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Due to the arcane machinations of the financial world, what should have been bad for Palm appears to actually have been good. Palm presented their numbers for the fiscal 4th quarter and even though they took heavy losses, however they weren’t nearly as heavy as they were expected to be. Why was that so important? Well, because just a  week after that quarter ended, the Pre was released, and it appears that even the expectation of that new device began to foreshadow improvement of Palm’s fortunes.

In fact that foreshadowing, along with the upbeat earnings call delivered by new Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein, was strong enough to cause a 16 percent (and still rising) jump in Palm stock prices in just a day.

In his comments, Rubinstein stressed that the Palm Pre had far exceeded sales expectations though he declined to give any numbers as of yet and was riding high on customer satisfaction. He said that the buzz had also caused an increase in sales of the Treo Pro. This may be due to the fact that Sprint sales reps have been wisely instructed to push both the Pre and Treo to new customers brought in by the hype, positioning the Pre as an iPhone-esque consumer handheld and the Treo Pro as a smartphone powerhouse for business users.

For all the hopeful noises, Palm still has a long way to go and an awful lot of skeptics out there. Well aware of that fact, Rubinstein stressed the need for Palm to execute to make good on the strong entry of the Pre, saying…

My highest priority is execution. That means delivering world-class products and customer support. Operational excellence in our supply chain management. Strong carrier relationships. Great sales and marketing. Strong back-office functions….Palm already has a foundation in all of these areas. We’ve been in this business for years. We have long-established industry relationships and we’ve successfully brought mobile products to market for over a decade. This footing can create a real advantage.

His comments are not surprising as certain elements of the Pre rollout show that Palm’s old demon of poor execution is lingering. For example, the Mojo SDK has been delayed, there have been marketing and message missteps and there are already rumors of poor supply chains and stock shortages right around the corner. Those must be especially galling to Rubinstein, since you may remember his last employer was near legendary for it’s sharp and nearly prescient execution when releasing new products.

You know, a little company called Apple.

Zealot (469 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook

By day a department manager and writer for a major network device vendor...by night Zealot stalks the mean magnetic streets, striking fear into the hearts of bandwidth abusers and theme park mascots. Zealot has been involved with mobile devices for more than a decade now, starting off with dumb phones, moving to PDAs and then to smartphones, notebooks and netbooks with the odd PMP thrown in. Most of his mobile time currently is spent on a Treo Pro, Zune HD, Thinkpad T61, Gigabyte M912M or a Hackintoshed Compaq Mini 704. He proudly groks the Geek community and considers himself a Neo Maxi Zune Dweebie (thanks Will Wheaton!).