Three moles, who obviously don’t want to be identified, gave some juice information to Bloomberg today. They say that Palm is seeking bids for the company as early as this week, and that HTC and Lenovo may be snooping around. According to Adnaan Ahmad, an analyst with Berenberg Bank, Palm is burning about $80 million every 3 months, and may do that for the next 5 quarters due to intense competition from every end of the market.
Is a buy out the right thing to do? With a market cap of $870 million, it’s pretty cheap considering what you’re getting. Access to the American market, a strong brand, relationships with operators, several highly talented former Apple employees, an OS that many describe as the only OS that’s even close to competing with the iPhone today, and let’s not forget about patents. Palm is sitting on a boat load of them since they pretty much invented the handheld computing space in America, and the infamous Treo form factor was the first of its kind.
We’ve already heard this speculation on Friday, but now that it’s coming out of Bloomberg (sorry Murdoch, Market Watch doesn’t have the same prestige) I’m much more likely to believe it to be true.