After spending 10 minutes trying to configure one of them I felt like throwing it against a wall. The thing is just shit, it's creaky, poorly built and feels really cheap.
I think everyone agrees with you. Palm reported today that sales are lower than expected and that the year's results will be lower than expected as well. Stock has fallen a little bit, but IMO, Palm is still over-valued by a factor 2 to 3 times. There's no way this company is worth over 500M, let alone 1.1B.
If things continue this way, it seems to me they'll be ripe for a fire-sale. The problem is, I don't think anyone is currently interested in buying. Maybe RIM, maybe Motorola (though I don't think they have the marketing expertise to do anything with it).
My personal opinion on all the Palm acquisition talk is that the analysts are seriously underestimating how long it'd take to swallow a totally different software stack and get a product out. It's not like, if Dell or Nokia bought them, they'd be out with anything based on WebOS for a year+ (anything that wasn't just the same box with a different label on it, anyway).
Nokia certainly knows this, being pretty seasoned at the whole mobile game and having rolled out a Linux-based system already. Dell are likely to be aware of this having seen how much effort it took to take a supposedly portable system (Android) and get it shipped even when using processors that it was *already ported to* as the core of their products, and being ninjas at manufacturing.
Basically, acquiring Palm isn't going to be a shortcut to anything much in the mobile space, a market where newness is everything.
Maybe someone with no mobile products at all will swoop in and basically bankroll Palm to the tune of more hundreds of millions, as that's the fastest way to get more WebOS products out there, but then again maybe they'll look and think... what am I doing that's different to what Elevation did?
My $0.02
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