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Electronista: Palm stock climbed over 8 percent on Friday after speculation that it would be bought out by Finland-based Nokia.

Trading was about 15 times heavier than usual in the morning and remained heavy until the end of the day. The spike mirrored a similar increase from late September.

Neither company has commented on the rumor. Critics have pointed out that such a deal is unlikely as Nokia is heavily invested both in its deal with Symbian as well as its own Maemo Linux operating system. It’s also been suggested that the speculation may have begun to help fuel share prices and boost the stock before shareholders have to cash in.

However, Nokia is currently lagging in smartphone share and has relatively simple touchscreen designs that go without the multi-touch present on some of its competitors’ products, including Palm’s Pre or Apple’s iPhone.

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CNET News: Faced with strong competition from Apple and Research In Motion, as well as economic headwinds, Palm has decided to lay off some workers.

Valleywag reported that the layoffs could involve as many as 10 percent of the company’s 1,050 employees. A Palm representative confirmed that layoffs were taking place but did not comment on exactly how many people were affected.

“There have been some layoffs as a result of challenges facing our company and the industry, and we’re restructuring our worldwide operations to better position ourselves for profitability and long-term growth,” said Lynn Fox, a Palm spokeswoman. She declined to comment on exactly where the cuts would come, but she said Palm has decided to “focus our efforts more effectively.”

The layoffs will have no bearing on Palm’s plans to release a new operating system next year, Fox said.

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Register Hardware: Palm’s next-gen operating system will be finished by the end of the year, the company promised late last week.

The company said the Linux-based system software known as Palm OS II and ‘Nova’ is “on track” for completion by the end of calendar 2008. Handsets based on the OS will following the first half of 2009, it said.

Palm announced back in April 2007 that it would develop the next generation of the Palm OS itself, a move made to ensure it was not tied to a third-party, either Japan’s Access, the current owner, or anyone else should Access choose to offload it.

Access took on the Palm OS when it acquired PalmSource – the OS developer spun out of Palm in 2003 – back in 2005.

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ElectricPig: Palm’s smart phones aren’t generally regarded as the pinnacle of sexy design, but that could all change with the firm’s next device. The Treo Pro (that’s the rumoured name) retains a classic Palm look – but kicks the style up a few notches.

Problem is, we don’t know if this pic represents the real deal or not.

Apparently it was mistakenly posted on the official Palm website for a brief time, before being taken down – so we know nothing about specifications and features, or even if it’s an actual handset or just a concept design.

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Electronista: No new Treo smartphones are expected to appear until the summer, Palm chief Ed Colligan said during the conference call for the company’s latest quarterly results. The company founder warned that quarterly losses were likely to continue during the spring quarter as the Sunnyvale, California-based company would not have an updated model during the period, which runs until the end of May.

Palm will primarily focus on expanding the reach of the Centro to Europe and other carriers until it can release a new Treo before the end of the summer, Colligan said.

The remarks by the CEO most directly affect the launch of the Treo 800w, the company’s long-awaited replacement for the 750 and the 755p. Reports have indicated the 800w will be the first to offer faster EVDO Revision A access on CDMA versions and give all models a 2-megapixel camera as well as a microSD slot in place of Palm’s previous miniSD.

Colligan has not explained the reason for the extended development of the phone, though former iPod co-designer Jon Rubinstein is believed to have had a significant impact on reengineering Palm’s lineup and is known to have had at least a slight impact on the Centro’s late debut in November last year.

The move also creates further troubles for Palm’s marketshare, which took damage from Apple’s iPhone price cut late last year and hovered at approximately 9 percent for the last calendar quarter of 2007 versus marketshare roughly three times larger for Apple and its rival Research in Motion.

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Camera Core: Palm has launched the Palm OS-based Centro smartphone in the UK.The company is marketing the handset as a youthful alternative to its Treo smartphones, which are aimed more towards business users.

The Centro has the look and layout of the recently released, Windows Mobile-based Treo 500, although it is narrower and has a higher resolution display.

The Centro features quad-band GSM/GPRS/Edge connectivity and Bluetooth 1.2, but 3G is not available. It has 64MB of user-accessible memory and can take Micro SDHC cards of up to 4GB in capacity.

The device also features a 1.3-megapixel camera. It comes with Google Maps pre-installed and DataViz’ Documents to Go for viewing PDFs and for reading and editing Microsoft Office files.

The phone comes with PocketTunes for MP3 playback, and a stereo headset is included.

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Electronista: Increasingly larger cellphone producer HTC is taking control of making smartphones for a few of its larger challengers, a report in Taiwan’s Commercial Times says. Without naming specific models, the trade paper says that Palm, MWG, and Dubai-based i-mate are all pushing their assembly orders back to HTC after previously turning to other contractors or their own factories. The reversal is not explained but should help HTC’s manufacturing for others account for over 10 percent of the firm’s bottom line, representing a significant boost for a company increasingly known for its own devices.

The shift may prove especially relevant to Palm, which has repeatedly struggled to turn a profit and will use HTC’s production for its newer phone designs, which include the Centro and the upcoming Treo 800 full-size smartphone. The motivations for i-mate and MWG are unclear, though the former was originally built around selling HTC-made devices in areas not covered by the European cell carrier O2.

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Camera Core: Toshiba is building on its strength in the laptop market with an expansion into the smartphone arena.

The company is developing a sub-brand called Portege and releasing two slider phones for business users – the G500 and G900.

The phones are rich in features suggested by respondents to a survey of business smartphone users, and will compete with brands such as Palm, HP and HTC.

Both phones have HSDPA and Wi-Fi connectivity, plus a two-megapixel camera, Windows-interface and microSD cards. Security features include fingerprint recognition.

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Tech.co.uk: Analyst Gartner has hit out at the new Palm Foleo , saying it’s “too large for many smartphone users to consider carrying around”.

The report into the new device says it is “a limited-function accessory that requires a separate carrying case”. It continues to state: “Gartner believes that this unwieldiness will severely limit Foleo adoption by smartphone users, who place a premium on ‘pocketability’ and attractive design.”

Palm has previously stated the Foleo is to be marketed as a “mobile companion”. The company believes it is an adequate replacement for a more expensive full-blown notebook. The Linux-based Foleo is able to read and write to Microsoft Office documents and boasts a battery life of five hours.

Gartner says the device has “limited functionality”. It gives Palm plenty of food for thought:
“We believe there is a small but growing segment of the market that would welcome a low-cost device with a full keyboard and good display that is capable of roughly 75 per cent of what most notebook computers are used for. But the Foleo’s functionality falls short of this.”

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Timesonline: Palm is poised to sell a 25 per cent stake to a private-equity partner in a move that will bring former Apple executives to the struggling smart-phone marker.

It is understood that Elevation Partners, the Silicon Valley private-equity firm that counts Bono, the activist musician as a partner, will pay $325 million for a 25 per cent in Palm, which is struggling to compete with a slew of competitors.

The deal, Elevation’s largest to date, will bring Jon Rubinstein, Apple’s former head of hardware and one of the executives who helped pioneer the iPod to Palm as executive chairman.

Mr Rubinstein, who left Apple last year, will be charged with breathing life into Palm’s flagging product portfolio. Later this month his former employer is set to launch the iPhone, a new smartphone that will compete with Palm products such as its Treo device.

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