After being delayed for a month, the Palm Treo Pro smartphone will be available to Sprint customers on March 15. But the announcement has been 
overshadowed by a grim preliminary results announcement for the fiscal third-quarter of 2009 and hype surrounding the yet-to-be-released Palm Pre.
Palm is expecting reduced revenues for the quarter as a result of the Treo delay, reduced demand for Palm’s maturing legacy smartphone products and the current economic climate. But analysts from GC Research think that Palm’s new webOS, which will premier on the Pre, is all that matters.
“Our research indicates the platform is better architected – as far as developers are concerned – than Windows, Symbian/Series 60 or BlackBerry. We believe that the platform will provide much higher performance than generally believed, and that Web developers will find it extremely easy to develop or translate their code to webOS. We believe based on technical considerations that the webOS developer community will grow quickly, turning Palm into a major contender in the smartphone space.”
The Pre is receiving favorable reviews from almost everyone except for Apple, which last month engaged in a war of words over ownership of technologies used in the iPhone and other touch-screen devices.
Sprint is still not elaborating on its planned release of the Pre in the first half of 2009.
Palm will report its fiscal third-quarter results on March 19.