Palm Inc. (PALM) – 06-19-2009
The first stock screen beginning investors implicitly learn is to think about the products and services they really like in their lives and look up whether the companies are public. Palm happens to be one of those companies for me now after spending some time with a Palm Pre. If you want a phone that lets you play games and listen to music, the iPhone is probably the only thing you should be looking at. However, if you’re like me and you want something as a personal organizer, email, messaging, web browser, etc. device, I don’t see how you could live without the multitasking Palm Pre.
I know I’m abnormal, but I always have at least a few different web pages loading and a couple conversations going on at the same time, which the Pre allows me to do seamlessly. Surfing the internet on the iPhone feels like going back to pre tabbed browser days. Is the Pre going to take over the smartphone market? Probably not — at least not in the immediate future. As much as the AAPL fanboys will hate me making this comparison, the iPhone is essentially the Windows of cell phones, and the Pre is a little mix of Ubuntu and OS X. Each have their technical advantages and disadvantages, but if you aren’t leaps and bounds above the competition it’s tough getting people to switch, as Apple has found out in their PC war. Fortunately for Palm, the turn over on phones is a lot quicker than on computers.
If Apple decides to stay AT&T exclusive, look for this race to get a lot closer much quicker. Also, pay attention to GOOG’s big surge of Android phones coming later this year, MSFT’s WinMo 7, and RIMM who’s starting to become a bit of a dark horse after dominating the market for so long. Of these companies, as a trader I would selfishly prefer that PALM or RIMM win the war, since dominating the mobile phone market would make a much smaller impact percentagewise to the bottom lines of any of the other gorillas. Other companies that are interesting are ARM and Imagination Technologies, since they make the chips that all of the phones are using right now, so any expansion of the market would be good for them. However, they’re both on the London exchange (ARM has an ADR under ARMH though). Expect more posts on the subject in the future…
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