Rumor: Nokia and Motorola prime candidates to buy Palm?
By Stefan Constantinescu on Monday, February 19th, 2007 at 11:31 PM PST In Financial/Corporate News
Shens. I smell complete and utter shenanigans.
Is Palm (NSDQ: PALM) up for sale? There’s been no official word from Ed Colligan and crew, but shares of the company jumped last week on speculation that they were quietly prepping themselves for acquisition. We’ve heard merger rumors before — there was some half-baked chatter back in the day that RIM was after ‘em — and it does seem like Palm is at a crossroads. The future of its two OS strategy is murky at best, and while the Treo has been doing fairly well here in the US, they’ve definitely had trouble getting traction abroad and have seemed flat-footed in the face of stiffening competition from HTC, Nokia (NYSE: NOK), Samsung, RIM, and Motorola (NYSE: MOT) (not to mention the looming threat of the iPhone, which threatens to peel off a good number of the prosumers and enthusiasts that were once Palm’s bread and butter). Of course, all this has us wondering who would actually plunk down $1.6 billion to buy Palm. Main candidates are said to include both Motorola and Nokia, but Moto already seems to be doing just fine with the Q, and to be honest, it’s hard to imagine Nokia snapping up a company that puts out phones running on Windows Mobile.Source: Engadget Mobile
I simply can not believe this.
S60 on a Treo with WiFi and WCDMA 850 would be quite … perfect.
$1.6 Billion for a totally washed up Palm is ridiculous… It’s worth $100 million at most.
Nokia shouldn’t go near Palm – it has so much baggage. They haven’t updated the Palm OS in years, so Palm fanboys will be expecting major OS updates from the new buyer – is there a reason Palm never produced such an update for almost 4 years?
If Nokia buy Palm, it will become a money pit due to the huge investment Nokia will need to make in order to refresh the Palm devices with modern software. It might be viable if Nokia can pick up Palm for nothing, but no way will Nokia see a return if they pony up $1.6 Billion! I doubt they’ll see much of a return on $100 million either.
Palm is also such a niche brand these days – big in the USA but non existant elsewhere. Nokia are a global firm, why would they be interested in a niche player? While the Nokia market has declined in the USA they can address that problem through their existing and future lines – they don’t need to gamble on Palm, a gamble which wouldn’t begin to pay off for at least 12 to 18 months if at all.
Seriously, the best thing for Palm is to let it fade into the sunset. It’s a technologically bankrupt company, and if I were a shareholder I’d be questioning the ethics of the board who have steared it down so many technological dead ends over the last few years.