Palm
Centro

At the height of the craze for messaging phones and at the peak of BlackBerry's success, the $99 Palm Centro was one of the first low-cost smartphones in the US, where Nokia's Symbian devices had never really taken off. Selling more than two million devices by mid-2008, it was considered a success and staunched Palm's bleeding for a while.  But its appeal was limited by Palm's ongoing software crisis: the Centro ran a surprisingly still-buggy version of a five-year-old OS, Palm OS 5. In 2002, Palm had spun off its software division into a subsidiary, PalmSource, with the idea that it would widely license the OS to various consumer PDA and smartphone markers. PalmSource swerved, veered and failed, first releasing a Palm OS 6.0 that Palm deemed not ready for consumers, and then getting caught up in a series of purchases and mergers which resulted in no consumer-ready new software by 2008. Palm instead began work on its next-generation operating system, WebOS. The Centro kept Palm's market-share warm while the new WebOS devices were in production. Apple's iPhone had built consumer interest in smartphones, but it was expensive and only available on the AT&T mobile network in the US. The Centro was cheap, the old OS was fast and it had many messaging options. But the Centro had a low profit margin, and it couldn't make up for declining sales of Palm’s business-focused Treo line. WebOS, which powered the Palm Pre and Pre 2, could have revived Palm's fortunes if it had succeeded, but sadly it did not.  Some of this content was sourced with permission from PC Mag UK