Palm has had a pretty up-and-down ride of it all, making some kickass PDAs and Palm OS back in the ’90s, and now responsible for the not-all-bad Treo and Centro smartphones, and yet struggling to do well in an increasingly crowded marketplace.

Thanks to the evolving direction of RIM’s BlackBerry handsets, now firmly being targeted at consumers and not just business suits, and the user-generated furore surrounding the iPhone, Palm is losing market share.

Putting a brave face on things, a spokeswoman for the company said that this was merely a consolidation of resources in order to focus more effectively on future innovation and products. There’s a new Palm operating system planned for the end of the year (not much time left, chaps), and an unnamed device coming in early 2009…