Palm Reportedly Officially Seeking Buyer

Though Palm easily could have decided to sell themselves, I don't see the reasoning behind anyone buying them at more than a couple bucks and believe THAT part of the latest rumor is just made-up crap to pump the price.

Note that Palm's BoD decided back in late 2006 that the best future for Palm was for it to be sold, so that same decision now isn't a surprise except to those who don't follow Palm.

I personally think Palm's going to remain independent for the immediate future (ie between now and the next 3-4 months). The suitors are going to wait for the price to drop a bit more. I'm most curious to see what (if any) new hardware Palm has waiting in the wings. In my opinion, Palm management already EXPECTED to be bought out sometime in the past year and they have nothing tangible on deck to replace the Pre & Pixi (the c40 rumors have so far been fruitless) other than perhaps 16/32gb models once (if?) the current inventory glut is resolved. It's possible the AT&T-branded devices may be the final new releases of any sort to ever come out of Palm.

And I'm starting to doubt that there's a long-term WebOS 2.0 strategy as well. I think they have another 6 months' worth of minor improvements to WebOS 1.x and then that's it. In short, Palm management has quietly been looking for a good deal for Elevation to get a nice ROI ever since CES '09. So if someone buys Palm now, they could kinda/sorta keep things status quo...no more new WebOS handhelds, sell off the existing stock, crank out 1.x updates for the next 6-12 months, then EOL WebOS as a standalone OS and gradually migrate everyone over to Android-based devices (with a WebOS-flavored, Sense-style UI overlay of course). Lenovo would likely keep the Palm branding around for a while like they did a gradual rebranding and assimilated the old IBM lines: "IBM" Thinkpads were around for a couple years until gradually replaced by "Lenovo" Thinkpads, for example. Or the "new" Palm ownership could sell off the remnants of WebOS to Access for pennies on the dollar. Wouldn't that be grand?!?
Pilot 1000->Pilot 5000->PalmPilot Pro->IIIe->Vx->m505->T|T->T|T2->T|C->T|T3->T|T5->Zodiac 2->TX->Verizon Treo 700P->Verizon Treo 755p->Verizon Moto Droid + Verizon Palm Centro

Like they say if you can't afford the car don't kick the tires. It is one strategy to make Palm appear valueless and scare off investors so the price comes down. The way i see it is if you can afford Palm then you want to buy its true value. Though some always want to buy low to sell high. So why not keep Palms value at it's true price and if it cost too much then build ones own product to compete with Palm.

China is no longer a developing nation though that has been their status. It is misleading to call a developing nation a country in need of capital when they are out purchasing advanced technology building up their military and not investing in their infrastructure as agreed.

It seems odd that a democracy would help a totalitarian capitalist dictatorship with a history of human rights violations buy our intellectual content below it's value.

Just some thoughts.

E-T
e-tellurian

Completing the e-com circle with a people driven we-com solution
WiFi & BT? No strings attached
we_tellurian@canada.com

Perhaps this has not been about keeping a North American brand but to sell and make a profit.
Right. Unless it is a charity, it is about making a profit.

It is sad that North America can no longer afford a pioneer such as Palm. Not only does the brand leave North America so too does all the North American intellectual content
Huh? Who said it would leave North America? A lot of companies in NA are owned by foreign entities. Even if Palm did leave, so what? We still have Apple, Microsoft, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Facebook, RIM, Evernote, Twitter, Google, et. al. I'd say everyone I just mentioned has FAR more innovation in their pinky than Palm does and those are all North American companies.

If this is true i hope all make money while the rest look for another job. Personally i do not know anything about China so my bounds are with in North America. Let's hope their is work for those that live in North America too. Though the war in the desert has really sucked up our cash flow. Good to know that will end in 2011.
I don't even know where to begin on this one. It is so far out of bounds I am not sure it even qualifies as a non sequitur. There is a fine line between non sequitur and totally irrelevant. I am pretty sure you crossed it at about 100mph.

That it, the valuation is as useless as it is silly.

However, the original words by PatentVest included ones along the line of (paraphrase):

== "...Patents are valued by number of licenses but Palm doesn't have any
== of those so we'll just go with patents cited by others patents instead this
== time..."

BoDs are REQUIRED to think about shareholders.

And apparently they've been on the block for months already.

I haven't played with a WebOS device since prior to the 1.4 update but I cannot imagine it makes THAT much of a difference speed wise. Watching the videos online of some of those overclocked Pre shows that is what it takes to approximate the peformance we saw at CES (albeit at the expense of the already miserable battery life!)

Just because they said the demo units at CES were clocked at 600Mhz doesn't mean at all that's what they were actually running at. And if they were stock clocks, then a lot of other "stuff" must've been stripped out to ensure that they had blazing-fast performance.
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Newsflash: Palm has been trying to sell itself for YEARS. They haven't been able to find any takers because the Board priced the company at over 2 billion. So far Palm has opened the kimono to at least 4 major players who have then walked away. Palm would have been sold in 2007, 2008 or 2009 were it not for the manipulations and unfettered greed that have defined its existence.

"Oh, China has a lot of companies who will Believe just as ACCESS Believed."

The Chinese aren't fools. They didn't take over half of the West's economy by being patsies. Unfortunately, the trailer trash buying cartloads of "Made in China" junk with their welfare checks are just too dimwitted to realize that China's government-sponsored forays into the "free" market are the reason why Bubba-Joe and Becky-Sue no longer have jobs.

"FJH;
Funny you mention that. After the Pre's retail release last year, when I was SO underwhelmed with its performance, I went back and dug through all of the footage I took at CES as well as some other videos floating around online. There's simply no comparison between the snappy performance between those Alpha/Beta Pre shows an CES '09 and what is was on an actual shipping Pre. Palm must've juiced those suckers up to at least 700Mhz and, presumably, had no telephony stack in place to slow down system processes.

I haven't played with a WebOS device since prior to the 1.4 update but I cannot imagine it makes THAT much of a difference speed wise. Watching the videos online of some of those overclocked Pre shows that is what it takes to approximate the peformance we saw at CES (albeit at the expense of the already miserable battery life!)

Just because they said the demo units at CES were clocked at 600Mhz doesn't mean at all that's what they were actually running at. And if they were stock clocks, then a lot of other "stuff" must've been stripped out to ensure that they had blazing-fast performance."

No offense, hkklife, but you got "played" by Palm at the Pre intro. Look back at the event and you'll see how you got caught up in the carefully-contrived "excitement" that the Palm ringmasters had created for the "Greatest Vaporware Demo on Earth". Not a single person in attendance at the demos did a little investigative journalism to see the truth behind the curtain. Do you remember how someone hacked into a Foleo during Palm's demo in San Francisco a few years ago and exposed its feeble processor speed, etc? Surely at least ONE person at the Pre demo could have rooted the phone or run a few Linux commands on it. Give a pro a Pre for 60 seconds and get a real "review" instead of the dozens of gushing stock price pumping fanboi/fluffer pom-pom "reviews" that we saw after the Pre demo. Skillman's lucky none of my power user buddies in SF were invited to the demo - they would have stopped his ultra-rehearsed, over-scripted demo, exposed the alpha nature of Web OS and made him piss his pants. Seriously.

FJH

Aside from the space wasted by the gesture area, the missing microSDHC slot, and the wacky build quality (all easily fixable), I don't think the Pre's a bad formfactor at all for a mid-tier smartphone with a physical keyboard. And the Pixi is also a solid design that just sorely needs a few similar upgrades.

It's just that Palm's combination of a poor marketing moves + a buggy, half-baked OS + major cost-cutting on the hardware undermined what would otherwise be two solid devices. If Palm could continue to flesh out the Pre & formfactors (as they did in the T|T & T|E series) both could eventually become very nice low & midrange devices by the 3rd generation. It's a shame Palm cannot fund a three-model lineup with an Evo or Droid-style flagship handset.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_(finance)

E-T
e-tellurian

Completing the e-com circle with a people driven we-com solution
WiFi & BT? No strings attached
we_tellurian@canada.com