TamsPalm – the Palm OS / web OS Blog

Even though Palm still has a fair bit of cash in the bank, its lack of carrier relations definitely hold the webOS back (especially in Europe and Asia). Ganging up with someone else thus would make perfect sense – and given the general intelligence Palm has exhibited recently, also sounds like a plan.

BloomBerg now claims the following:

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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.

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For the first time, Huawei and ZTE were named as potential buyers. This IMHO makes sense – Huawei insiders have told me frequently that their company wants to get into the cell phone business to augment its 3G dongles; yet they have not been able to achieve much here.

By purchasing Palm, Huawei would get a more than decent phone product – for comparatively little cash, that is…

Palm’s stock has been in for a wild ride in the past few weeks – this almost always puts the CEO under some kind of pressure to act. Jon Rubinstein always was extremely talkative – he now sat down with Fortune’s BrainstormTech journal to talk strategy.

Unfortunately, he hasn’t been able to refrain from Sprint bashing completely in the interview:

Was it a mistake to debut with Sprint in the first place?

Hindsight is always 20/20, but you have to understand that we had a long-term relationship with Sprint. Sprint wanted to do an aggressive launch on webOS. They were willing to invest significant marketing dollars. But the quid pro quo for that is that we had to do an exclusive with Sprint. Now, if I sit today and I kind of roll back the clock and go, okay, now if I could have launched in October with Verizon, and done a shorter exclusive with Sprint, and the world would be completely different today, yeah, I mean, that’s easy to say. But you don’t know these things at the time. And Sprint has been a really good partner for Palm. They continue to be a really good partner for Palm.

Either way: find out more at the URL below:
http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2010/04/08/palm-ceo-puts-his-cards-on-the-table/

Germany and France were among the first countries to get a stab at the Pre – it thus is only logical that Palm will continue by releasing GSM versions of the Pre and Pixi Plus there first. The last hours brought us a flurry of interesting leaks and statements:

French carrier SFR gets Pre Plus and Pixi Plus on 27th
The first part of the batch comes from a PR head of the carrier – he just tweeted the following:

Translated, it means as much as that the two devices will drop on the 27th of April.

German retailer 7mobile shows Pixi as “upcoming”
Secondly, the German retailer 7mobile just started to list the Pixi:

Unfortunately, their spec sheet is a bit confusing – but it nevertheless is a good start…

Palm’s initial launch campaign for the Pre was so-so – while visually pleasing, they have been met with open hatred by many members of the tech community.

According to advertising publication AdAge, Palm now draws the consequences…and kicked Modernista out. As usual in the ad business, insiders sound off in the comment section – the two most interesting ones are below:

Palm executives participated very actively in the infamous Palm ad campaign last year. Even Jeff Zwerner, Marketing SVP participated actively as a consultant during the campaign development phase. Sure, Modernista recommendations were not appropriate (and they deserve to be fired) but the Palm marketing executives did not push back when needed. Ultimately, the vision was provided by Palm and that was the first mistake. Palm execs including Zwerner were stupid and developed a brand campaign (inspired by Apple) that reflected a mature brand (like Apple). The failure of the campaign truly reflected the arrogance of the Palm execs who thought that Palm was already the new Apple. The campaign should have focused on functionality and not on weird, aspirational, subjective stuff – as in last year’s campaign. Let’s be clear – the problem with Palm was (is?)the arrogance of his executives – this was fully reflected in all their mistakes (advertising, POS training, etc, etc) – sadly, many of these executives still remain at Palm…

I’ll bet Modernista moved first on this. Their launch ads gave Palm its highest brand awareness numbers ever and pushed the stock to $18. The ads drove awareness; Sprint handled the functionality. But Palm got cold feet, abandoned a campaign that had quickly gone viral, and then sat back and watched its stock drop to $3. Swift. Word is that Palm stopped paying the agency when it ran out of money. Modernista has plenty of juice left, and I doubt it wanted a client that didn’t recognize good work and that didn’t pay.

As of now, nobody knows who will take over – stay tuned for further info as we get it!

We’ve already had our fair share of Palm C40 sightings in Sprint’s inventory – and it has just popped up again.

The Boy Genius reports the following:

…. Well, if you’re looking for a new BlackBerry 9650 or BlackBerry 8230, you might not have to wait too long as they’ve just showed up in Sprint’s order forms. In addition to those two devices making appearances, a Motorola device, the ES400 also shows up too, in addition to the previously seen Palm C40. …

As Palm has already stated its intent to drop Windows Mobile publicly, we are looking at a fluke or a new webOS device here…