Wednesday News Roundup – Ares and Palm Financial Results
Welcome to the Holiday edition of the Wednesday News Roundup. This week we’ll cover Palm’s financials from their most recent quarter. After that we’ll cover the new beta release of Palm’s Ares, a web-app to create webOS applications. Then we’ll sneak a few presents under the tree with our usual roundup of news tidbits. Let’s roll.
Palm’s 2nd Quarter 2010 Financial Results
Last Thursday Palm announced their most recent quarter’s financial results. Analysts weren’t too happy with the results, with the stock falling 13% after the news (It was trading at $10.83 at the close of the market today). That afternoon they held a conference call with investors. Among the news from the results and the conference call were:
- Revenue of $78.1 million.
- Gross profit of $5.5 million, gross margin of 7.0%
- 783,000 smartphones shipped
- $590.0 million in cash and cash equivalents
- webOS 1.3.5 would be coming soon
- webOS 1.3.5 would bring improved performance, more app storage, improved battery life and more speed for the Pixi
- More carriers will be carrying the Pre and Pixi
For more in-depth coverage of the conference call check out this PreCentral article.
Ares Moves to Beta
Last week we mentioned rumors of Palm’s new browser-based application development tool called Ares. Now, Palm has opened up a public beta of Ares. Among the features Ares boasts are:
- Browser-based editor built on Bespin technology
- Rapid UI development with drag-and-drop widgets
- Integration with native SDK for deployment to attached devices and emulators
- In-browser simulator
- Integrated debugging
- Source-control integration
We’ll have our own tutorial and introduction to Ares later but if you’re interested in getting started you’ll first need to become a registered developer then head over to the Ares site. There’s a tutorial there to get you started. We’re very excited to see this new technology as it brings app development to an even broader audience. Go check it out.
Roundup
For those of you looking for more information about what happens in the App Catalog I encourage you to go check out what our friends over at webOS School have cooked up: the webOS App Catalog Viewer. This web-app lets you browse apps, check out approximate download numbers, see graphs of download patterns and view approximate revenues. While this information may be mostly useful to developers it may be interesting to end-users to see how the app distribution process is working. For those who use Google Latitude check out this PreCentral article on viewing a Latitude-integrated version of Google Maps on the Pre (as if you needed Google knowing more information about you!). Merry Christmas, happy Hanukkah and a joyous holiday to all out there.
