SUNNYVALE, Calif., Mar 20, 2008 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Palm, Inc. (Nasdaq:PALM) today reported that total revenue in the third quarter of fiscal year 2008, ended Feb. 29, was $312.1 million. Driven by strong demand for the Palm(R) Centro(TM), smartphone sell-through for the quarter reached a company record high, totaling 833,000 units, up 13 percent year over year. Smartphone revenue was $275.4 million.

"Centro is off to the strongest start of any smartphone in Palm's history," said Ed Colligan, Palm president and chief executive officer. "Centro's fun design, great price point and amazing array of easy-to-use features is expanding Palm's customer base with more than 70 percent of Centro buyers trading up from traditional cell phones."

Net loss applicable to common shareholders for the quarter was $31.5 million, or $(0.30) per diluted share. Net loss included stock-based compensation expense of $6.2 million, amortization of intangible assets of $1.0 million, restructuring charges of $12.3 million and accretion of series B convertible preferred stock of $2.4 million. This compares to net income for the third quarter of fiscal year 2007 of $11.8 million, or $0.11 per diluted share.

Net loss applicable to common shareholders in the third fiscal quarter, measured on a non-GAAP(1) basis, totaled $17.0 million, or $(0.16) per diluted share, excluding stock-based compensation expense, amortization of intangible assets, restructuring charges and accretion of series B convertible preferred stock and adjusting the related income tax provision to 26 percent. This compares to non-GAAP net income in the third quarter of fiscal year 2007 of $16.5 million, or $0.16 per diluted share, which excluded the effects of stock-based compensation, amortization of intangible assets, an in-process research and development charge and adjusting the income tax provision to 40 percent.

Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, or EBITDA, totaled negative $28.4 million. EBITDA, adjusted to add back stock-based compensation, other non-operating expense and restructuring charges, or Adjusted EBITDA, totaled negative $9.5 million.

During the second quarter of fiscal year 2008, Palm reclassified its auction rate securities, which are currently illiquid to non-current assets that are shown on its condensed consolidated balance sheet below as $74.7 million at the end of the third quarter of fiscal year 2008. Palm is in the process of completing an impairment analysis and expects to record an impairment charge that will be made available in Palm's quarterly report on Form 10-Q.

INVESTOR'S NOTE: The company will hold a conference call today at 1:30 p.m. Pacific/4:30 p.m. Eastern to discuss matters covered in this news release. Investors and other interested parties are encouraged to listen to the call by logging on to the conference call webcast prior to the start of the conference call at Palm's Investor Relations website http://investor.palm.com. Participants will be able to simultaneously view the presentation slides during the call.

Investors wishing to listen to the conference call via telephone may dial 866.314.5232 (domestic) and 617.213.8052 (international). There is no passcode required for the call.

A telephone replay of the conference call will be available through March 30, 2008. The dial-in number for the replay will be 888.286.8010 (domestic) and 617.801.6888 (international), passcode 88825488. An archive of the audio and visual portion of the conference call will be posted on Palm's Investor Relations website at http://investor.palm.com.

An audio replay and text transcript of the conference call also can be accessed at the same URL beginning today at approximately 5 p.m. Pacific.

Buy a Car Charger and International Travel Charger Kit for Asus EEE PC and receive an Airline adaptor for the Asus EEE PC worth £7.45 FREE.

To take advantage of this offer, please add following links into shopping cart.

>> Car Charger
>> International Travel Charger Kit

Offer ends Midnight(GMT) Monday 24th March. Limited to first 25 customers only.

HAPPY EASTER.

KEELE, Staffordshire, UK & Seattle, WA, USA - March 19th, 2008 Astraware(R) and PopCap Games(R) are very excited to announce a major update to PopCap's best-selling, flagship game, Bejeweled(R) 2.

In version 1.30, Bejeweled 2 adds much-requested support for 240x240 square screen Windows Mobile(R) devices such as Palm(R) TreoTM smartphones and includes support for 320x320 Windows Mobile Professional and Classic devices such as Samsung's SGH-i780 smartphone.

This update also sees the very first release on Windows Mobile(R) Standard devices. Bejeweled 2, version 1.30, supports 240x320 and 320x240 resolution non-touchscreen devices including the HTC S710, HTC StrTrk, Samsung Blackjack & Blackjack II, and Motorola Q and Q9.

The game has been brought fully up-to-date on Astraware's current games framework and controls have been optimized for play with either 5-way or stylus. Bejeweled 2 is recognised by both public and media as the must-have puzzle game for your Palm OS(R) or Windows Mobile(R) device, and this update supports an even wider range of devices than ever before!

Bejeweled 2, version 1.30, is a completely FREE update for registered users. Players who haven't yet experienced this award-winning classic can purchase a copy, priced $19.95, from the Astraware website: http://www.astraware.com/bejeweled2.

Garmin Mobile XT is priced competitively at around £50 for the full version and boasts compatibility with many mobile platforms, alongside some impressive features such as ‘PeerPoints’, ‘Traffic’ and ‘Weather’ reports. All of this sounds great, but does it do the job as well as the competition? Let’s find out-

My first task was to get it off the included microSD card and install it on my 4GB card. I managed it by copying all of the files to my desktop, copying them back to my 4GB card and then inserting the original card back in. You need the original card to do the first installation, but after that it will run from your own card, albeit with a warning every time you launch it. After installation I lost almost 10MB of internal memory on my Centro so it is not exactly memory efficient, especially when you consider that TomTom Navigator takes almost no internal memory.

On the first launch there was very little to set up and it was rather painless, although it does take a long time to launch each time. Be prepared for at least an 8 second wait each time you start it up. After start up though, it does plod along at a good rate and seems to be more efficient on the Centro than TomTom Navigator is.

My first task was to set it up and see how well it coped with re-routing and complex roundabouts and this was a positive experience initially. A window popped up advising that a traffic problem had been spotted before I set off and that a new route was available. This gave me reassurance and I duly opted for the new route. I then discovered that the traffic system will look for problems ‘before’ you set off, but not during the trip! Now, I don’t want to be negative, but what is the point of a system that is so limited as to not offer real time traffic management? If I was driving up to Scotland which takes about 7 hours, it is highly unlikely that there would be no problems during this trip. Because of this, I have to write off the traffic feature and have to question this wording from Garmin- “Receive real-time traffic information from traffic.com about traffic tie-ups and road construction that lie ahead on your route and navigate around congestion.”

Now, I may well be wrong about the traffic service, because some more information has come to light suggesting that it does indeed provide real time traffic information. If this is the case, why did I get stuck in an hour tailback with the so called traffic service enabled? I picked up my TyTN II and TomTom Traffic advised to avoid the route...

So far, I am struggling with the traffic service and do find the interface and options available to be slightly limiting compared to the likes of CoPilot and TomTom. I am going to persevere with Garmin Mobile and will finalise the review next week.

Available from www.clove.co.uk for £49.98.

Easter SameGame is the SameGame Game, but with Easter Eggs. Not impressed? No, thought not...

SameGame is a highly addictive puzzle strategy game. The goal is to remove all eggs from the field. This is done by clicking on an egg, however it must touch at least one other egg of the same color. The more eggs of the same color touch, the more points you get. Also, there are bonus points for clearing a screen.

The program is quite straightforward to use. Tapping on any of the element boxes in the Periodic Table will bring up a dialog showing a list of physical/chemical properties.

In the Options menu, you can choose to display either element symbols or atomic numbers in the table. You can also select a subset of the elements for display (Transition Metals, Halogens, Noble Gases, etc).

Only half of the Periodic Table can be viewed at a time. To switch between the two sections, click on the left or right arrow buttons.

NB: To download files, please use right click mouse on the zip file and select 'Save Target As' option."

For many years video games have been all about the hard core player.

These people, typically young men, have the time, budget and patience to spend hours crafting an empire or honing their skills on a first-person shooter. But that focus is shifting dramatically thanks to a very simple game that involves creating rows of matching jewels.

When it first appeared in 2001 the game was known as Diamond Mine but is best known as Bejeweled.

Since then creator Popcap has sold more than 10 million copies of Bejeweled and the game has been downloaded more than 150 million times. More at BBCi.

The Nokia N82 Camera Comparison article over at Symbian in Motion highlights just how good some camera phones really are these days- "After my initial post on the Nokia N82 it has been a while since my promised update and my comparison of the camera capabilities of the N82 versus the N95. Apologies as I have been very busy with a few matters. I’m sure you’ve all read and have been keeping update with the crazy Stavros and his mission to create the greatest art ever. Now have you asked yourselves why he is doing it using the Nokia N82? I mean why not the N95? It also has a 5 Mega Pixel camera and as most of his journey is during daylight, the Xenon flash will not be factor. So why the N82? Is it a Nokia PR stunt? Yes, it would seem at face value, it is to promote the N82’s capabilities and good reason to.

You have to realise on paper yes the only difference between the N95’s and the N82’s camera is the flash, but in reality and looking into it in more detail there some other differences between the handsets that make the N82 ideal and on the whole a lot better than the N95. For one the GPS seems to lock on a lot quicker than the N95, the camera is quicker to respond and adjust to light and the scene quicker than the N95, in lowlight the N95 obviously doesn’t compare against the N95, but there are also other issues to consider when taking a picture; colour, saturation, white balance and exposure all these are not mentioned anywhere in the specs sheets. Hence this is why I always insist on hand testing a device before making judgement on it, obviously there are handsets which are just plainly not good enough and don’t deserve the time, but when comparing fine details like these it is essential. So the N82 does all these things better than the N95 but you wouldn’t know about it unless someone told you or you found out by trialling the devices themselves."

Today's free eBook is Alistair Baffle's Emporium of Wonders by Mike Resnick- "Gold and Silver—that’s us. We’ve been a team since major league baseball ended at the Mississippi River and the flag only had forty-eight stars. (Looked a lot nicer back then. More regular, sort of, with six rows of eight—or maybe it was eight rows of six. I suppose it depends on whether you were standing or lying down.) Between us we’ve outlived three wives (one of them his, two of them mine) and two kids (both his), we’ve stayed friends for more than three-quarters of a century (seventy-eight years to be exact), and we’ve been living together at the Hector McPherson Retirement Home since . . . well, since we couldn’t live on our own anymore.

He’s Gold—Maury Gold. Me, I’m Nate Silver. I think it was Silverstein until my grandfather changed it back when Teddy Roosevelt was still president. Maury’s dad changed his right after World War I, from Goldberg or Goldman or Gold-something-else. Makes no difference what they used to be. We’re Gold and Silver now.

We met seventy-eight years ago, like I said. We’ve always lived in Chicago. It was pretty safe when we were kids. The cops had cleaned up Al Capone and his friends, and the place wasn’t crawling with junkies and panhandlers yet, so we were each allowed to take the subway down to the Loop by ourselves, me from Rogers Park on the North Side, Maury from South Shore a couple of miles beyond the University of Chicago, which was overflowing with geniuses and Communists—frequently the same people—back in those days.

One of the things I loved to do was go to the Palmer House, the ritziest hotel in town. The guest rooms started on the third or fourth floor, but the ground floor and the mezzanine were filled with shops that carried the most fascinating things: clocks that glowed in the dark, pianos that played by themselves, clothes and jewels imported from exotic-sounding places like Constantinople and Hong Kong and Bombay."