Palm has a history of, shall we say, making poor decisions. Hardware components… launch partners… the Foleo. We had hoped all that would change when HP acquired the struggling company earlier this year, but it looks like it’s going to take longer than we had hoped for the stars to align over Sunnyvale, CA. Exhibit A: the Palm Pre 2. The Pre was a good start for Palm but there were tons of problems with it. The Pre 2 addresses some of those problems — the occasional sluggishness, the cheap plastic screen — but many of the usability issues remain. The display is too small, the keypad is cramped, and so on.
If new rumors surrounding the upcoming Palm Mansion turn out to be true, we have our exhibit B. Self-professed rumor monger Go Rumors cites a “close source” in claiming that an upcoming Palm smartphone, likely the Palm Mansion, will feature a 5-inch touchscreen when it launches in three months. The Dell Streak is a nifty little gadget, but we wouldn’t exactly say it birthed a successful new range of ridiculously oversized smartphones / ridiculously undersized tablets. In fact, we’d say the opposite is probably true. We’re hoping Go Rumors ran with some bad intel but the unfortunate truth is that we would hardly be surprised if a 5-inch webOS phone launched some time in February.
