Palm is Dead (and Personal Finance Links)

I’ve been very bullish on Palm phones in this space and in person. I have found that multitasking adds so much to the smartphone experience. You can’t currently get that out of the box with the Apple IPhone. Google’s Android devices allow for that, but from what I’ve read on Lifehacker, Google doesn’t keep the phone’s OS updated and in sync. Specifically they said:

“…those looking to buy and enjoy an Android smartphone for any length of time are in the dark as to what’s coming next, on which carrier, and how long they’ll have to wait for an upgrade—if it ever happens. Right now, the G1—only one year and four months old—is running Android 1.6, and looks like it may stay that way forever.”

Android phones don’t have that strong link between the operating system and the hardware. You may remember that Microsoft (via Windows Mobile) and Palm (remember their Sony PDAs) tried the model of an open OS and I don’t there was one major success. I believe that Apple showed it’s best to tie the hardware to the somewhere so you don’t have three companies (carrier, hardware developer, software developer) all mixing things up.

Palm came along and gave people the best of both worlds… a physical keyboard, an open application market-place, changable battery, multitasking, availability on multiple carriers, and a strong tie between the hardware and software where your phone actually gets better through numerous updates. Palm has just one problem… no one knows about their phones. Lifehacker also mentioned recently that people tend to choose the most popular phone, not necessarily the best phone. Palm has to change that. How they do that, I simply don’t know. They’ve made some poor advertising choices in the past, but even now that they’ve righted the ship, it doesn’t seem to be getting good sales.

It seems like more and more people are gravitating to the IPhone or Droid devices. That has caused Palm to revise their earning estimates downward. Their stock in the last 18 months has moved from around $1 to $18 and back down to about $5.50. Earlier today, I decided to go long on Palm with a small amount of play money. I’m a sucker for the underdog when they have solid technology. Before following me, I warn you that I also invested in AMD a long time ago thinking that they could split the marketshare with Intel since their chips were just about as fast and much cheaper.

I was further convinced of Palm’s death on a recent trip to Barnes and Nobles. There were at least 30 books on iPhone development, a few for Android development, and not a single book on the shelf for Palm WebOS development. So while I wallow in my future stock market losses, check out these personal finance links:

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