Palm Centro at 2 Million

Palm this morning revealed that its budget Centro smartphone has cracked two million sales since it became available in the fall of 2007. The figure suggested an increased pace and comes less than four months after the company reached the one million mark at the end of March. The phone was helped by a launch on Verizon in the US and other world carriers over the spring but has also been given a last-minute boost by a price drop to $70 through AT&T, discounting the already inexpensive $100 device.

Centro sales are significantly behind those of its frequently Apple-made challenger, which sold six million of the original iPhone in one year and one million iPhone 3G units just on its opening weekend.

Despite the sales gap, Palm claims a greater influence on the mobile web than its fellow California smartphone maker, claiming the unusual metric of AdMob mobile advertising data which sees the Centro as the seventh most influential phone for ad requests worldwide and the sixth in the US. By contrast, the iPhone is 17th for ads internationally and 12th in its home country.

The Centro's web use is helped in part by its presence on Sprint and Verizon, which have had faster 3G cellular Internet access on their CDMA-based Centros since launch where iPhones until July have been limited to slower, 2G EDGE access and Wi-Fi. This bottleneck has been described as curbing demand for the iPhone outside of the US, as the markets Europe and other countries often resist premium phones that don't offer 3G data.

By Electronista Staff