UBS Downgrades Palm to Sell

That doesn't necessarily apply at all.

Just wait til ThinkEquity says "Strong Sell"; then come back and spin that one.

Giggle.

YEEEEESSSS!!!

This is about the best news I've heard from Palm in a long time. Wait for the "Strong Sell" recommendation by the ANALysts and then load the wagon. This brokerage house probably just got all of it's institutional investors outta this position and is ready to move em' back in when they get it to the bottom.

This stock recommendation business has to be one of the biggest scams on earth, in league with Al Gore and his Polar Bear Killing SUV routine.

Pat Horne

When/if Palm ever get around to launching something interesting and new, will anybody with any enthusiasm for Palm OS be left?

Palm's biggest hurdle is convincing the world that their products are not stuck in the middle of the previous decade. They're not, but that's the perception with the lack of innovation and trickle of lacklustre product tweaks.

I'm amazed that 'Elevation' haven't forced Palm into launching a TX2 in late 2007/early 2008 just to see them through till their Linux platform is ready.

And Access - where's handsets running your new OS?

Bad days behind us... bleak days ahead!

iPhone is play. Palm is work...

Successful people become successful using Palms...then they can afford it and play with iPhones or give iPhones away to their small employees, customers, the masses so to speak or people who they will keep the secret of their success away from. Hahaha. Cant have too many billionaires or geniuses out there or you will not sell enough iPhones!

Objective

Palm should've refreshed the E2 & Z22 in mid-2006 and the TX sometime that fall or early '07.

A TX2 *WOULD* have helped...had it come out with 12-18 months of the original TX. But now it's too late and even loading this thing up with the absolute best tech that Garnet can support (128mb RAM, 4gb internal flash drive, BT 1.2 etc) wouldn't be enough to sell it with the kind of margins Palm likes to have. Palm's let the developer community wither away to nearly nothing and all of their traditional PDA retail partners have dumped Palm or are about one quarter away from doing so. Even if they wanted to, Palm simply cannot execute. If the iPhone & the flurry of RIM news over the past 2 weeks hasn't made Palm look like a dead company walking, I don't know what will. And how will Palm respond to the surprising success of the Centro....more colors and a bunch of snazzy cases! IMO, they will do NOTHING before Q2 '09 to capitalize on the Centro's success, aside from possibly releasing the Wanda here in quad-band form as a "Centro W" or some such.

Of course, Palm has traditionally released decent handhelds that were simply a year (or more) later than the should've been.

The m500 line should've come out in 2000, not 2001. The Tungsten W would've been a superb device had it been released earlier and not overshadowed by the T|T. The TX basically is what the T5 should've been in 2004. And the Fooleo might've stood a chance had it been released in 2006 instead its planned September 2007 launch date.

But the Treo 700p was probably Palm's worst-ever moment. It hit the market at least 6 months later than it should have AND was horribly buggy when it did arrive. Palm let 18+ months pass between launch of the Treo 650 and the next Palm OS Treo (700p). That's just unacceptable.

Pilot 1000->Pilot 5000->PalmPilot Pro->IIIe->Vx->m505->T|T->T|T2->T|C->T|T3->T|T5->Zodiac 2->TX->Verizon Treo 700P->Verizon Treo 755p

Funny but there are many that frequent this site and others that would disagree with you. I agree that at this point Palm couldn't even pull it off if they wanted to. All you have to do is look at the iPod Touch. Yes I know you'll say that it's a MP3 player with PIM capabilities and you are right. Palm was in the position to do the same thing and yet let the ball slip.

In your world the classic PDA may be dead but in my world I know many people besides myself who continue to use PDA's, be it Palm, PocketPC, or even still some Apple Newton hold overs. The fact is no one has come out with anything that has moved the classic PDA user forward and until that happens we will complain and moan about it.

PDA's Past and Present:
Palm TX (Number 2)
Palm - IIIxe, Vx, M500, M505, Tungsten T, TX
Handspring - Edge, Platinum, Deluxe
Sony - SJ22, UX50
Casio-EM500
Apple - MP110, MP2000, MP2100

I don't have a TX, but I do own a T3. I love this little device.
Once I broke the touch screen in 2007 and I was lost without it and bought a brand new one for $275. Why? First of all I have all my private information on this since
2000. I must have went through six wireless phones. I can do many things with this that I cannot do with a fancy cell phone. And there is free software out there for basic living. I can copy and paste many emails and many forms of electronic documents. Top it off I back these up on my local PC. The T3 is amazing.

I don't use it for business per say, but I will send stuff from work to my home email address and copy/paste stuff there. All my passwords are all copy and pasted into BeSafe or some at low risk into Memo.

I was hoping for a new handheld device from Palm, but reading this discussion makes me think it will never happen.

But I'll tell you that no matter what Marketing throws out there, the Palm handheld
is a very useful and powerful device. Problem is that it does take you about 6 months or more to appreciate what it does, and does not. The "does" outweighs the "don'ts" by 5-1.

Past models I had: Vx, 705i (my first ever email sent wireless!!, T2 and T3(2).
Then I bought the Palm Pilot 1000 (?) for kicks that still has a6 month old batties
and works fine.

>At a minimum, they should have used a standard mini-USB connector instead of Palm's stupid proprietary one,

Remember the last time they switched connectors? A lot of people were pissed that they couldn't use their accessories.
You can bag on the multiconnector till your arms fall off, but it's really a powerful piece of equipment for hardware hackers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_Multi-Connector <- there's more than meets the eye; could you do all that you can on a PMC with a mini-usb and without writing drivers for said mini=usb? I think not, dear watson.

Best Regards,
Ryan Rix
TamsPalm - The PalmOS Blog

STOP WHINING! If you hate PalmOS so much, get a winmob device and go whine about it on a winmob site!

I'm afraid that it is too late (once again). Whilst I now want a phone with my PDA - I use a 650 - I can see that the iPod Touch has sold well and that Apple seem to be making a profit out of it. These are 'the computer guys' who don't know anything about phones as someone once said. As Mike suggests above, it looks as though they're going to do it again with their new slate (http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/05/14/intel_exec_vouches_for_atom_based_apple_newton_tablet_report.html)
It seems as though Steve Jobs knows the market and how to turn a profit giving people what they want at the right time.
The nearest Palm came to this in recent years was the Foleo. I work in education in the UK and there is a massive market for the EasyPC type device, and now there's a flurry of similar devices coming to fill the demand. The Foleo could have come in nicely and given people what they wanted - if it was at the right price, say no more than £99, which is getting on for $200 I suppose. It could even have stimulated Treo and Centro phone sales with its connectivity etc. Use the Foleo on campus and on WiFi and then with your phone at home or out and about. Instant on. Email, web and Office as Docs to Go nearly perfect. The only thing missing was the Calendar and Address book. It looked as though it was nearly there. Then they can it in favour of harmonising it with a phone platform that will not be ready until 2009 (at the earliest) because they couldn't support both OSes. Well given the gap they could have let the Foleo be overtaken by the second one if it is going to be so good.
If the Foleo kept them going and made a profit they could then handle the problem of the overhead at their leisure whilst making money rather than economically not making a penny in the meantime.

Verizon now uses Blackberrys instead of laptops for their field techs:

- http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/080515/nyth057.html?.v=101

I've been to at least 3 concerts in the past year (give or take) and at EVERY venue (from a large outdoor amphitheatre to an indoor coliseum/arena to a small local dive) they were using classic monochrome POS Symbol barcode scanners to zap the tickets.

FWIW, the Alphasmart Dana seems to be alive and semi-kicking in the educational field, though they've since come out with a newer model (Neo) running some kind of proprietary, closed OS.

What I'd really like to know is what kind of users/consumers buy those <$50 Sharp Wizard/Royal/Franklin organizers. Those things are so crude that they make the original Zire look like something out of the next century in comparison! Yet they've hung around for ~20 years, essentially unchanged and still on retail store shelves.

I can imagine the margins there are brutal, but I'm honestly surprised Palm didn't keep plugging away at an ultra affordable Zire-style device at the $50 neighborhood. Heck, I imagine there still would be plenty of takers for a Z22 at $75ish (that device was hampered more by poor visibility/marketing and spotty retail distribution than anything else).

Pilot 1000->Pilot 5000->PalmPilot Pro->IIIe->Vx->m505->T|T->T|T2->T|C->T|T3->T|T5->Zodiac 2->TX->Verizon Treo 700P->Verizon Treo 755p

i have not seen anyone use a pda since 2003. there is no significant market anymore. it's over. please let it go.

I agree that a TX2 would be a bad move. People just aren't interested in PDAs anymore. People want media devices and phones (and media devices that are phones). PDA functions are passe, from a market standpoint.

Think about it: Is the iPhone or iPod Touch touted for its ability to keep you organized? For keeping notes? For making sure you're going to get to meetings on time? Of course not. It's a media player, and a phone. The mass market doesn't care about any other benefits. The rudimentary calendars and note applications in most feature phones are enough for most users (if they use them at all). The thing that I think has changed the most, since the Palm first came out, is the ubiquity both of desktop computers and desktop organizers, as well as text messaging alerts. If I can set up Google Calendar (or anything else) to send an alert to my phone, that function makes up for not having a dedicated PDA's calendar. Contacts and notes work the same way.

Don't misunderstand: I'm not saying I don't like PDAs. I own a TX and a Centro. But the plain fact is, the PDA's time has come and gone. Handheld devices you see now (iPod, iPhone, PSP) are not PDAs. They're for browsing, media, and games, primarily. (The iPhone is a phone, of course, but not a particularly good one.)

The only thing I can think of that Palm could add to a handheld to distinguish itself would probably be a GPS. (And by that, I mean a real GPS system, not a simple system like the Google Maps on iPhone/iPod Touch, but something with turn-by-turn directions, 3D view, spoken directions, etc.)

People just aren't interested in PDAs anymore. People want media devices and phones (and media devices that are phones).

How about showing us a study that says that? If there is nothing new to buy, how do you expect high sales numbers? Let them try putting out a new non-winmob PDA and see how well it sells. A limited production run could keep costs and unsold inventory down.

I'm nearly convinced now that you work for Palm.

Is that you Ed?

PDA's Past and Present:
Palm TX (Number 2)
Palm - IIIxe, Vx, M500, M505, Tungsten T, TX
Handspring - Edge, Platinum, Deluxe
Sony - SJ22, UX50
Casio-EM500
Apple - MP110, MP2000, MP2100

How about showing us a study that says that? If there is nothing new to buy, how do you expect high sales numbers? Let them try putting out a new non-winmob PDA and see how well it sells. A limited production run could keep costs and unsold inventory down.

First, you don't need a study to tell you where the market is going. Do you think that the manufacturers of PDAs (not just Palms) all abandoned PDAs on their own initiative, even though the market for them was strong? But I can certainly reference articles which cite this decline in 2005 (around the time of the LifeDrive and TX):

http://www.betanews.com/article/PDA_Sales_Continue_to_Decline/1130528969

Here's a story on an IDC study from 2004:

http://www.networkworld.com/net.worker/news/2004/1027idcsees.html

Here's one from 2005:

http://www.windowsfordevices.com/news/NS4246182789.html

Here's a story from ZDNet Australia:

http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/hardware/soa/HP-Pen-based-PDA-market-on-death-bed/0,130061702,139241073,00.htm?omnRef=www.google.com/search?aq=f" rel=nofollow target="_new">http://www.google.com/search?aq=f

I guess you get the idea. The market has been declining for PDAs across the board since before the TX and LifeDrive were ever released. Therefore, you can't blame a lack of new devices on the decline of interest. It's the other way around: A lack of consumer interest led (as one should expect) to a lack of new standalone PDAs.

Whatever UBS's history is, the analysis sounds right. The market is getting more and more competitive, and Palm is falling further and further behind. By the end of the summer RIM will be out with the Bold and maybe a touch screen phone, and Apple will have launched the second generation iphone. Isn't the 7.0 version of WinMob out soon? Add to that ALP, Android, etc. and the competition for market share will be intense.

The imagine what Nova will look like, in the best case. It will need debugging, which means six + months of patches, random errors, and instability. And the third party developer ecosystem will be starting from ground zero, right? How many developers are going to jump into a market just starting out when there are huge installed bases of the other OSes to develop for? That's a tough sell.

Just to add to that intimidating schedule, think about the economies of scale that Palm is facing. By the time they put out there smartphone, Apple will be ordering iPhones by the millions (one rumor had the initial order for the iPhone 2.0 at 3 million for the first month! With those kinds of numbers the price of each unit plunges. That's not even to mention the price advantages Apple must have on flash memory since they use it in the iPod as well. Palm's first smartphone won't likely to be ordered in anywhere near those quantities, so how can they price it significantly below the iPhone and still make money?

Nova phone: fewer third party applications, buggy, predictable design, not significantly cheaper... What can they possibly offer to make up for those weaknesses?