Centro a bright spot in Palm's quarterly results

Record sales, but numbers still down

Palm is still losing money, despite the Centro selling in record numbers (for Palm). The company lost $9.6m in the three months to 30 November, on revenues which are down 11 per cent on last year to $349 million.

So good are sales of the diminutive Centro that Palm is now concerned they won't have enough components to meet demand next year, though the company is keen to stress that it'll have new Treo models coming over the next 12 months and is still working on its own version of Palm OS.

Quite why anyone is developing a new version of Palm OS isn't clear. Any updated version is going to have little in common with its predecessors, and users wanting to run Palm OS applications can already do so on Windows Mobile, or (soon) Symbian, thanks to StyleTap. Even Access - which owns the original - is reportedly reassigning engineers who were working on its new version.

But Palm needs to be able to promise good news on the horizon, to tide it over what it sees as a bad spot - so research and development spending is up 20 per cent, while just about everything else is down. ®