Palm, Inc. today announced that the Palm Pre Plus and Palm Pixi Plus phones will be available in Germany on both o2 and Vodafone on April 28.

"Following the success of the Palm Pre in Germany, we are excited to bring Pre Plus and Pixi Plus to the market for both o2 and Vodafone customers," said Jon Rubinstein, Palm chairman and chief executive officer. "With the choice of these two new Palm webOS phones, customers across Germany can stay connected so they never miss a thing."

Palm, Inc. will be featured as a special presenter at MDB Capital Group's Bright Lights Conference on May 11, 2010 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. Bright Lights will feature more than 40 of the "Best and Brightest" IP leaders identified by MDB's PatentVest IP intelligence platform as possessing technology leadership and potentially disruptive innovation. Palm's Software CTO, Mitch Allen, will share his insights on Palm's IP leadership and path of innovation where he has worked for the past decade. Mr. Allen has led the development of Palm webOS from conception to implementation.

Pete Conley, Managing Director of MDB Capital, will also present his analysis of Palm's IP portfolio and the value of its technology pipeline, using MDB Capital's proprietary PatentVest IP intelligence platform. "Palm's IP is ranked in the 99.5th percentile of over 4,000 companies rated by PatentVest," said Mr. Conley. "Based on PatentVest's comparative valuation analysis, we believe the value of Palm's IP alone is worth between $8 -$9 per share."

Bloomberg is out with a widely referenced report this morning that states that Palm is seeking bids for the company as early as this week. The report claims that Palm has hired Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Frank Quattrone's Qatalyst Partners to find a buyer according to the source. Last week's rumored suitors Taiwan's HTC and China based Lenovo have reportedly already looked and are potentially interested. Texas based Dell Inc is said to have already looked at Palm, but passed on a deal.

Naturally Palm, HTC and Lenovo have denied commenting on the latest developments so far. The article goes on to mention that other large Chinese phone companies, Huawei Technologies Co. and ZTE Corp., might also be potential suitors. Clearly something is in the air given the intensity of recent stock swings and the perpetual M&A rumors. Just last week CEO Jon Rubinstein was out giving interviews talking up the Palm turnaround narrative, while continuing to defend Palm's performance under the current challenges.

Shares of Palm are leading the tech sector higher today, as it is up over 12% in early friday morning trading on very high volume. As was the case earlier this week, another round of buyout speculation is fueling the rise once again.

This time the chatty mouths on Wall street would have you believe that Taiwan based HTC is now interested in acquiring Palm Inc. According to MarketWatch an unnamed Chinese newspaper is said to be the source. The article has some humorous quotes from analysts over the recent round of M&A chatter. HTC is not commenting on the rumor and a US based HTC spokesperson is quoted by Reuters as saying "To the best of my knowledge this is just a rumor."

"Every day there is a different rumor about who is going to buy Palm," said Kevin Hunt of Hapoalim Securities on Friday. "I could make a list of eight companies who could buy it. But would they buy it for more than $1 billion? I just don't know."

As we reported in January, one of Access' remaining Palm OS Garnet licensees has indeed produced a rather compelling new piece of Palm OS Garnet hardware. New Zealand based Aceeca is preparing to release an interesting new "semi-ruggedized" Garnet handheld that slots in somewhere between a 2005 era Palm TX PDA and Aceeca's earlier industrial handhelds. Tam'sPalm has posted a new high-resolution image and preview of the upcoming device. According to the company's literature, the tentative release date mentioned in January is on track and the device is slated to arrive April 10th with an MSRP of $199.99.

Initial inspection of the promo photograph & spec sheet reveals a glossy white device dominated by a 320 x 480 pixel LED-backlit LCD display. A 400Mhz Samsung CPU provides the processing power, and the PDA32 will come equipped with 64mb of RAM alongside 128mb of NVFS storage and a SD expansion slot. It will measure in at 128x76x25mm (5 x 3 x 1 inches) and weighs 196g (6.9 ounces), which would put it somewhere larger than a TX but leaner than a LifeDrive. The usual 5-way navigator directional pad is still present, albeit with individual buttons (likely more durable and easier to use while wearing gloves), while two shortcut buttons are provided instead of the classic four.

Fourtune's Brainstorm Tech blog has posted an interview with current Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein. The interview is an interesting read for webOS users and Palm history buffs alike. The interviewer pitches out a series of direct and to the point questions on Palm's current situation, issues and competition. Ruby provides some straightforward answers for change and is upfront about the challenges that lie ahead for Palm Inc.

F: Can you succeed being frugal when the competition is going pedal to the metal spending money and has the resources to do it?

JR: Necessity is the mother of invention, right? I mean, would I rather have a spare billion dollars to go spend on brand advertising around the world? Of course I would. But that's not the reality. So it may take us a while, but we will work our way through this, and we're continuing to invest very heavily in engineering on both webOS development and on new product development.

Shares of Palm Inc. stock gained 20% in trading yesterday on a rumor that China based Lenovo Group was interested in the company. The stock closed Wednesday up 77 cents to close at $4.62.

While Palm's stock is no stranger to M&A rumors and insider trading moves, this latest bit of wall street speculation was kicked into high gear by a mention by CNBC anchor Jon "option monster" Najarian. He remarked that the play would be a "very nice cheap shot for Lenovo" and in the same sentence mentions U2's Bono should just do the deal himself.

On the serious side, Lenovo made no official comment, however this MarketWatch article mentions that the Lenovo CEO has mentioned in recent interviews that the company is looking into making more acquisitions to build out their mobile Internet business.

Kinoma has updated their Kinoma Player EX for Palm OS devices. Kinoma Player is a popular multimedia player for the Palm Centro and Treo devices. It features excellent music and video playback capabilities as well as a built-in media guide for accessing tons of internet radio, podcasts, YouTube and many other streaming media sources. This update fixes YouTube support and is a free update for existing customers which can be obtained via the built in check for updates feature.

Kinoma Player 4 EX v.4.5.5 for Palm OS is available now for $24.99. A free trial period is included. The software is compatible with Palm OS 5 and higher.

comScore has released its U.S. Mobile subscriber market share report for February 2010. The report ranked the leading mobile original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and smartphone platforms in the U.S. according to their share of usage by current mobile subscribers age 13 and older, and reviewed the most popular activities and content accessed via the subscriber's primary mobile phone.

The February report found Motorola to be the top handset manufacturer overall with 22.3 percent market share, while RIM led among smartphone platforms with 42.1 percent market share. Palm meanwhile held to its ~5% position, down marginally from January.

From the better late than never department comes word that Palm has dumped its ad agency Modernista. The news comes from a article out now at AdAge.

Modernista was partially responsible for the universally derided series of creepy ads the debuted around the Palm Pre launch and continued to run after an enormous amount of mostly negative backlash. An interesting comment in the adage article from an apparent insider sheds some light on the possible reasons why the spots weren't pulled earlier.

Rumor: With little to go on other than the usually trustworthy "Ninja" reports the Boy Genius Report has posted an article referencing upcoming RIM and Motorola smartphones heading to Sprint. What makes the report so interesting is that amidst the flurry of new Blackberrry and Android releases, the mythical Palm "C40" has apparently popped up in the Sprint system yet again, signifying that Palm may be readying their first all-new device since last fall's Pixi.

With the stock price dropping and ominous rumors swirling, the time seems nigh for Palm to release a compelling new piece of hardware as its nears the one-year anniversary of the original Pre Sprint launch. If the Sprint internal inventory system proves correct, the long-rumored C40 stands to be the first new CDMA hardware from Palm since the Pre and Pixi Plus launched with Verizon in January. It is conceivable that Sprint may even be taking an uncharacteristic pass on the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus refreshes and heading straight for an entirely new form-factor device.