We’re not sure if you can derive any information from this, but we’ve had several readers let us know that both Verizon Wireless online and AT&T online have been out of stock on the Palm Pre Plus for some time now. We’d sort of been assuming that we had a overstuffed channel on both carriers so seeing it out of stock since last week has been odd. We called around to a handful of stores on both carriers and the local guys all report that they have plenty of the devices on-hand.

Maybe they just don’t feel like competing with HP.com, who is selling contract-signers the Verizon Palm Pre Plus for $19.99 and the AT&T Pre Plus for free with a $50 gift card.

We’re not feeling that this means newer devices are in the pipeline, but given that Verizon is still charging a crazy-low $29.99 with free Mobile Hotspot, we can’t say we’re super pleased to see it out of stock online. Anybody been jonesing to buy online only to run into this out-of-stock wall?

Sources: AT&T, Verizon, HP Wireless Central; Thanks to everybody who sent this in!

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HP’s offer for Palm was for $5.70 a share, a hefty premium over yesterday’s closing price of $4.63. Understandably, when the news of HP’s purchase broke, both the volume and price of Palm’s stock skyrocketed, with Palm stock opening the day up nearly 24% from yesterday afternoon. Right now shares of Palm are trading around $5.74 (yes, higher than HP’s offer), with investors hedging that somebody else is going to come in and place a higher bid for Palm than HP’s $1.2 billion package. We wouldn’t count on it, and we’re not sure we could take the excitement either. Chart after the break.

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The shocker headline from late last night was that Palm was up putting itself up for sale. According to Bloomberg, Palm enlisted the help of Goldman Sachs and Qatalyst Partners in the quest to find a buyer. If you fear what could come of Palm should they be purchased, Reuters is here to assuage your fears. According to Reuters’ source, Palm’s retaining of the two banks (Qatalyst focuses on technology investments) is not just to arrange a sale. Palm is apparently exploring all options, as we would hope they would.

On the same table as “sell” are at least two other options: seeking additional capital investments (such as the hundreds of millions of dollars injected into Palm by Elevation Partners) and licensing the webOS operating system. Either would allow Palm to remain a standalone company, though if you had to ask us, extra money stands a better chance of success than licensing webOS. The smartphone marketplace is incredibly crowded and Google’s Android OS has snapped up licensees left and right. The smartphone marketplace is growing increasingly crowded, and as much trouble as Palm has had convincing customers to buy their phones, we can see even greater difficulties in getting manufacturers to pick up webOS.

Meanwhile, StreetInsider.com is reporting that Canaccord Adams‘ analysts expect that if Palm is purchased, it will be taken in at below market value (a proposition we find laughable). According to the analysts, four potential buyers have submitted bids between $1 billion and $2 billion (Palm’s market cap stands at a hair over $1 billion). Only three of the potential suitors have apparently made it to the second round of bidding: HTC, Lenovo, and Cisco (surprise!). Yeah, Cisco, the company known to laypersons as the guys that make routers and big video conference rigs only presidents and CEOs can afford.

Palm’s stock rallied hard on the NASDAQ today, ending trading up 17.05%, closing the day at $6.04. Shares of Palm have risen nearly 57% since last Wednesday when the first serious rumors of a buyout surfaced.

Thanks to Mikeh20 and Markus for the tips!

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Palm’s stock is up around 10%, over $5.00 per share as of this writing for the first time since their dark earnings call on March 18th. The reason today is the same as the reason earlier this week: buyout rumors.

Whereas before it was Lenovo rumored to buy Palm (with a tiny side of RIM), this time it’s a story at udn.com (Chinese site Economic Daily News) speculating that it’ll be HTC. Interactive Investor does the translating for us, noting that the udn report cites "market speculation" and stern "no comments" from HTC. If it wasn’t making the stock jump, as Marketwatch notes, chances are you wouldn’t even be reading about it on these fine pages.

We’ll admit that Lenovo makes a bit more sense to us that HTC – HTC has made a very strong Android play and seems committed to both it and Windows Phone 7, webOS just doesn’t seem to integrate well. This despite the fact that Palm and HTC have worked very closely together in the past, with HTC acting as a original device manufacturer for Palm and in some cases, may have even helped design a Treo - the Treo Pro.

Thanks to everybody who sent this in!

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“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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The bad news for Palm keeps piling up, especially if you’re concerned about the whole financials thing. As noted by the Wall Street Journal, Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services has reversed their outlook on Palm, flipping from cautiously optimistic to downright negative. S&P’s ratings are a judgment on a corporation’s credit potential, and the occasionally issue outlooks statements on how they think that company may fair in coming months and years.

S&P’s current judgment of Palm is a CCC+ rating, the top tier of the low highly speculative territory. It was back in October that S&P upgraded Palm to a CCC+ rating and issued their positive outlook. But given recent revelations about Palm’s lower than expected sales figures, S&P’s analysts saw fit to retract their positive outlook. The outlook reversal had little effect on Palm’s stock performance for the day – all the damage was dealt earlier in the week.

Thanks to amateurhack for the tip!

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The Wall Street Journal has published an email written by CEO Jon Rubinstein to all Palm employees. In it, Rubinstein details Palm’s earlier guidance today, then he explains what steps are being taken to improve sales moving forward:

 Dave Whalen and I just returned from a very successful meeting with Verizon Wireless, where they acknowledged that their execution of our launch was below expectations and recommitted to working with us to improve sales. To accelerate sales, we initiated Project JumpStart nearly three weeks ago. Since then, nearly two hundred Palm Brand Ambassadors, supplemented by Palm employees from Sunnyvale, have been training Verizon sales reps across the U.S. on our products. Early results from the stores have already shown improvement on product knowledge and sales week over week. You may have also seen a growing number of Palm ads on billboards, bus shelters, buses, and subway stations—all getting the word out about Palm

It’s interesting (and gratifying?) to see that Verizon has taken a share of the blame for the Palm Pre Plus’ and Pixi Plus’ poor showing thus far on Verizon. Having spoken with several Verizon employees throughout the day today, I can say that internally at Verizon there isn’t as much enthusiasm for webOS as one would hope – Verizon employees in general are better educated on, more familiar and more comfortable with the Droid by a wide margin. Hopefully this "Project JumpStart" will help to close that gap.

Rubinstein closes the email by planning an all-hands company meeting and also by saying:

Our goals are taking longer than expected to achieve, but I am still confident that our talented team has what it takes to get the job done.

It’s odd to think it, but it’s still early rounds in the smartphone fight – knowing the team at Palm, they’re in it for a few more rounds.

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If there’s a lesson to be learned here, it’s don’t mess with the investors. They are sharks, and if they smell blood in the water, look out. Today that’s a lesson Palm learned, revising down their previously upbeat forecasts for the current quarter. The move, along with ongoing worries about Palm’s performance in the marketplace, sent Palm’s shares nose-diving through the floor of the NASDAQ exchange, to the tune of a 19.28% loss, closing the day at $6.53 a share.

That loss was the biggest one-day percentage loss since October 2006 when the investment by Elevation Partners resulted in an $8 dividend for stockowners. Today’s loss also sent Palm stock to a point not seen since January of last year, just before the Pre was announced at CES 2009. From a peak of $18.09 in October, Palm stock has lost nearly two-thirds of its value, wiping out $2.9 billion of shareholder value. As of today’s closing, the total outstanding Palm stock plus Elevation Partner’s 1/3 stake (purchase price, ~$7/share) comes to just $1.6 billion. In the past week alone, Palm stock has declined more than 30%.

All of this tells us one thing: Palm’s in trouble. They had enough trouble gaining the faith of customers and a handful of stock analysts, and while webOS 1.4 will make plenty of current users happy, we don’t think it’s going to do much to assuage shareholders, analysts, or potential new customers. Sorry for all the doom and gloom lately folks – sometimes that’s just the news.

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After several days of crazy stock swings, Palm has issued a press release updating their investor guidance for for Q3 FY2010. In essence, it appears to be an admission that sales are slower than hoped:

[...] revenues for the third quarter of fiscal year 2010 will be in the range of $285 million to $310 million on a GAAP basis and in the range of $300 million to $320 million on a non-GAAP basis.1 Revenues for the quarter and full year are being impacted by slower than expected consumer adoption of the company’s products that has resulted in lower than expected order volumes from carriers and the deferral of orders to future periods. Accordingly, Palm expects fiscal year 2010 revenues to be well below its previously forecasted range of $1.6 billion to $1.8 billion. The company will provide more detail on its financial results during Palm’s third-quarter financial results conference call currently scheduled for Thursday, March 18.

In a quote in the release, CEO Jon Rubinstein added "However, driving broad consumer adoption of Palm products is taking longer than we anticipated. Our carrier partners remain committed, and we are working closely with them to increase awareness and drive sales of our differentiated Palm products." The release closes with Palm debunking a recent rumor that they had little cash on hand, claiming that they expect to end the quarter with cash and cash-equivalents totaling over $500 million.

The release comes a day after the Wall Street Journal reported (subscription required) on an analyst claim that Verizon "was ’evaluating the potential for destocking.’" It appears that article may have been a bit overblown as in the same piece Verizon spokeswoman Brenda Raney dismissed the report. Reached for comment, Raney told PreCentral "Palm devices are an important part of our portfolio as more and more people enjoy both the Palm Pre Plus and the Palm Pixi Plus on the nation’s most reliable network."

As we briefly discussed in PalmCast Live on Tuesday (podcast coming soon), in recent weeks it seems as if any errant rumor has the potential to affect Palm’s stock lately. We’ve long held here at PreCentral that Palm’s single most important challenge right now is simply selling as many webOS devices as possible to help establish the platform as viable for both users and developers. Given Palm’s statement today, that challenge isn’t being met yet.

With luck, Palm’s recent advertising push will help with that – although we’re starting to think Palm is going to need new, high-end hardware to act as a ‘halo device’ for the platform. What do you think Palm needs to do to juice sales?

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Today both Vivek Arya of Merrill Lynch and Phil Cusick of Macquarie Research downgraded their analytic opinions of Palm, with Arya moving Palm into the sell column, while Cusick took a more cautionary approach and advised not buying any more shares. What worries investors, however, is the reasoning behind their downgrades: sales of the Palm Pre Plus and Pixi Plus at Verizon have been less than stellar so far (though we do admit it is rather early in Palm’s life on Big Red).

While sales of the Pre on Sprint were okay, they were clearly less than what Sprint CEO Dan Hesse had hoped. And the Pixi, well, how many Palm Pixi phones have you spotted in the wild? Verizon, meanwhile, is fresh off the launch of the Motorola Droid and HTC Droid Eris. From reports in our forums and the word of Arya, Verizon employees are pushing those handsets over the exclusive Pre Plus and Pixi Plus. All that in spite of the large marketing push from both Verizon and Palm.

The news has pummeled Palm’s stock, with shares down a painful 9.99% for just Tuesday, while the NASDAQ technology index dropped 1.28%. So far through February shares of Palm are down more than 21%; and down nearly 55% since hitting a high of $18.19 just five months ago. As a company, Palm is now worth $2.51 billion less than it was at the end of September, which is not so great when that leaves your value (including Elevation Partners’ 1/3 stake) at $2.08 billion.

The only way for Palm’s stock to hope to recover from this decline is for sales at Verizon to be spectacularly better than expected. While most Palm users don’t care about the stock price, it does matter. A higher stock price is indicative of investor confidence in Palm, and while some may think Palm stock isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on, investors and analysts do still seem to have some expectations for the company. Just not lofty ones. That lower stock price makes a takeover a much more appetizing prospect for any company looking to expand their mobile offerings or jump into the market. For stable companies like Apple or Microsoft, the stock price matters very little. For a company on increasingly shaky ground like Palm, every little thing matters – the value of their stock included.

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