“Palm is essentially an accelerating death spiral.”

That’s not a good thing to hear, and given yesterday’s bleak financial report, we can’t say we disagree (though we do maintain that it is possible to pull out of a death spiral). That little nugget comes from Ilya Grozovsky, analyst at Morgan Joseph & Co. As CNN Money noted, Grozovsky was one of two analysts to cut their price targets on Palm stock to a heart-stopping $0/share. By valuing the stock at zero, Grozovsky and Peter Misek of Canaccord Adams are declaring that Palm the company is worth nothing.

Those two doomsayers aren’t the only ones kicking Palm to the curb. At this point, not a single analyst will recommend buying Palm stock. Given Palm’s current cash burn rate, most estimate that Palm has only about twelve months to execute a turnaround or find a suitor with deep pockets.

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Palm Wars Episode V: The Analysts Strike Back. Not long after throwing Palm’s stock into the clearance bin, Morgan Joseph analyst Ilya Grozovsky has penned another research note on Palm.

This time he’s claiming that the unannounced non-slider Eos/Pixie webOS smartphone has been delayed from its unannounced 2009 holiday season to next year. Grozovsky stated that Palm will need to put all its muscle behind the Eos if it hopes to compete against the $99 iPhone 3G currently on AT&T (the Eos is rumored to be landing on AT&T – and Sprint – at $99).

No sources, even of the completely anonymous variety, were cited, leading us to advise that this is to be taken with considerable sodium chloride. Note also the scare quotes about "delayed" in the title – it’s hard to call something ‘delayed’ when we know so little about what the original plans for it were in the first place.

Ok, one anonymous tip we received earlier in the month was that prototype units of the Eos on Sprint had at least made their way out of Palm HQ — so the thing probably exists out there in Sprintland.

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Ah, analyst estimations, how we missed your vague guesses so. At long last, the analysts have started rearing their heads about Palm (again), this time with Ashok Kumar of Collins Stewart and Ilya Grozovsky of Morgan Joseph issuing calls that amount to the coming death of Palm.

As quoted in Barrons, Kumar states that “momentum appears to have already peaked” and that Palm has cut production levels on the Pre for the rest of the year by 500,000 units. How he knows this, he does not say. Of course, this would be a very puzzling move, as Palm has planned launches in Canada, Australia, and Europe by the end of the year, and will be moving the Pre onto other US carriers early next year. It is worth noting that Kumar has been consistently negative on the Palm and the Pre, and doesn’t even formally cover the stock as part of his roll at Collins Stewart.

And then there Ilya Grozovsky’s rating of PALM shares as a ‘sell,’ with the low low low target price of $7.50 (from a Thursday close at $13.55). Grozovsky’s unspecified checks indicate Pre sales in July were down to 100,000, half his estimate of 200,000 for June, and that sales thus far in August will end up even lower than last month. In total, Gozovsky is now expecting that Palm will move 350,000 Pre phones in this quarter, a cut of 50,000 from his previous estimates. He believes that the low numbers that Palm and Sprint have sold thus far may result in price cuts before this year’s holiday season, with concessions being made by Palm on the per-unit price to make up for Sprint’s hefty subsidization.

Of course, all of this analyst guesstimation could very easily be solved if Sprint and Palm were to just come out and tell us how many Pre phones have been sold. At this point, we won’t be too disappointed if it’s not a zillion units, just so long as we have a number.

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