Kaput: Palm’s relationship with Windows Mobile

Sprint’s all-new Palm Pre is just about the greatest thing to come out of Palm in quite some time. The compact QWERTY slider features a 3.2-megapixel camera, GPS, WiFi, finger-friendly interface, sleek styling and responsive capacitance-based touchscreen. That all adds up to one impressive smartphone – and it’s mostly thanks to the intuitive and fun webOS. Is it any wonder Palm wants to put all their resources into the webOS’s continued success? Palm CEO Paul Rubinstein himself declared today, during a financial results call, that Palm smartphones will no longer sport Windows Mobile. Going forward, all we’ll see from Palm is the webOS, stuffed into Palm smartphones the likes of the Palm Pre and the Palm Pixi.

Due to importance of webOS to our overall strategy, we’ve made the decision to dedicate all future development resources to the evolution of webOS. Which means that going forward, our roadmap will include only Palm webOS-based devices

The news comes on Palm’s fiscal Q1 2010 earnings report. Palm sold some 810,000 Palm Pre smartphones in the previous quarter. Given the Palm Pre’s US-only status, that’s not exactly a sales figure to laugh at. Still, the Palm Pre has yet to become the booming success that Palm needs to be, and expects revenues to drop in the coming quarters.

So, Palm’s going to be focusing all its R&D dollars into making the webOS as badass as possible. They’re still betting on webOS to bring Palm back to its past glory as a market leader. In fact, Rubinstein even hinted that the webOS might just get some serious enterprise support in the near future. That’s big, especially since Sprint wanted to distance the Palm Pre from business users. We might even see a webOS-powered Palm Treo coming back to give BlackBerry and Windows Mobile a challenging run for their money.

[Via: PreCentral]