Good thing Palm withdrew investor Roger McNamee’s your-next-iPhone-will-be-a-Pre claim because there obviously wasn’t much truth to it. If there was, well, there would have been a massive rush on Pres nationwide this past month. And that clearly didn’t happen.
Palm seems to have satiated pent-up early demand for its new Pre smartphone, constrained supplies be damned. In a pair of investor notes issued today, analysts at Pali Research and JP Morgan say that sales of the Pre have tapered off to a point where supply and demand are roughly in parity.
Palm’s Pre is the first non-Apple device to successfully link with iTunes in years. And it may also be the last. On Tuesday, Apple issued an advisory warning that it does not support iTunes integration with third-party digital media players.
Now we know why it was Palm executive chairman Jon Rubinstein and investor Roger McNamee on stage at the D conference last month talking up the Pre, and not CEO Ed Colligan: Colligan was on his way out. On Wednesday, Palm tapped Rubinstein as its new CEO.
In Silicon Valley, it’s hard to believe that not everyone follows each shiny new thing on the Web, tracks OS versions as intently as the storyline for “Battlestar Galactica” and remains jacked-in pretty much 24/7. But it’s been known to happen.
For instance, BoomTown was in Rome earlier this week attending a conference on business, brand and innovation that happens only once every seven years–and one of the biggest takeaways? Hardly any Italians have heard of Twitter, and those who have don’t really use it.
Roger McNamee’s hyperbolic predictions about iPhone-to-Pre conversion rates didn’t go over too well at Palm. Appalled by McNamee’s inflated, indecorous claims about its forthcoming smartphone, the handset maker on Monday filed a Free Writing Prospectus with the SEC that distances the company from McNamee’s claims and categorically refutes his your-next-iPhone-will-be-a-Pre foolishness. em>That was CRAZY talk, Roger
Palm investor Roger McNamee isn’t drinking his own Kool-Aid, he’s drowning in it. In an interview with Bloomberg, McNamee–co-founder of Elevation Partners, which owns 39 percent of Palm–claimed iPhone owners will switch en masse to the Palm Pre when their contracts expire.
Is it too late for Palm? Elevation Partners doesn’t think so. The private equity firm has agreed to make an additional $100 million investment in the foundering smartphone maker, which last week reported an abysmal second quarter and its sixth consecutive loss.
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper.
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
Spectacular in the bellowing Russian sailor sense of the word …
“If you spell something wrong on your insurance claim, do you really deserve surgery? I don’t think so …”
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