Roberta Cozza

The reduced revenue guidance for Palm's current business year, announced Thursday, is suggesting to industry observers that the company will either have to make major alterations to its business plan or find a buyer. The slower-than-expected consumer adoption of the company's products -- which pushed Palm's annual projections well below its earlier forecast of $1.6 billion to $1.8 billion -- was no big surprise to industry observers.

Palm said Thursday it expects revenues will fall well below the company's previously forecast range of $1.6 billion to $1.8 billion for the current business year. The smartphone maker attributed the anticipated decline to slower than expected consumer adoption of the company's products, which has led to lower order volumes from carriers as well as the deferral of future orders to later periods.

Gartner said Tuesday that Apple succeeded in capturing market share from Nokia and other smartphone producers last year. The iPhone OS held 14.4 percent of the worldwide market at the end of 2009 -- sharply up from Apple's 8.2 percent share in the prior year -- enabling Apple to slip by Microsoft and become the world's third-largest smartphone vendor, the research firm said.

Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo told investors Tuesday that the world's number-one handset maker remains committed to the open-source Symbian and Maemo operating systems as the main platforms for smartphones, advanced handsets, and web tablets. Among other things, Kallasvuo said Nokia intends to drive user-experience improvements in 2010 by taking the Symbian user interface to a new level.

Verizon Wireless has begun shipping Research In Motion's new Blackberry Storm2 handset. Verizon is offering the new smartphone, which incorporates improved touchscreen technology, at a post-rebate price of $179.99 for customers signing up for a two-year service contract.

RIM's latest BlackBerry sports a QWERTY-style keypad, a 3.2-megapixel camera with camcorder capabilities, built-in Wi-Fi, 2GB of onboard media storage, and 256MB of flash memory. What's more, the Storm2 ships with a 16GB SD memory card.

Global mobile handset sales fell 9.4 percent year on year to 269.1 million units in the first quarter, even as smartphone sales rose 12.7 percent to 36.4 million units, according to Gartner.

Overall, the mobile-device market recorded its biggest quarter-to-quarter contraction since the research firm began monitoring the market on a quarterly basis in 2001, said Gartner Research Director Carolina Milanesi. "This was also the first time the market contracted year over year during the first quarter, a period traditionally helped by strong seasonality in the Asia/Pacific market," she said.

Rolling back prices is what Wal-Mart does best, but will the super retailer roll back prices for Apple's iPhone as part of its Operation Main Street promise to cut costs for Christmas?

Holiday shopping for hot items at a bargain price took on a new form this week as rumors flew on the Web about a 4GB iPhone to be available at Wal-Mart for $99. That phone was initially to be rolled out at a $399 price tag.

The NPD Group, a market-research firm, reports that 30 percent of the U.S. consumers who purchased Apple's iPhone 3G from its release on July 11 through August switched mobile carriers in order to join AT&T, which holds exclusive U.S. sales rights for the red-hot device.

About half of AT&T's new iPhone 3G customers elected to switch from Verizon Wireless, while 24 percent came from T-Mobile defections, and 19 percent abandoned Sprint, noted Ross Rubin, director of industry analysis for NPD.

According to Gartner, smartphone unit sales in the second quarter of 2008 rose 15.7 percent in comparison with the year-earlier period. However, the research firm noted that the subcategory's share of the cellular handset market remained flat at 11 percent.