Todays & Tomorrows Technology

Palm have announced their Q4 and full-year 2009 financial results [pdf link], covering the period up to the end of May 29th. Palm chairman and CEO Jon Rubinstein revealed full-year revenues of $735.9m and gross profit of $159.8m; he went on to describe the launch of the Palm Pre and webOS shortly after the period finished as when the company “officially reentered the race”. That’s good news, because while smartphone shipments in Q4 rose 6-percent from Q3, year-over-year decline for the quarter was a huge 62-percent.
In Q4 2009, then, Palm report total revenues of $86.8m, with gross profit of $20.1m and a gross margin of 23.1-percent. That amounts to a net loss to common shareholders of $105m, or $0.78 per diluted common share; that’s more than twice the net loss in fiscal-year 2008.

Rubinstein remained positive, however, suggesting that the Pre was a “major milestone in Palm’s transformation” and pointing to “a large group of developers waiting to build great applications for Palm webOS”. He also tipped “a new product pipeline” which is presumed to include the Palm Eos, also based on webOS.

Palm’s “webOS Reset Doctor”, the tool intended to be used to reflash broken or bricked Palm Pre handsets, has leaked, and with it the full webOS ROM. Intended only for internal use, the ROM has already been cracked over in the PreCentral forums, and it’s throwing up not only some interesting tidbits about Palm’s intentions for the Pre but about the rumored Eos second device said to be launching later this year.

Mention has been found in the code of both “castle”, assumed to be the Pre’s internal codename, and “pixie”, which has previously been tipped as the codename for the Eos. Palm have never hidden the fact that the Pre is to be the first device of many to use webOS, but the presence of “pixie” in this first-gen code does seem to suggest that the handset is set to arrive sooner rather than later.

Elsewhere in the ROM, icons for MSN and AOL have been unearthed, together with a Java Virtual Machine. There are also plenty of comments left by webOS’ developers, including the somewhat worrying “# what the hell does this do?”

It was arguably the unofficial developer community that accelerated the original iPhone to success: while Apple were attempting to corral programmers into creating simple webapps, those with access to the hacked (aka jailbroken) core of the iPhone could use the same functionality that Apple’s own apps did. Might this be the turning point for the Pre, too?