A little PALM entertainment.

by Kris_Tuttle on March 9, 2009

Palm is keep­ing things inter­est­ing.  For starters they have filed an offer­ing to resell a chunk of what Ele­va­tion Part­ners put in just a lit­tle while ago.  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.  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.  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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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 webOSâ„¢ 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.  In fact they are bold enough that any­one would rec­og­nize it to be show­man­ship rather than seri­ous com­men­tary.  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.]

Tagged as: Palm

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