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Palm Rumor Update...
Palm Rumor Update
Palm, the company, continued to garner a ton of attention during the month of July. Along with talk about the Palm Pre, the back and forth on iTunes compatibility (disabled/not- disabled) and whether the Pre returns/sales figures are real, there emerged some other interesting story lines.
 TheStreet.com's Scott Moritz wrote about PALM in his "Tech Rumor of the Day" column. He seemed to think that in light of the "Google does netbooks" announcement about Google Chrome OS, that Palm's plan for webOS software are much bigger than the Pre phone.
Moritz communicated these reasons:
1--Laptops are shrinking to the size of, well, Palm tops.
2--Palm has dipped a toe here before with the ill-fated Foleo.
3--Smartphones and mini-notebooks are almost the same and, it's where all the action is.
"Palm was early and wrong the first time [Foleo]. But now it has a former Apple engineer heading the company and a budding success with a new WebOS operating system. You can probably expect Palm to be a force in this emerging smartbook trend."
Another topic being bandied about came the other day, when MarketWatch's John Letzing wrote a post about Microsoft and the Zune. He quoted George Kurian, a vice president at Tradition Capital Management LLC, who said, "Microsoft should abandon Zune and follow Apple's strategy to try to make its presence felt in the high-growth smartphone sector." Kurian stated the easiest way for Microsoft to do that, would be to simply purchase Palm Inc. (Palm's Pre smartphone, released in June, has been touted as a viable rival to the iPhone).
 These rumors don't seem to be factored into the numbers being proposed by Deutsche Bank analyst Jonathan Goldberg who recently reiterated a “Buy” rating on shares of Palm (raising his price target to $17 from $16).
Per a Barron's Tech Trader Daily post , Goldberg was quoted saying, "We think market fears about return rates, weekly order trends and applications development,” for the Pre “are off the mark. Our checks continue to point to solid demand and carrier interest.”
Goldberg also said he expects Palm to show progress with its applications catalog by September.
Palm stock is currently trading in the $15.75 range.
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