Palm Inc. shares fell Wednesday afternoon amid chatter Verizon Wireless may drop its Pre Plus and Pixi Plus smartphones, sales of which have disappointed many on Wall Street.
The buzz started after Canaccord Adams analyst Peter Misek told his firm’s salesforce Verizon Wireless was “evaluating the potential for destocking,” industry jargon for dropping a product from the store shelves. Misek cited conversations with Verizon Wireless officials.

“We have relationships with certain people at Verizon, and they have been very, very disappointed with Palm sales,” he told Dow Jones Newswires.

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Wood TV has a review of the New Palm Pre Plus and Palm Pixi Plus. Here are the highlights:
These phones are magical. That’s right. With the push of a button your phone becomes a WiFi hotspot. The utility of being able to turn your phone into a WiFi hotspot is amazing.

No other phone has ever had this capability offered at retail. You can tether other phones to your laptop via a USB cable or Bluetooth, but the software on the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus turns your phone into a WiFi network.

I tested it out in the food court in the middle of one of the local malls. Where there was not other WiFi network present, I connected to the Pixi Plus’ network without a hitch and was able to check email and do some light browsing. I had two friends with me, who were also able to browse without an issue.

The App Catalog has grown. At the launch of the original Pre, there were just 30 apps. Fast forward to December of 2009 when I reviewed the Pixi, 774 apps were cataloged. As of this writing, there are now 1,516 apps. This number is likely to grow as Palm has released a more developer-friendly set of tools for writing apps. The 100,000+ apps of Apple’s App Store, and the tens of thousands of apps in Google’s Android Marketplace overshadow the small number in the App Catalog.

The screen sizes and resolutions are identical to the non-plussed counterparts. That means the Pre Plus sports a 480×320 resolution and the Pixi Plus has only a 400×320. From the original Pixi review: “At first glance, 80 pixels may not seem like that many, but it’s really noticeable. Cycle through to one of the images that shows the comparison of how much you’re losing on the Pixi compared to the Pre to see just what I’m talking about.”

The biggest news coming from Palm at CES is that it will be offering two new(ish) devices exclusively from Verizon Wireless. The Pre Plus and Pixi Plus bring new features to each device plus a cool mobile hotspot application.

Both of these revised devices will be available from Verizon Wireless on January 25. Pricing was not disclosed.

The Pre Plus differs from the original in that it has a redesigned exterior, improved navigation, two times the storage (16GB), and it will now ship with a Touchstone-compatible back cover.

The Pixi Plus now includes Wi-Fi, which was not previously available on the Sprint version.

Both devices will have a new application exclusive to Verizon which turns them into mobile hotspots. Similar to a Novatel MiFi, it uses Verizon’s 3G network to connect to the Internet. It will then allow up to five other devices to tether via Wi-Fi for Internet access.

Read the full story on InformationWeek.