Mobile advertising specialist firm AdMob (soon to be gobbled up by Google) has put out their March 2010 report, which paints a steady picture for Palm, and a rocket-ride for Android. Let’s get the big news out of the way up front: AdMob’s ad requests for Android phones have eclipsed those from the iPhone OS. There are a number of factors to consider in the numbers that may or may not validate the newfound dominance of Android (46% share vs. 39% for iPhone OS), but it’s still a surprising number.

On the sidelines, however, is Palm. Worldwide marketshare and US marketshare remain essentially unchanged. In the US the Pre accounted for 2.4% of AdMob’s ad requests, a tick up of 0.1% from their February report. Granted, for the Pre a 0.1% rise in overall marketshare equates to a 4.3% increase in traffic from the previous month, so it’s not all bad. But bumps of a tenth of a percent in US marketshare aren’t going to sustain Palm, especially when your devices don’t even make an appearance on the charts for other regions. Still, it’s better to have made minuscule gains than to be giving up ground, right? What we’re looking forward to is the reports for April and May, which will hopefully show the positive effects on increased promotions and price cutting at Verizon and Sprint, and the launch of the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus on O2 and Vodafone in Europe.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

Looks like we have the new look of Palm’s ads fairly established now: somebody out there, mobile, magically interacting with a floating screen that simultaneously changes the landscape surrounding our flaneur. Sure, there’s not much focus on the hardware itself, but we’re cool with that at this point. Bottom line: No more creepy women, no more moms, just a good indicator of the multitasking and Internet connectivity that are the hallmarks of webOS.

Here we have ‘The Movies,’ and as with Shoes and the ‘New Digs,’ we like what we see. You?

READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

If we had to pick just one cause behind the failure of the Palm Pre to really catch on with the general public, it’d have to be that increasingly bad advertising from ad firm Modernista that tried and failed to introduce webOS to the world. We won’t link you to them to refresh your memory – you don’t want that. What we will link you to is a report from AdAge: the relationship between Palm and Modernista is over.

Palm is, quite obviously, now in the market for a new ad partner. The new partner will be working with a Palm that has lost a lot of momentum in recent months and has tons of excess inventory to move. Modernista’s ads for Palm have improved recently, so we can’t help but wonder if the parting of ways is more over money than anything else.

Several months ago Cadillac also dumped Modernista, a move that came as part of GM’s restructuring and an effort to cut costs. Modernista is a small independent firm with only a few major clients, and thus charges more than some of their larger Madison Avenue competitors. For their part, Palm has already shifted their focus to point-of-sale advertising (in-store ads and training for store staff) and cut back on expensive television advertising, leaving that to the carriers instead.

[via: PreCentral sister site TreoCentral]

READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

While we’re still plenty happy with Palm’s new Life Moves Fast, Don’t Miss a Thing ad, there’s still concern out there that it doesn’t quite do justice to showing that all that fancy multitasking is actually happening on a piece of hardware. Enter ThiesFX, whose entry into the PalmSpot contest is, as we say above, pretty much full of win – and not just because PreCentral leads off the video

It’s funny, but the core problem with webOS is that its killer feature is nearly impossible to describe in 30 seconds. Namely: the natural elegance of multitasking and notifications all working in concert.  What do you think is the best way to show that off in 30 seconds or less?

YouTube embed after the break

via Engadget and webOS Roundup, thanks to everybody who sent this in!

read more

READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

It wasn’t that long ago that Merrill Lynch analyst Vivek Arya was all gung-ho about Palm, placing the stock in the buy column with a $20 price target. But Arya’s optimism seems to have faded, and he has not only moved Palm into the underperform (i.e. sell) column, but has slashed the price target in half to just $10 a share.

While Arya believes that Palm’s webOS is better than most mobile operating systems, he said that “Palm’s superior platform features have not translated into sufficient carrier support and consumer demand, and we are concerned the window of opportunity may be closing as Google’s Android ecosystem gains ground, {Research In Motion] revitalizes its portfolio, iPhone increases its presence, and as Microsoft reboots its efforts with Windows Phone 7.” Additionally, he is concerned by Palm’s cash resources – at the end of the last quarter Palm had just $590 million on hand – money that Palm is burning through incredibly fast.

Arya has also noted something that we have heard a lot of: while Verizon staffers are generally knowledgeable about the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus that their stores carry, they are tending to push the Motorola Droid, HTC Droid Eris, and BlackBerry devices over the newer Palm smartphones. Even if Palm manages to add AT&T and T-Mobile to their carrier partners list, Arya doesn’t expect a significant boost in unit sales. With all that in mind, he has cut his prediction of how many units Palm will move in the coming quarter to 900,000 (down from the 1.1 million previously expected). Arya doesn’t expect Q4 to be much better for Palm, anticipating 1.2 million units shipped in the quarter, a cut of 300,000 from previous estimates.

There is one positive note, and it’s that the heavy advertising campaign that Palm has put on seems to be paying off with stronger sell-through (presumably at Sprint and Verizon stores). But amongst all this doom and gloom, it’s just a glimmer of hope as the expensive campaign is being supported by Palm’s diminishing cash pile.

Read: Barron’s

READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

If you’ve watched any TV in the last week you’ve probably seen an ad for the Palm Pre Plus on Verizon, and maybe even one for the Pixi Plus. But TV land isn’t the only place you’ll see Palm gear advertised – as we saw earlier in the week with the Pixi Plus Verizon BOGO ad destined for a weekly newspaper. Newspapers are old media, baby. Signs on the street are where it’s at these days, with people walking around their cities and stuff. As such, we’ve received shots from around the country of reader running into Palm and Verizon advertising for the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus. It’s in office towers, its at bus stops, and its in art festivals… in Miami!

read more

READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

Forget moms, let’s talk software! With Valentine’s Day in the past, Verizon has now turned their attention and considerable marketing muscle to advertising the Palm Pre Plus and Pixi Plus they way they’re meant to be advertised: as feature-packed smartphones. In 30 seconds time Big Red manages to cover more than Palm managed in their entire series of launch commercials.

Oh, and they’re showing of Buy One, Get One Free too. If there was any need of clarification, this ad should clear things up for both staff and customers: the Pixi Plus is available as a BOGO offer when you buy a Pre Plus or a Pixi Plus, not just the latter. Verizon’s BOGO promotions have proven a boon for both the BlackBerry Curve and the HTC Droid Eris, hopefully we’ll be able to say the same for the Pixi Plus.

Thanks to Matt and Adam for the tips!

READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

We didn’t see any of the Mom-focused Verizon commercials for the Pre, unfortunately, but we did briefly see the Pre appear in a commercial for SMS Info company KGB.

It was bittersweet, though, as not only did the Pre take the fall as a stand-in for "finding information via the web," but it also had to suffer a "simulated screen image" that showed a featurephone interface instead of our beloved webOS. It also stood in incredibly stark contrast to another smartphone commercial. The Pre appears in the hand of a skinny guy who gets obliterated by a sumo wrestler, the Motorola Devour in the hand of Megan Fox in a bathtub.

Both videos after the break for your post-superbowl webOS schadenfreude viewing ‘pleasure.’

Thanks to everybody who sent this in!

read more

READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

If there’s one company that is the bane of advertisers, TiVo would be it. Their “timeshifting” devices (i.e. DVRs) have enabled consumers not only to watch TV later, but to skip commercials and get to what they really want to watch. And while most consumers may not own a TiVo, they can get a similar DVR through their cable/satellite provider. As it would turn out, TiVo is also interested in how people skip commercials and keeps track of stuff like that. They decided to compare last years smartphone companies ads, pitting Research in Motions’s BlackBerry line against Palm (Apple’s not just a smartphone company, so despite their excellent commercials they don’t count here).

What’s interesting is that despite the fact that BlackBerry ads were both more plentiful and better positioned in a block of ads (first being better), Palm’s ads were skipped over less often. Palm’s ads that were in the “first pod position” were actually skipped 20% less than similarly-placed BlackBerry ads. Palm’s ads also were skipped less overall in households with incomes over $150,000.

The ads that Palm ran were also notably shorter than RIM’s, with 97% of the Palm ads running for just 15 seconds. The shorter ads logged 30% less fast-forwarding than 30-second ads. On the flipside, 26% of BlackBerry ads ran for a full minute, and those only suffered 4% more skipping than the 30-second versions.

Most of those Palm ads were creepy lady commercials, so it’s hard to say whether people were fascinated by the product or by the commercials themselves. Either way, it has a tiny part of us wondering if maybe we burned the witch too soon, so to speak.

With Palm’s new ad campaign under way and the devices soon to spread to other US networks, it should be interesting to see this comparison again next year.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

A heavyweight in the mobile advertising arena has thrown their resources behind webOS: AdMob. The firm, which was recently acquired by Google, has targeted mobile advertising for several years, particularly on websites designed for mobile phones and on smartphone OS apps. AdMob has enjoyed tremendous success with their iPhone ads SDK program and likewise with their Android ads push.

Today, AdMob announced their new open source ads SDK for webOS. The SDK supports both CPC text ads and CPM banner ads and is published under the MIT license (i.e. open source and free use). AdMob worked with several webOS developers, including Twee-maker Delicious Morsel and game-builder Byte Sequencing. With AdMob’s ads SDK now freely available, we wouldn’t be surprised to see more ad-supported free webOS apps in the future.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>