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The once mighty PDA/smartphone leader in the US market Palm is now a basket case ripe for a takeover. Its share price that once peaked at $95 now hovers between $4 and $7 depending on the rumours and speculation that there's a takeover bid or not. Its share priced did some rebound to rise 20% early April as reported by Bloomberg when rumours circulated that either Taiwan's HTC or China's Lenovo were interested in acquiring it. Other companies have likewise been rumoured to hold some interest after looking at its books, like Texas PC giant Dell, China's ZTE Corp and Huawei, but all these speculation were doused and company's share prices promptly settled back to where it was, around $6. Strategies that backfired 2009 could have been Palm's turnaround year after realizing its past marketing errors. Apple's tech wizard Jonathan Rubinstein who among the engineers behind iPod's success was taken it first to least its Product Development arm and then as CEO. The future was a lot brighter. But the company remains in the red a year after. It looks like the strategies that could have saved the company were not enough to reverse its free fall. It took time for the company to realize its local PDA market was shifting to smartphones and when it finally did, its smartphone products failed to compete. Its narrow focus to match Blackberry with its own version of the candybar QWERTY handsets in the Treo line-up didn't do much damage to the Blackberry juggernaut. You can't simply try to match a leader and expect to overtake it. But it was really a case of too little too late, aggravated by a haughty attitude to maintain its upscale prices in the face of better and cheaper smartphones from its rivals. CEO Rubinstein did the right thing abandoning its Windows Mobile efforts that only bring higher production cost with its licensing when it already has its own OS development team behind the PalmOS which it also abandoned in favor of the newer WebOS. Its Palm Pre product might have saved the company had it been released earlier and not when HTC and Blackberry were at their prime. And certainly not when iPhone was making headway as another unstoppable force to reckon with. Without even a simple FM radio, no microSD card slot, an underpowered battery that delivers only 5 hours at the most and no video recording, it was not surprising that Palm Pre performed poorly despite the fact that it was among its best products ever. Missing Android Many industry pundits have pointed to Android as Palm's best option to remain competitive. It's an
open source OS that costs less to maintain than either Windows Mobile licenses or having a dedicated team of OS developers that it has for the WebOS. This could bring its pricing in line with HTC and not be pricing itself out of market reach. While many have praised CEO Rubinstein's decision to abandon Windows and PalmOS in streamlining the company, it didn't go far enough to latch itself on the industry's darling Android.
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