The Irrelevancy of Treo

Posted on April 21, 2005

Russ Beattie gives PalmOne a well-deserved smack today over sales of the Treo line:

PalmOne’s sold a million Treos (isn’t that quaint?) and to “celebrate” they’re giving away a free Treo every five minutes [yesterday]… It’d be great to have a Treo… so I could pull it out and mock it at meetings and other gatherings of mobile professionals. You see, the Treo 600 was launched in September 2003, so it’s taken them roughly 20 months to sell a million units, which works out to about 50,000 Treos sold a month. That’s pretty pathetic. Keep in mind there were roughly 675 million mobile phones sold last year worldwide, including 14.38 million Symbian phones (and 6.67m in 2003). Palm’s numbers aren’t just anemic compared to this, they’re statistically nonexistant.
It’s official: Palm (One/Source) is completely irrelevant in the mobile market.

Yup. I’ve written before on my problems with Palm’s strategy, and this is another example: keeping the Treo priced at the “executive toy” level kept it from ever developing any real market share. Classic Apple-circa-1988 thinking. Way to go fellas.

UPDATE (04/27/2005): Russ highlights some new numbers that point to slightly better performance from PalmOne than he originally anticipated. I still stand by my points, though; Palm is increasingly marginal as a platform.