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Palm Closes Its Retail Stores For GoodOnly the store from the Palm headquarters will remain open |
By Florin Troaca, Communications News Editor
29th of January 2008, 14:24 GMT
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Palm Inc. has officially confirmed that it is closing all its retails stores and all its 26 Airport Wireless stores across the US, in order to cut costs and concentrate on its future handset line-up and
its future Linux-based OS. Only the store from the company's headquarters, in Sunnyvale, California, will remain open.
The American company has some big problems, although in the Fall of 2007 it released the Palm Centro smartphone that should have brought great profits. Despite the fact that Centro has become a popular Palm smartphone, things are not really how the manufacturer wanted them to be, and this is clearly reflected by the future closing of its retail stores (not to mention the cancellation of Palm Foleo, a smartphone that was close to being released but never made it to the market and never will).
Palm's sales are currently affected by BlackBerry and Apple, who, in the last year, conquered an important market share that belonged to Palm, by offering constantly improved and modernized handsets (well, not in Apple's case, as the iPhone brought great design and functionality from the beginning). Palm, on the other hand, was often criticized for recycling its older models without bringing important improvements. Another aspect far from being positive for the Californian producer is that its Palm Treo 600 and 650 models sometimes experience serious problems, so the company decided to offer refunds to clients who have defect devices.
A funny aspect related to Palm's stores and their closing is that, after the news came out, many people said, via different sites or forums, that they didn't even know Palm had retail stores. And I don't mean people who have just discovered the Internet this morning, but users who own Palm devices. This tells a lot about how profitable the stores are, so it's definitely a good thing that the company decided to close them.
By focusing only on developing its future products, there are high chances that Palm will bring devices with much more than we expect in terms of features, functionality or design. So, after all, the stores' closing will hopefully lead to good things for both consumers and the company.
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