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LAS VEGAS
— Palm's news conference at last year's Consumer
Electronics Show marked the beginning of its comeback
story. This year, Palm seemed determined to show that
its story still has some life to it.
The smart
phone maker announced at CES on Thursday a long-awaited
deal with
Verizon
, the largest carrier in
the United States
, to sell phones using Palm's new operating system. The
company also unveiled two new phones, said it is opening
up its application store to all programmers, and
announced new capabilities for its webOS software that
will help it keep pace with — or even surpass —
rival operating systems.
"Last
year, we said Palm was back, and we meant it,"
company CEO
Jon Rubinstein
said.
But the
company has fallen far behind rivals like Apple and
Google
in sales and available applications. And the competition
it faces is only going to get stronger, said
Ken Dulaney
, a mobile-phone industry analyst with technology
research firm
Gartner
.
"Palm's
got a tough, tough mountain to climb here," he
said.
Rubinstein
and the company left some important questions
unanswered.
Most
notably, it didn't say how many webOS devices the
company has sold since it launched the Palm Pre in June.
It also didn't say how much
Verizon
will charge for the new phones, which are updated
versions of the Pre and Pixi, which the company launched
in November. And while Palm officials said there are now
more than 1,000 programs available in the company's
application store, they didn't say how many applications
Palm customers have actually downloaded and installed on
their phones.
Palm
representatives also declined to confirm reports that
AT&T
plans to offer two webOS phones this year.
Palm has
struggled to maintain the buzz it generated at CES last
year, when it won a "Best in Show" award and
its new operating system and Pre phone drew accolades
from the press. Since then, the company's efforts have
largely been overshadowed by the continued success of
Apple's
iPhone and developments surrounding
Google's
Android operating system and the phones running it.
Still,
the latest announcements could give Palm a boost.
Previously, the only U.S. carrier that offered webOS
phones was
Sprint
, which has far fewer subscribers than either
Verizon
or
AT&T
, the nation's No. 2 carrier. Having webOS phones on
Verizon
gives Palm a much larger potential market than it had
previously.
The
updates in the Palm Pre Plus and the Palm Pixi Plus
address some of the shortcomings of their predecessors.
The Pre Plus will have 16 gigabytes of internal memory,
double that in the original Pre. Palm added a Wi-Fi
antenna to the Pixi Plus, a glaring omission in the
previous version, which will allow users to gain access
to the Web and send e-mail via home networks.
The
latest update to webOS will add video recording
capabilities to Palm devices, a feature that's proved
popular on the latest iPhone. And Palm is giving
developers a new set of tools that will allow them to
create more sophisticated applications, including games
with three-dimensional graphics.
That
capability comes as the iPhone and its iPod touch
sibling have become important handheld game devices. The
new capabilities in webOS could allow software
developers to create games for Palm phones that are
every bit as sophisticated as those for the iPhone.
Electronic Arts
, for example, demonstrated versions of its "Sims
3" and "Need for Speed" games for webOS
that it began offering in Palm's application store
Thursday.
Palm also
announced a coming feature that's not yet planned for
the iPhone: support for Adobe's Flash software. Much of
the video available on the Web, and many interactive
games and programs, are delivered through Flash. By
offering Flash — through a software download that is
expected to be available later this year — Palm will
allow webOS users to access more Web content than they
could on the iPhone.
The
company also is opening its application store to all
software developers. Previously, Palm had allowed only a
few hand-picked programmers to offer applications in its
store. The company said some of its software tools have
been downloaded some 85,000 times. Such interest could
indicate a rapid expansion in the number of programs
available in its store.
Still,
Palm has some big challenges ahead of it. Application
developers tend to flock to platforms that have the
greatest number of users. The total number of programs
available on webOS are likely to remain limited until
Palm is able to ramp up sales of its phones. But the
lack of diversity in applications could well limit the
appeal — and sales — of its phones.
And the
move to
Verizon
comes as the carrier has made a big commitment to
Android.
Verizon
heavily promoted
Motorola's
Droid phone last year and plans to roll out a slew of
new Android models this year. Analysts have already
questioned the degree to which
Verizon
will support the webOS phones.
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