DELAYED MOBILE Linux OS firm Palm has started trumpeting the sale of over two million of its affordable, entry-level and Palm OS based Centro smartphones. It says it reached the seventh position in a world-wide traffic index compiled by mobile advertising firm Admob.

The latest Mobile Metrics index shows that Motorola has not been having bright days, losing hits in every category of Admob's adverts platform. It also shows that Apple's MessIahPhone showed a 32 per cent increase month/month in hits and that Palm's Centro is the firm's secret sauce in the war to capture market share: "Palm continued its strong growth and now represents 2.0 per cent of requests worldwide. The Palm Centro is now the number six device in the US, capturing 3.3 per cent of impressions."

The Centro has proved attractive particularly for newcomers to the "smart phone" concept due to its small size and attractive form factor and the availability of a wide range of colours, although sadly not in every country. In addition to the original red, blue, black, and white versions offered by US and European carriers, Palm also introduced a pink version earlier this year.

Continuing with the colours craze, earlier this month AT&T released a new light blue colour version, and Infoworld also reports this week about the release of the Palm Centro in the "Onyx Black" colour in India, in addition to the white one.

However, if you look at the Admob numbers in detail you can't help noticing how sad it is for one of the inventors of the "smartphone" to be seen having half the traffic numbers of relative newcomers like LG. Yet, on the upside, you can see Palm with two per cent of worldwide requests, compared to just 1.4 per cent for Apple's much hyped Iphone.

If you like seeing pie charts and lots of columns with percentage numbers, find the Admob report in PDF format over here. These positive popularity and sales numbers come at a time when the company needs a boost in morale as it's conquering market share with its aggressive pricing at the expense of income: Palm lost $43 million during 4Q of FY2008.

While the world+dog awaits the firm's Linux-based mobile OS, code-named " Nova" and which is taking forever to be developed, the good old Palm OS has proved that simplicity beats version numbers and feature bloat. µ

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