We reported last week that Palm would be closing all of their retail stores, but PDAStreet has discovered that things are slightly different.
Palm will, in fact, be closing only the 7 stores that were opened in malls. The other 26 stores, all of which are in airports, are owned by a quite different company called Airport Wireless which has chosen to remain open. The company has decided, however, to remove the Palm branding from their stores and greatly expand stock to include products from companies like Nokia, RIM, and Motorola.
The gang at PalmInfocenter discovered that Palm has hired Mike Bell, a 16-year Apple employee, to be their new Senior Vice President of Product Development.
The move was done with minimal fanfare, and Silicon Valley news site Valleywag says the reason for the silence is due to some possible bad blood between Palm and Apple. Palm’s chairman, Jon Rubinstein, was on the team at Apple before leaving in 2006 and has been snapping up Apple engineers for Palm ever since, leading to “screaming matches and threats of lawsuits” between the two companies.
Apple is of course renowned for industrial design and innovative user interfaces, so this could be very good for Palm and their recent slump.
Palm rumors abound: hot on the heels of the rumor that Palm might be closing their retail stores, WMExperts finds an anonymous user on their forums that claims to have details on the Treo 800w.
The mysterious “anonuser” has made two posts on the WMExperts forums, claiming that the 800w is about as thin as the Centro, will ship with Windows Mobile 6, and will feature an EvDO Rev. A radio, Bluetooth 2.0, and 802.11g WiFi support amongst other things.
According to the user, who claims received his or her information a source inside Sprint, the device will ship in April of this year. Nothing to do but wait and see…
A user named treoneo at the TreoCentral forums posted on the 14th that Palm would be shutting down all retail stores, and later in the thread is was confirmed by other users and by Palm themselves in an email.
The staff TreoCentral contacted Palm directly and received this response:
“We continue to focus our company around core business initiatives and are consolidating more resources behind fewer programs in order to compete most effectively and build world-class, category-defining mobile solutions. We have therefore made the decision to close our retail stores.”
Palm’s 31 stores are mostly located in airports, although they have some freestanding buildings such as their Rockefeller Center location in New York. There’s no word yet on when exactly the stores will close, and Palm has not updated their retail page or put out a press release, so this remains a credible but unconfirmed rumor.
The PalmInfocenter has posted that Clievideo has released a beta of Lightspeed 3.0, software dedicated to overclocking certain Palm devices.
3.0 adds support for the Treo 680, 700P, and 755P, and the Palm Centro. It also adds support for ZLauncher shortcuts, a new default value, and several unnamed tweaks and fixes. Registration is discounted to $14.95, and a free trial is available. You can download or buy the program on their website.
PalmInfocenter found some information from industry analyst Tero Kuittinen that indicates Palm might be readying the Centro for T-Mobile as well as AT&T.
According to the report, which was posted at Seeking Alpha, Palm CFO Andrew Brown declined to comment when asked about a Centro on Verizon–likely due to their long delay in launching the Treo–but “giggle a little” when asked about T-Mobile.
There were also some comments that might be related to Nova, Palm’s upcoming OS update. Namely mentions of a “new user interface” and “software/hardware integration.”