Palm Reportedly Places Company Up for Sale

[MacRumors]

Bloomberg reports that Palm has placed itself up for sale, working with several partners to find a buyer for the struggling company.

The company is working with Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Frank Quattrone's Qatalyst Partners to find a buyer, said the people, who declined to be identified because a sale hasn't been announced. Taiwan's HTC Corp. and China's Lenovo Group Ltd. have looked at the company and may make offers, said the people.

Palm's stock, which had seen its target price cut to as low as zero by some analysts in recent weeks after poor financial performance, received a boost late last week on rumors of a buyout.

Palm and Apple have been sharing frosty relations in recent years, as Palm has attempted to recruit a number of former Apple executives and employees to ride the company's new webOS back to prominence. The company's launch model, the Palm Pre, was met, however, with veiled threats from Apple Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook over its swiping and pinching multi-touch gestures. The two companies further sparred over iTunes media syncing for the Pre, with the companies engaging in a software game of cat-and-mouse and filing complaints to regulatory bodies over the issue.

Article Link: Palm Reportedly Places Company Up for Sale

 

[MorphingDragon]

So will HTC or Apple or Google buy Palm?

 

[igazza]

So will HTC or Apple or Google buy Palm?

google

 

[cyantist]

Death by iPhone.. Good riddance..

 

[Kwill]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone : Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7E18 Safari/528.16)

The history of Palm will be studied in business classes for years. Even the best talent could not save it.

 

[Goona]

I remember when people on this site when shoving this phone down people's throat as an iphone killer for months, damn how time flies by.

 

[Truffy]

Kinda sad really

Competition is good for all of us. Not that I would've bought another Palm. Unfortunately, it appears that everyone else had the same idea.

 

[ranReloaded]

Goldman sucks

 

[ImperialForces]

So Apple killed Palm... That's amazing.

 

[dgree03]

Better hope HTC doesnt buy them, because is they do... Sj butthole is gonna be so tight, he can crack a walnut!

 

[dgree03]

So Apple killed Palm... That's amazing.

Since apple is the ONLY mobile phone company in the USA

 

[NebulaClash]

Consolidation is inevitable. The market will center around iPhones, Android and RIM, with secondary market share for the new Win 7 phones from Microsoft. There just isn't room for Palm, let alone Symbian and others to take a huge chunk of market share.

RIM will fade slowly until it becomes enterprise only. Win 7 will never amount to much just as the Zune never did. Eventually the big pieces of the pie will be owned by Apple and Google.

The only reason to buy Palm is to get their patents.

 

[Samuriajackon]

Competition is good for all of us. Not that I would've bought another Palm. Unfortunately, it appears that everyone else had the same idea.

So far as I know Palm has been hanging in there since about 2002. Nothing they've done since the Tungsten T series has been remarkable or ahead of it's time. I had a Palm m130 with a keyboard and wirelesss 802.11b adapter, it was the ****. Rest in Piece Palm people.

 

[chris7777]

Palm was one of those companies that had it all in the "palm" of their hand, several times. And each and every time they had something, they went off on the safe route and ditch the good idea, in favor of things like pixie, that really do make one just shrug their shoulders in bewilderment and disbelief.

 

[troop231]

Lol posted this last night wow

 

[DrMaturin]

I remember commercials for the Palm Pre that were shown again and again during the remake of The Prisoner a little while ago. They featured a very strange looking actress and were downright disturbing to watch . Just awful marketing. Those commercials probably reduced demand for the Pre.

 

[*LTD*]

I think it was obvious that the Pre was buyout bait from day one. MDN called it a year ago and despite all the high-faluting talk about Palm's dog and pony show MDN kept at it.

Done and done.

 

[troop231]

Their innovation with the Touchstone inductive charger may have been the best thing lol

 

[Andronicus]

I'll buy it.

 

[rwilliams]

Death by iPhone.. Good riddance..

I have never understood this attitude. Why do people root for companies to fail? What a negative time we live in.

 

[DeSnousa]

Bye Palm, you were loved but now forgotten. I loved my Palm when I had one, however they have nothing on modern smartphones, although the Pre did look decent.

 

[MorphingDragon]

I have never understood this attitude. Why do people root for companies to fail? What a negative time we live in.

Why do people want the other sports team to loose in a sports game?

Same principle, Apple vs Palm on the rugby field, and Apple is a mixture between NZ All Blacks and an some Aussie Rules team.

 

[ten-oak-druid]

We had one palm device - a Tungsten T.

If you didn't use it for a while, simply recharging it was not enough. You had to resync it as all of the information was lost. I thought this was a defective palm device but apparently that was normal. I found this to be very annoying and the device has been a real dust collector.

I would would hope that newer palm devices have a better system like the ipods where the data is stored on flash memory or hard drive.

 

[rwilliams]

I have never understood this attitude. Why do people root for companies to fail? What a negative time we live in.

Why do people want the other sports team to loose in a sports game?

Same principle, Apple vs Palm on the rugby field, and Apple is a mixture between NZ All Blacks and an some Aussie Rules team.

No, it's not the same principle. I may root for an opponent to lose a particular game, but I'm not rooting for their franchise to fold. Big difference. Just as I may hope that the iPhone, EVO, etc. does better than the Pre, but I wouldn't wish for Palm to get to the point of needing to be sold. People's livelihoods are greatly affected whenever something like this happens. It's about more than just the gadgets.

 

[Stella]

Sad. Palm have been quite innovative.

I'm sure the buyers will keep Palm going in some fashion.