Now that Palm is apparently up for sale there seems to be as many alleged reasons for its struggles as there are people serving them up. One of the most popular ones is that Palm should not have
Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein has expressed some regret that Palm couldn’t launch on Verizon earlier and vie for the kind of promotion that the Droid received. Even if Palm had had the Pre for only three months, though, it’s doubtful that Verizon Wireless would have jumped in with as much support after Sprint had the opportunity to debut Palm’s handsets, even with the “Plus” enhancements.
Sure, it would have been better to ride the twin horses of AT&T and Verizon to higher market share, but Sprint was the best deal Palm could get. It believed in Palm and the platform, and offered strong marketing support. Sprint is still the third largest U.S. carrier. Its 50 million customers were more than an ample base into which Palm products could be sold, and its 3G network generally has good coverage and very good speed.
The strongest argument against blaming Sprint for disappointing WebOS volume, though, is to contrast it against the launch of the T-Mobile G1, which launched on a carrier with fewer subscribers, lower ARPU, and (at the time) an embryonic 3G network, but which still managed to sell a million units in its first quarter of availability and set the stage for continued Android growth throughout 2009.