Palm is keeping things interesting. Â For starters they have filed an offering to resell a chunk of what Elevation Partners put in just a little while ago. Â It will help the company raise some cash and start to clean up the capitalization of the company a bit.
The funny part is that Roger McNamee was recently on Bloomberg making all kinds of incendiary statements. Â Since the offering is being done the company had to respond with a filing as a free writing prospectus and at the same time had to withdraw some of the more outlandish comments. Â Rather than print the whole interview and the whole filing we will just quote the last few “Clarifications and Corrections” from the filing and let readers fill in the rest:
- With respect to the statements in the tenth paragraph of the transcript that the Palm Pre is “going to be a million times – well, not a million times – several times faster†than Apple, Inc.’s iPhone products and is “going to run rings around them on the web,†the Palm Pre is still under development and it is premature to state the speed at which the device accesses the web or the relative speed of the Palm Pre compared to the smartphone products of competitors.
- With respect to the statements in the twelfth paragraph of the transcript that “there are aspects of the Pre that are unlike any phone you’ve every seen before,†“the Pre is the first one that is the next generation†and “the result is it does a lot of things the others guys don’t do,†the Palm Pre is designed to be the first phone based on the Palm webOS™ platform and as a result will have different operating characteristics and features than other phones, however; the Palm Pre is still under development and it is premature to compare its full functionality with that of other phones.
- The statements in the fourteenth paragraph of the transcript regarding the relative development and stability of Sprint’s, Verizon’s and AT&T’s 3G networks are generalizations regarding wireless cellular network performance that may or may not be true depending on a variety of factors specific to geographic regions.
- The statement in the second paragraph of the article that “not one†person who bought an Apple, Inc. iPhone on the first shipment date “will still be using an iPhone a month†after the two-year anniversary of that day is an exaggerated prediction of consumer behavior pattern and is withdrawn.
- With respect to the statements in the second to last paragraph of the article that “the underlying technology for Research In Motion Ltd.’s BlackBerry is about 13 years old, while the technology behind the iPhone goes back almost nine years,†estimating one specific age for the many technology components underlying any mobile phone is inherently imprecise and these statements are withdrawn.
- With respect to the implications in the second to last and last paragraphs of the article that Palm’s new operating system will give it an edge over competitors that “are going to run out of gas way before†Palm, estimations of the relative useful lifespan of smartphone operating systems are conjecture, unverifiable at this time, and age is not necessarily predictive of their relative long-term success.
We think it’s too bad these statements had to be addressed. Â In fact they are bold enough that anyone would recognize it to be showmanship rather than serious commentary. Â Anyway the Palm situation and the launch of the Pre will be an interesting show to watch in the next few months.
[Research 2.0 has no position in PALM stock at the time of this writing.]
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