Comments on: PalmSource Spins Out From Palm Inc

My question is more will they be acquired by some larger entity? They are a fairly small concern and very inexpensive for a large corporation who wants to become a player in the small device/smartphone field. Just my $0.02 US...

That number dates back to the earliest PalmOS devices manufactured, most of which are laying in landfills. The PDA sector is little more than a bug fart compared to other key markets, particularly the cell phone industry. 30 million devices sold in 7 years is hardly a vast field. That's only a little more than the projected number of Macintosh systems in circulation (isn't it 25 million?).

> and the smartphone market is on the verge of exploding.

That remains to be seen. So far the buying public has looked at Smartphones with disinterest. This "explosion" you refer to won't take place until prices fall dramatically, which won't be for quite some time. And PalmSource doesn't have the Smartphone market to itself either. They still have to go up against Symbian (which already has a strong presence in the market), and Microsoft (although I'm skeptical MS is going to get very far with their platform. We'll see.

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My blog: www.pocketfactory.com

-Palm sales will remain flat or down after this christmas and only will pick up again after OS 6.0 is released.

-treo 600 will fissle out after March. (seeing what Nokia, SE, motorola, and the rest of the boys are bringing out)

There won't be any 'exploding' to be had for any Palm devices.

http://www.proxyvote.com

Annual reports and proxy statements can be downloaded as .pdf files saving trees, postage, and time. Contact your broker to see how you can set this up -- not just for Palm, but for your other investments as well.

And yes, it's not the first time the proxy arrived a few days before the shareholders' meeting, essentially making it impossible to vote by mail (yeah, I know, I can use the internet, but it's also a matter of providing the information early enough so people can make an informed decision). Not sure, though, if the companies can be blamed for the delay; I get mine sent through my brokerage company.

Still, what I got in the mailbox last week was a 400+ page book explaining the merger. Are you saying this was a waste of money to write, print, and send out to shareholders, and that a one-page press release would have been sufficient? If so, I'd think you should argue that case with the SEC, not with me (I'd agree that there's room for improvement). I think that if they do go through the trouble of doing that, they should also ensure that it doesn't just end up unread in a recycling box just because it arrived too late (again, it might have very well been the fault of my brokerage house).

Well, many (not most) people also seemed to have thought that electing Bush for president was a no-brainer, and now see what you got ;-)

I really don't understand your logic. It's apparently required by law/regulation that sufficient information is provided to shareholders about certain transactions that substantially impact the structure of the corporation they own. This seems to make sense to me. Good corporate governance practices would then seem to imply that you actually make that information available to all shareholders in a timely fashion. As you said, they announced the merger intention and the spin-off intention months ago. So presumably they didn't have to send out the paperwork at the last minute?

As far as "whining" is concerned, if you got your paperwork in time and you took your time to read it and vote (assuming you are even a shareholder), good for you. I don't think, though, that it's reasonable of you to criticize others for asking what seems to be nothing more than their right as shareholders.

Yes, I could have voted on the web without reading the paperwork, and yes, I probably would have voted for the merger/spin-off. But there are typically other items on the ballot, too, like employee option plan changes or board of director elections (I don't recall if that was the case here, and I don't have the ballot handy to confirm). Do you suggest I should just rubber-stamp those items, too?

And what would you say if your absentee voter ballot and the election handbook came the day before the next presidential election?