Business & Technology | Pioneer Palm now teeters in crowded smartphone market | Seattle Times Newspaper

Reading Palm’s future

So what will happen to Palm now?

Misek thinks the company could keep spending its cash — it had $590 million at the end of its most recently reported quarter — and run out of gas in a year or two.

Or it could try to conserve funds and angle to be bought out. But Misek thinks a buyer could be dissuaded by the year or two it might take to get webOS working on new phones.

Kaufman Bros. analyst Shaw Wu thinks Palm could be purchased in the next year by a company such as Motorola or Dell. That would give those companies their own smartphone software.

Ultimately, Wu thinks the smartphone market will look like the PC market, which was crowded with competition early on but eventually produced a short list of winners and a smattering of losers.

"Palm's almost on that list of losers," he said.

Business & Technology | Pioneer Palm now teeters in crowded smartphone market | Seattle Times Newspaper