Palm Inc, fighting Apple Inc in the smartphone market, cut the price of its Pre device by US$50 and announced plans to release a cheaper touch-screen device this year.
The Pre, which Sprint Nextel Corp began offering in June, will now sell for US$149.99, Sunnyvale, California-based Palm said in a statement yesterday.
The new phone, called the Pixi, is thinner than the Pre and includes applications for social-networking sites Facebook Inc and LinkedIn Corp.
“One of the design goals was to make it more compact, more customizable and also more affordable,” Katie Mitic, a Palm senior vice president, said in an interview on Tuesday.
The price of the phone, sold exclusively by Sprint, will be announced at a later date, she said.
Palm is counting on phones powered by its WebOS operating system to bolster sales and return the company to profitability after two years of losses.
Analysts said the company would report a fiscal first-quarter net loss of US$87 million next week, a Bloomberg survey showed. Chief financial officer Doug Jeffries said last month that Palm expects to be cash-flow positive by the second half of next year.
Like Apple and Research In Motion Ltd in Waterloo, Ontario, Palm is allowing outside developers to create programs for its devices and share the revenue from downloads. Palm said last month that it would allow others to sell applications for the Pre starting this month.
The back cover of the Pixi is one of its customizable features. Users can choose the standard black or pick from five designs, the company said. The Pixi, Palm’s second WebOS phone, is longer than the Pre because the keys are fixed below the screen, while the Pre’s keyboard slides out from underneath.
Sprint announced on Tuesday that it was offering a US$100 service credit to new subscribers for the Pre, before pulling the promotion later in the day because of an error, spokesman Mark Elliott said in an e-mail.
The Pre was still priced at US$199.99 when the offer was announced.
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