From DailyTech

Palm reportedly has 1.5 million unsold Palm Pre and Pixi units. It has halted sales, a sign of the company's deep problems.  (Source: Palm via VentureBeat)
Bad news continues for veteran mobile device maker

Palm, maker of the Pre and Pixi smartphones, is facing desperate times.

American Banking News has reported that Palm's production halt continues as it is unable to sell the stockpile of webOS handsets it has built up.  There's no official word from Palm, but the announcement seems likely to be true as Palm stock plunged 30 percent to around $4 a share following the news.

Palm has a rich history and helped to launch the PDA and smartphone movements.  Lately, it has struggled to keep up with Apple iPhone and Research in Motion Blackberry smartphones.  And smartphones have largely killed the market for PDAs, so Palm can no longer seek refuge in that market.

In 2008, Palm saw the writing on the wall and made an ambitious bid to retake the market.  After much investment, it unveiled webOS, its new smartphone operating system.  In June 2009, the Palm Pre launched on Sprint, America's third largest wireless carrier.  

Commentary on the smartphone and its OS was mixed, but overall was somewhat positive.  The interface was much like the iPhone, but it lacked the iPhone's extensive app library and used slower interpreted code for apps (as opposed to native code).  Perks, though, included multitasking and a physical keyboard.

Since the launch of the Pre, Palm has done its best to beef up its offerings, releasing the cheaper Palm Pixi handset and the Palm Pre Plus on Verizon, the nation's largest network (Sprint was the first to get the Pixi).  It also released a new software development kit that allowed native application code via the Simple Direct MediaLayer.  The results were impressive -- Palm devs were able to quickly port both Doom and Quake to the phone, a feat impossible with interpreted code.   [More...] [Comments...]