How is it game over? Palm still has a great product and they aren't out of money. They're not doing as well as they had hoped to do, but that doesn't mean things aren't going to turn out well for them.

They are a proprietary handheld hardware / software developer built around a branded OS.

To survive in that position you need massive traction.

Apple pulled it off, and in my estimation they are the only ones that could manage it at the scale they're shooting for.

PALM could try licensing their OS at this point, but it's hard to argue with FREE and a product with much wider adoption, eg Android.

I would say in current form, PALM is finished after this latest failure.

I'd love to understand your logic of apple being 'the only ones that could manage it at the scale they're shooting for'.

What about Blackberry (outsells iPhones I believe), Nokia, etc. This is not a mature market and there is still boatloads of innovation to happen. What advantage does apple have over anybody else, with the exception that they brought out a device which set a great standard to measure competitors against.

If webOS had been a year earlier, would those positions be reversed? If so, would you be saying Apple should give it up?

  What advantage does apple have over anybody else,
  with the exception that they brought out a device
  which set a great standard to measure competitors
  against.

Don't you think that coming out with device like this is the advantage Apple has? Or rather capability to design such device.

No, I don't agree with that. Remember the Motorola Razr? That was 'the device' to have, and Moto was almost completely out of the market within a few years. I don't expect Apple to rest on their laurels, but they have competitors gunning for them, and this won't be a market where everybody has only one device. This may not even be as homogeneous as the pc market. Just my 2cents.

I totally agree. Symbian and Android are open sourced so there is no chance any other manufacturer would be interested in paying to use WebOS. They should have open sourced from the start.

Their problem is that unlike other companies, they don't want to give anything back (and this annoys consumers).

This strategy works for Apple only because there are many who are heavily biased towards Apple, and Steve Job's often deceives them (like during the iPhone launch, he strongly implied he invented Multitouch, and that no other manufacturer would support multitouch because Apple patented it).

Furthermore, nobody even seems to be selling Palm phones here in Australia. Since palm are the only manufacturer which makes WebOS phones, that means nobody in Australia uses WebOS. That being said though, Palm's phones aren't that great anyway

It is in the article....

"we stated that we expect to report revenues for Q3 between $300 and $320 million. We also announced that we expect our revenue for this fiscal year to fall below the guidance we gave to Wall Street, which ranged from $1.6 to $1.8 billion."