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An interesting tidbit from Apple’s first-quarter earnings call just now. Asked for his company’s view on new iPhone rivals like the Palm Pre and handsets running Google’s Android OS, Apple COO Tim Cook answered with a bit of considered saber rattling. “We like competition–as long as our competitors don’t rip off our IP,” he said. “And we’re going to go after anyone who does.” Like, say, Palm?

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What an astonishingly potent elixir of life Palm’s Pre announcement has proven to be, eh? Just a few weeks ago, the company’s shares were trading below $3, having been dragged deep into the mud by a grotesque conga line of quarterly losses (six, consecutively). Palm’s market value was a third of what it was at the beginning of the year, sales of its Treo smartphones were down to 599,000 units–a drop of 13 percent–and it held a paltry 2.1 percent of the smartphone market.

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The Web never stops publishing, but a tech blog definitely slows down on a market holiday. To wit: A (Long) Weekend Update, and best wishes on Martin Luther King, Jr. day.

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Anarchy! We want Anarchy. We don’t want anyone to tell us what or how we can do anything. The only rule is NO RULES. We want you to distribute our apps, but we don’t want to pay for it!!!! Nothing, nada, zilch. And we want the ability to JAILBREAK! Wheeeeeee!!!!!!”
– Palm developer Jeano tells the [...]

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Lots of chatter this past week about the Palm Pre and the Web OS on which it runs–most of it overwhelmingly positive, if not euphoric. Clearly, Palm is on the mend. Still, the fact that the company is entering a market characterized by fierce competition and a furious pace of innovation puts it at an enormous disadvantage. Further, to stage a comeback, it needs a thriving developer ecosystem. And by some accounts, Palm’s developer ecosystem is in disrepair.

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Palm’s long-suffering investors are today basking in the company’s “new-ness”–specifically, a stock that’s continuing the big rally it began last week after the announcement of the Palm Pre handset and Web OS. As I write this, Palm is trading at $6.10–up an astonishing 85 percent since its big announcement. And it seems destined to go higher still, given the enthusiastic reception analysts have given it.

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There’s got to be a joke somewhere in the fact that Macworld, the Consumer Electronics Show and the AVN Awards (the “Pornies”) all happen during the same week. Maybe even one that hasn’t been played out 10 times over. All Things Digital was too busy covering two out of three this week to think of one.

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Palm’s long-suffering investors have apparently drunk themselves silly on Palm Pre Kool-Aid. Shares of the much diminished handset maker climbed almost seven percent to $4.45 Thursday after the company uncrated the device and Web OS, the new platform it will run on. Wall Street seems convinced that the Pre is not a postscipt for Palm, but the beginnings of its rebirth. A historic turning point worthy of a trading bacchanal.

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Palm bet the company on a new handset today. It’s called the Palm Pre, though given the company’s faltering business, a better name for it would have been the Palm Hail Mary. It seems a slick little device. But is it formidable enough to stand its ground next to Apple’s iPhone? Palm certainly seems to think so. In fact, the company is so confident in the Pre that CEO Ed Colligan seems to think it won’t need a sub-$200 price point to pull market share from Apple.

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