Palm to close all retail locations but one, for real

If our solemn word wasn't enough to convince you of trouble in retail-ville for Palm, take this news as empirical. According to the smartphone-maker, it is officially shuttering all of its retail locations but one over the next five weeks. Originally, we thought that the airport locations would steer clear of the axe, but news today is that 34 stores total -- 26 airport-based and eight branded stores -- will be saying adios before long. Sure, this news doesn't sound real hot, but Palm claims they want to cut costs and focus on its next-gen phones, which is what we've been asking them to do all along... so maybe this is a blessing in disguise?

[(Unverified) Posted Jan 26th 2008 1:31PM]

has anyone actually been in a palm store?

[(Unverified) Posted Jan 26th 2008 1:46PM]

Yes, the one at JFK and it was convenient as they were the only ones selling a SDIO Wifi card which I needed for overseas (gadget stores in NYC don't carry them anymore).

Either way, this is great news as this is exactly what Palm should be doing. And when will Engadget stop patting itself on the back for the open letter nonsense? Yikes.

[(Unverified) Posted Jan 26th 2008 3:52PM]

Yeah, I worked at one. :-P

There were hardly any customers though.

[(Unverified) Posted Jan 27th 2008 5:14PM]

Palm is doing all they can to put the totality of their resources into developing next generation phones. From people I know in Palm, the previous layoffs and the store closings were done in order to clean house of people who were not relevant to developing their new products. With the money available to them from these cuts they are now free to try and get more developers to work on their new products.

The new OS is extremely simple to develop for but at this point it sounds as if all Palm legacy apps will not work. I expect it to feature heavy use of Wi-fi and internet connectivity including VoIP and possibly mobile media access.

[(Unverified) Posted Jan 30th 2008 1:19AM]

Never understood the airport store concept anyway. I could see if you lost your stylus on the plane or something and needed to pick up a replacement, but it seems unlikely that people would shop for multi-hundred-dollar devices while hurrying to their plane. Didn't seem like a casual/impulse buy kind of product.

Plus, if airport premium pricing applied to Palm stores as it does to other airport stores, you'd think most people in the target segment would know they could order it online for cheaper and would bypass the stores.

Seems like maybe visibility to the business crowd might have been the best benefit of those stores (Hey! Hey! We're not dead! Promise!). They should have sold coffee.