The last quarter’s financial results are in from Palm and things look grim. Everyone expected it. Palm warned us. That doesn’t take the sting out of $22 million in losses and some ugly sales numbers. The company shipped 960,000 phones last quarter, which sounds great until you see that it only sold 400,000 to consumers – 30% less than last quarter. That’s a lot of handsets to be sitting on the stock shelves.

The news almost certainly points to a buyer. Palm’s had nine months of work on WebOS to turn this ship around and it’s just not happening. The longer it lingers in a market where juggernauts like the iPhone and the Droid exist, the worse things are going to get. Palm needs someone to bail it out, the only question remaining is, who?

It could very well be RIM, though I doubt it would pull the trigger. RIM needs a more consumer-friendly platform, which WebOS would offer. There’s also someone like HP, a company that could use a cellular presence. The most likely, though, is probably Google. Google has the cashflow to throw a pile of money at Palm, dissect the company for all the good parts and people, keep development going on the stuff it likes and just scrap the rest. It also has the relationships with wireless providers to get Palm out of the mess its currently in, relying mostly on Sprint, which has its own sales issues, to keep the company alive.

Whoever it is, I’d expect serious discussions to start before the year’s end.

Source: Palm