Ed Hansberry
01-25-2008, 12:00 PM
<a href="http://www.news.com/8301-13579_3-9857696-37.html?tag=newsmap">http://www.news.com/8301-13579_3-9857696-37.html?tag=newsmap</a><br /><br /><i>"Thursday brought news that the company's 34 stores--eight Palm-branded locations and 26 stores that were inside Airport Wireless outposts--will have to go by the end of the current quarter. "We continue to focus our company around core business initiatives and are consolidating more resources behind fewer programs in order to compete most effectively and build world-class, category-defining mobile solutions. We have therefore made the decision to close our retail stores," the company said in a statement regarding the retail move."</i><br /><br />Palm started opening these stores a few years ago when Palm had a varied product line including the TX handheld, LifeDrive, and several flavors of the Treo smartphone. They even opened <i>three</i> stores within Boston's Logan International Airport. Now, Palm has settled on the Treo line, largely abandoning the standalone, or as Microsoft likes to call it, the "Classic" PDA in favor of phone enabled devices. In the US, selling those phones is mostly done through the carriers themselves.