Is Palm Putting Itself Up For Sale?
After persistent rumors that several suitors might be interested in the ailing Palm (NSDQ: PALM), now Bloomberg is reporting that the company has put itself up for sale and is seeking bids as early as this week.
According to three people familiar with the situation, Bloomberg said the company has hired Goldman Sachs and Frank Quattrone
From Carl Howe at SeekingAlpha …
In front of a standing-room-only crowd that clapped and cheered with every light-hearted dig at AT&T, Verizon, the iPhone and the Droid, Sprint CEO Dan Hesse unveiled the new HTC Evo. The hardware specs are impressive: 1 GHz Snapdragon processor, robust 4.3 inch touchscreen, 8-megapixel camera (plus a second 1.3-megapixel camera on the front of the phone), 1GB of built-in memory and 512MB of RAM, and full Flash support support. Sprint also demoed a number of new applications designed to leverage the phone’s Android 2.1 platform, including a cool visual search app called Google Goggles (say that five times fast) – just take a picture of a book cover or a famous building, and Google Goggles will return search results, really fast.
But that’s because real story here is the device’s 4G capability. A town like Las Vegas screams out for gambling analogies, and it’s clear where Sprint is putting all its chips: on the speed and “wow” factor of 4G. After talking about WiMax for years, Sprint can now actually demonstrate its capabilities to consumers. The demos from Kevin Packingham and Fared Adib of Sprint did a good job showing how 4G is a game-changer for certain functions, especially web-browsing, video streaming (the Evo even has an HDMI-out jack, so you can stream content to your HD TV), and as a mobile hotspot, capable of providing network access to up to eight WiFi devices simultaneously.
Words, frankly, don’t do it justice.
Sprint’s handsets are on par with either AT&T or Verizon. That will soon change. It’s got a huge lead in 4G on both of these competitors (Where does AT&T or Verizon have 4G?) and is rolling out a phone this summer that rides on both its 4G and 3G networks. Palm is in the rearview miror at Sprint. It introduced the Palm Pre and only later, after many found it to be a great phone, did Verizon begin to carry it. By that time, no one wanted it, since phone models get old quicker than computer models.