhelds by 10-20% would make people expect their replacement models to not exceed that price?

2. Palm is so greedy that they want to milk their dying handheld lineup as long as possible, even when their feature sets & pricetags make them look awfully archaic?

3. Palm's component costs have not dropped as much as we might be inclined to believe and the Z22 & TX were underpriced when they were launched nearly 3 years ago? (by that same logic, can we draw a conclusion that Palm's material cost on a Centro is not as cheap as we might assume and those devices are either being very heavily subsidized by the carriers and/or sold at a not-insubstantial loss by Palm in order to move units?

4. Something else entirely?

(revisiting point #3): FWIW, the unlocked Centro is $299 from Palm.com, which is precisey what the TX costs when it's not on sale. The Centro's component costs are increased by the cellular radio, SIM card slot, removable battery, physical keyboard & more bundled software on board (thus higher licensing fees to Normsoft, Dataviz etc) but the TX counters with wi-fi, a larger/high-res screen, a metal stylus etc. I'm no Digitimes reporter but I'f figure the unlocked GSM Centro & TX to be roughly similar in pricing, with the Centro honestly probably costing more material & support-wise on a per-unit basis.

P.S. I find it astonoshing that Apple's per-unit iPhone 3G cost is just ~$174.x. If that were Palm it'd probably be $100+ more. I wonder if/when Apple gets around to doing, say, a CDMA version with a removable battery (no more one size fits all GSM version) & a few more bundled features if they'll be able to enjoy such nice margins.

Pilot 1000->Pilot 5000->PalmPilot Pro->IIIe->Vx->m505->T|T->T|T2->T|C->T|T3->T|T5->Zodiac 2->TX->Verizon Treo 700P->Verizon Treo 755p

oh, how times have changed -

Shortage: Palms are hard to come by

13 October 2000 03:00 PM

Many consumers hoping to buy a new Palm PDA are finding retailer's shelves bare and online shopping carts empty.

The Palm shortage, the company says, results from a combination of high seasonal demand and a shortage of LCD panels and flash memory, two critical components used to construct the devices. (The same shortages, as reported by ZDNet, are also affecting mobile phone handset vendors.)

ZDNet News found that Palm's Palm III and Palm V line of organisers are on back order or out of stock at Palm own Web store as well as other online resellers, such as Egghead.com. Brick and mortar retailers face similar problems.

These backlogs are estimated at "several weeks per product line," said Palm spokeswoman Marlene Somsak.

Somsak called the shortage of devices a "pleasant problem," explaining the company prefers it to an overabundance of devices and no customers.

Dads and grads
"Everybody's having component problems. It's 'Dads and Grads' season right now ... and the devices are in high demand," she said. "Production has not slowed at all. Demands is out of balance (with supply) right now."

The tightness of supply of components is expected to continue for a few months, with some relief from the shortages expected in the company's June quarter, Somsak said.

As a result of the parts shortages, Palm has begun buying certain components in bulk, qualifying additional component suppliers and has also purchased some flash memory on the spot market, she said.

Palm partner Handspring, at least for now, seems to be unaffected. The company's Web store on Tuesday listed all of its models as being in stock and available to ship within three to seven days.