Palm?has confirmed Wall Street's worse?fears?and posted results for its last quarter that are half what analysts predicted.

"Our recent underperformance has been very disappointing, but the potential for Palm remains strong", said Jon Rubinstein, Palm chairman and chief executive officer on the back of poor sales of the Palm Pre?and?Palm Pixi?phones.

Although the company shipped a total of 960,000 smartphone units during the quarter to stores around the world, it only managed to sell 408,000 units to customers, down 29% from the second quarter of fiscal year 2010 and down 15% year-over-year.

"The work we're doing to improve sales is having an impact, we're making great progress on future products, and we're looking forward to upcoming launches with new carrier partners", said Rubinstein.

But the positive outlook from the CEO hasn't been enough to calm stockholders. Shares have plunged a further 14% on the back of the earnings report. The drop in value means that Palm stock is worth half what it was at the beginning of the year.

Perhaps admitting defeat chief executive Jon Rubinstein said on a conference call with analysts that "Our recent underperformance has been extremely disappointing to me personally".

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Tags: Phones Mobile phones Biz Results Palm

Palm screams Mayday as stock takes a dive originally appeared on http://www.pocket-lint.com on Thu, 18 Mar 2010 23:05:21 +0000

Nokia's recently announced financial results for the last quarter of 2009 show that the Finnish phone maker is clawing its way back in to the market.

With net sales up, Nokia saw a 38% growth in smartphone shipments over the past year, selling over 20 million smartphones in the fourth quarter, which compares to 15 million the year before.

This sees Nokia with an estimated mobile device market share of 39% in Q4 2009, up from an estimated 37% in Q4 2008 and 38% in Q3 2009.

"We grew our market share in smartphones in the fourth quarter, driven by the successful launch of new touch and QWERTY models", said Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, Nokia CEO, in a statement.

"Our performance in smartphones, combined with continuing success in the emerging markets, helped us increase sales in our Devices & Services unit, both quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year".

As far as the next year goes, Kallasvuo was not letting anything slip about future handsets, but instead said Nokia was focusing on "user experience" with the recent Ovi Maps news used as an example.

"Our focus remains firmly on execution, especially around user experience. Here I want to highlight our move to shake up the navigation market with free walk and drive navigation on our smartphones, a good example of how we are leveraging our assets to bring real benefits to consumers".

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Tags: Phones Mobile phone industry Nokia Results Biz

Nokia fights back with growth in market share originally appeared on http://www.pocket-lint.com on Fri, 29 Jan 2010 10:03:22 +0000

Microsoft's second quarter financial results have revealed just how many copies of Windows 7 the software giant has shifted since it went on sale in October 2009.

While announcing record revenue, sales figures of 60 million Windows 7 licenses from Microsoft make it the fastest selling operating system ever.

With revenue up 14% compared to the same period the year before, the success is being credited to the launch of the new OS: "Exceptional demand for Windows 7 led to the positive top-line growth for the company", Peter Klein, chief financial officer at Microsoft said.

"This is a record quarter for Windows units", added Kevin Turner, chief operating officer at Microsoft. "We are thrilled by the consumer reception to Windows 7 and by business enthusiasm to adopt Windows 7".

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Tags: Software Windows 7 Microsoft Statistics Operating Systems Results Biz

Microsoft reveals 60 million Windows 7 sales originally appeared on http://www.pocket-lint.com on Fri, 29 Jan 2010 09:30:15 +0000

While companies across the globe struggled in 2009, that didn't seem to be a problem faced by?Google?based on its latest quarterly earnings report released on Thursday.

According to the latest numbers to come out of the "Googleplex" not only did the company increase its year on year Q4 results by 17% to revenues of $6.67 billion in the fourth quarter of 2009, but managed to bring in over half of that cash (53%) from international rather than US sales.

Of that $6.82bn, Google-owned sites like YouTube, Gmail, and its search engine generated revenues of $4.42 billion, or 66% of total revenues, in the fourth quarter of 2009, while third party Adsense partners, such as websites like Pocket-lint who run Google ads, bought in a further 31% of total revenues.

Google hasn't broken out which sites earned what amount, so it is still impossible to say whether the money is coming all from the company's cash cow - the search engine, or whether services like YouTube are finally starting to justify their $1.6bn cost.

What do all these numbers mean? Put simply, that the company now has a cash horde of $24.5 billion in the bank ready to spend. Shame then that shares were down by $5 on the news.

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Tags: Software Biz Google Results Search engines Statistics

Google says what recession, Q4 09 revenue up originally appeared on http://www.pocket-lint.com on Thu, 21 Jan 2010 23:22:47 +0000