Is PALM here to stay: II

I sold my few shares of Palm Friday morning shortly after opening. Palm (Nasdaq:PALM) share dropped 29% on Friday after horrific earning outlook (marketWatch). Palm is increasingly likely to say “bye bye” to its loyal customers in a year or two. Quote sobelmedia:

======
I’m never going to forget my very first Palm Pilot in 1998…how cool…it was everything I needed and wanted in a handheld device…addresses, notes, contacts everything…and it had the ability to sync with my computer to keep it up to date. Over the years the company changed owners, management, operating systems and the competition heated up all at the same time. Now it appears as though Palm is at the end of the rope and Wall Street is ready to say goodbye.
======

I think PALM has to blame itself for the recent problem (since webOS based Palm Pre launch at Sprint network last July). I saw the following problems:

Palm only way forward

1. Come up with products that is consistent (not sometimes work, sometimes don’t, see this old post from PreCentral guys).

2. Also come up with some smart ads (with Sprint and Verizon), something like this one from German carrier O2.

O2 has about 11% market share in Germany per Yahoo Answers.

iPhone TV ads vs. Palm TV ads

It appears to me iPhone TV ads are more effective than Palm TV ads.

First iPhone ads

There’s an app for that

Palm Pre First Impression

Got opportunity to play with Palm Pre for couple minutes in the weekend. Sprint kiosk at Chesterfield Mall has the real Pre (instead of the faked phones at many other places). I was very impressed by the screen, both the (multi) touch and the display. Surfed the web: amazon, ESPN etc. Zooming in and out is very similar to iPhone (using two fingers). Checked out the tiny keyboard, it feels OK. Initially I thought it’s not “qwerty” keyboard, I was wrong: it was just different from the keyboard of my Blackberry 8800, as you can see from this picture at PreCentral: .

AllThingsD the D7 conference

Walt Mossberg talks about his overall impression of the conference, Walt is the conference organizor, and he is also the tech writer for WSJ besides his involvement to AllThingsD and D conferece (both owned by WSJ, I think).
(both videos from Yahoo Tech-ticker)

And his comments on Palm Pre (this one could cause some anxiety on Palm shareholders 🙂

Pre Demo at D7 conference

(Update from The Register May 29) Palm Pre plays nicely with iTunes.

See more D7 video here. Here is another interesting one, for instance, Microsoft new search engine “Bing“.