Palm’s current sales woes are widely known and are universally cited as the reason the company went shopping for suitors back in February.  HP is obviously looking to remedy that issue through normal vectors such as increasing carrier sell-through and the like, but it’s looking like the tech giant is going to leverage its oft-mentioned scale and broaden distribution through a couple of channels with high potential in areas where the company has a lot of influence, namely through its PartnerOne partner solutions group and its Enterprise Solutions group.

For a sense of that scale, HP currently has a $54 billion Enterprise Business, the channel relationships of which include network service providers, ISVs, system integrators and business advisory firms;  all of which will be overseen by a former high-level Sprint and Salesforce.com executive.  Palm devices are an easy sell to these groups, according to Stephen DiFranco who manages the Solution Partners Organization: "One of our competitors in the phone business does a good job selling devices in corporate environments. But they’re not coming from a channel world. Now you have a company from the channel to have a device that has a smart enough OS to shut down if the device is lost or stolen. Now you can start to go out to customers with that."

Source: ChannelWeb; Thanks to Workerb33 for the tip!

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As we heard yesterday, Palm is running a new promotion:  (nearly) all webOS apps are now half-off – a quick perusal of the App Catalog shows all sorts of $0.50 apps and even 3D PDK Games are half-off. By our rough accounting, developers get double benefits from this promotion: increased sales and their share of the revenue will be treated as though their apps were full price.

In other words, if you’ve been waiting to purchase an app, now is the time. Get some great apps on the cheap and send some love to your favorite webOS developers.

What apps are you going to pick up?

Thanks to coolguyslim for the heads up!

Update: Palm lets us know that the "Half Time" promo ends on July 9th and that there are "a handful of exceptions" – so we’ll add an "Almost" proviso to the title. Proviso #2: US only, folks, sorry citizens of the world. Lastly, developers should be pleased to hear that for the purposes of the Hot Apps program, these sales will be counted at full price, per Palm’s dev forum - developers see the full FAQ here.

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As was noted by our sister site, Android Central, the launch sale numbers for the HTC Evo 4G on Sprint were not quite the record they were originally supposed to have been. While Sprint first announced that "the total number of HTC EVO 4G devices sold on launch day was three times the number of Samsung Instinct and Palm Pre devices sold over their first three days on the market combined," today’s correction describes launch day sales as "in line" with [THE FIRST THREE DAYS COMBINED] of the Instinct and Pre. Still quite respectable, to be sure, but not [ENTIRELY] the blowout first thought.

Perhaps Sprint might want to look into some of the many calculator applications available in the App Catalog and as homebrew for webOS, to help it better figure sales for its next big seller (which we certainly hope will be a new webOS device).

[NOTE: EDITED TO MORE ACCURATELY SUMMARIZE SPRINT STATEMENT]

Source: AndroidCentral

Thanks to everybody that sent this in!

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As you all know, the Palm Pixi has been out since November 15th for $99.99 after the regular discounts and rebates, and a two year agreement, of course. But that doesn’t mean that you cannot find a better deal on the web, or on the biggest retailer in the US.

Yes, you are not dreaming, if [...]

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Wondering when the new app catalog is coming? An anonymous tipster sends word: September 24th is definitely the date to watch, just as we suspected when we first published the images.

On that day, we should be able to purchase apps from the Catalog directly, after submitting credit card info to Palm. We’re all sorts of pleased about this: assuming Palm is able to meet their deadline, they will be coming through on the "September" launch date we’d heard earlier. We’re also all sorts of pleased that we can give our Credit Card info to Palm directly, which pretty much means that they kept the carriers out of the App Catalog process, as it should be.

We also reported last night during the Live PalmCast (after a tip from Kense in the chatroom) that we’re currently expecting webOS 1.2 to hit sometime next week.

Our fingers are crossed for both rumors to be true. They’re crossed again that DocsToGo with full document editing will be a go on the 24th. All these crossed fingers are making it hard to do gestures on the Pre.

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According to research firm Gartner global mobile phone sales declined six percent in Q2 2009. While handset sales as a whole were on the decline, sales of smartphones grew an impressive 27%.

One of the notable launches during the quarter was of the Palm Pre. The Pre created lots of buzz, but according to Gartner, the [...]

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Citi, a major financial services company based in New York City, have just issued a note on the Palm Pre regarding their estimates on first year sales. They seem very confident in the product, boasting they believe Palm will sell 1.5 million Pre’s within the first 12 months of the device being available.
It is also [...]

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