Sweating Palms

With the high number of telecoms big cheeses doing the off of late, I’m beginning to wonder if Palm’s chief exec, Ed Colligan, is starting to sweat a bit.

On Friday, Palm said its loss for the quarter just gone was going to be greater than usual [a loss warning?], mainly because of a new gadget that didn’t get certified for shipment when it should. I’ve no idea what this secret weapon is, but getting it to ship after the Christmas rush isn’t going to help.

Palm’s had a bit of gadget trouble of late. It’s cheapo Centro device is too popular, diluting the revenue mix, and then there’s the ill-fated Foleo, which got killed off just as it was about to ship, mainly because no one understood what it was.

This is all against the background of Colligan trying to get the operating system strategy onto a two-fork road – Linux and Microsoft Windows Mobile – but something’s afoot as the company is still releasing PalmOS-based devices.