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Handhelds Hardware

Handspring Files For IPO 43

Posted by Hemos from the wanting-the-money dept.
William Tanksley writes: "Handspring, the PalmOS licensee started by the inventors of the original Palm, is going public. " Not much information yet -- just stating they've filed with the SEC.
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Handspring Files For IPO More

Handspring Files For IPO

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  • Re:Linux users != IPO ready (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    While those are all valid points, the Slashdot readership expects other people to write software for them & give it away free. It's a logical extension that other people should form a company and give them the profits for free.

    Freeloader.org - news for nerd. Someone else will do it for me.

  • In case you hadn't, all the Linux darling have been taking quite a beating as of late:

    ANDN's at 23% of it's high
    CALD's at 71% of it's high
    COBT's at 27% of it's high
    CORL's at 23% of it's high
    LNUX's at 19% of it's high
    RHAT's at 28% of it's high

    Where as with the dot com's,

    AMZN's at 59% of it's high
    LCOS's at 75% of it's high
    YHOO's at 68% of it's high

    In all those cases of me saying high, i meant 52 week highs...But those are the flagships of the Linux companies and the dotcoms. Hate to say it, but Linux has lost it's ring, it appears. The new trends are PDA's and wireless... Handspring's well poised to take advantage of that infatuation.

    I still do wish that Handspring would manage to ship their products in quantity prior to their IPO... Palm had been shipping Pilots for years before 3Com spun them off. Handspring just develops a device and then says "time for the IPO!"
  • Well, I've got some Palm stock (yes, at the IPO price, so what) and when I think of the Handspring IPO, I'm not so sure about putting any money into their IPO.

    I mean, the fact is, that's a lot of debt and while I think it's cool to have cheaper Handspring PDAs, I'm not sure they're not the AMD (Handspring) of the PDA set to the Intel (Palm) main leader. Microsoft is probably the Cyrix of the PDA set.

    My point is, I'm pretty sure Palm's going to make money, but I wouldn't bet the farm on Handspring. I might buy a Handspring for my son or just for fun, but if you cut too much profit, you might get killed by the slim margin.

    Oh, to the person who asked can everyone get IPOs:

    No. If you've got some money, try E*Trade and you might luck out. Otherwise, you'll need an account at a major backer (e.g. Morgan Stanley Dean Witter) with somewhere between $100,000 and $1,000,000 in assets (depends on the brokerage house).

    And remember guys, these IPOs are risky. Some flop.

    That said, even though I'm still frosted at E*Trade, IPOs (especially Linux) have been very very good to me.

  • Actually, if you look at the Palm quarterlies, a lot of licensing revenues are coming in from cell phones, not just PDAs.

    Less marketshare for WinCE - this is good.

  • Seems that Handhelds are expanding like crazy into our world these days. I'm a little biased, but only a few years ago people didn't see the point in having a PDA. "Paper & pen is all I need." Now people are buying stocks, sending email, and (if it's not a joke) making webservers with their Palm-compatibles.

    With cool addons like the folding Stowaway keyboard [visorcentral.com] and the upcoming SixPak [visorcentral.com], Handspring is going to really take off. And what's good for HS is good for Palm.
    ------
    James Hromadka

  • New, powerful hardware?!? Too many (Microsoft) programmers rely on this excuse...which leads to sloppy code (Hey, who cares how many debug lines are left in the release canidate, most hard drives these days are 10 gigs!) or don't worry about cleaning up the memory, most users have 128 MB of RAM! Want to impress me? Write an OS that makes my Pentium 60 useful again - not only as a server.
  • "M$ generally writes software that exceeds the capacity of hardware, knowing that the hardware will soon be more powerful and cheaper"

    - Is this suppose to be a good thing? It's definitely not a reason to support Microsoft and Windoze CE.
  • I'm impressed by the folks at Handspring, and I think they have a really good product, but I have to wonder about the IPO bit. Those who saw Caldera's IPO a couple of weeks ago probably noticed that it was less impressive. Many investors and analysts are beginning to shift their attention away from upstart companies with only red ink on their balance sheets and are moving money back to those companies who are making real money. Even the Palm IPO was less than spectacular. Is Handspring even profitable yet? Will they profitable tomorrow? Next year? Ten years from now will they still be around? Sure, I'd love to get in on the IPO, but I'm not entirely certain that becoming publicly traded carries the same amount of glitz and glamour that it did a year or two ago. Just some food for thought...
  • ... since Symbian [symbian.com]'s Epoc operating system (especially the Quartz DFRD) will be most serious threat PalmOS will ever have to face. With all the major phone manufacturers backing Epoc, there's only so much anyone else can do ..

    (I mean, who _wouldn't_ want to have one instead of two devices in the pockets? A Quartz WID with a Bluetooth headset is the #1 choice for the future here in Europe. I don't know how much of this info has leaked into the US ... )

  • In light of the torrent of these IPO announcements, all those in favor of a new slashdot section dubbed 'IPO Mania' please vote aye!

    -----------------------------------------
    Ah, for the good old days of slashdot with links to actual interesting geek sites on the web.
  • All of your claims are factually incorrect. Look at the Visor product details page. [handspring.com]

    * mild mannered physics grad student by day *
  • Every single thing I said was true.

    You're either a liar, or an idiot. Again, look at the Visor product details page. The Visor Solo sells for $150, the same price as the Palm IIIe. This unit comes with 2MB, and no cradle. For $180, you can get the Visor Solo, 2MB, and a USB cradle. For $250, you can get the Visor Deluxe, with 8MB, cradle, and your choice of colors. If you had bothered to read the URL I supplied, you'd know this.
    * mild mannered physics grad student by day *

  • The pricing issue is not a very effective barrier to Palm Computing, since they can easily offer a stripped down version that eats into Handspring's share. Even had the Visor been considerably less powerful, I would still have purchased it due to the pricing. I have just enough clutter in my life to justify a palmtop, but not enough to make the difference between 4mb RAM and 8mb significant.

    Uh, have you looked at the current going prices recently? I needed to replace my Palm Pilot because the old one crapped out and was outside of warranty (an entirely different issue that I won't go into here...), and I found that it would have cost me more to get a Visor than to get a Palm IIIe. The only thing the Visor had that the IIIe didn't was the silly expansion port. Oh boy, now I can...what? Add a pager? Play MP3s? Nobody has developed any hardware that would seriously make that thing worth it, and I doubt anybody will anytime soon.

    In terms of price, the Visor cost the same as the Palm IIIe, but you have to buy the Visor cradle separately! In other words, they're not winning any price battles here.
    * mild mannered physics grad student by day *

  • You're right, it would be better if they GPLed PalmOS. Handspring pays for a license. Still, can't I cheer for Palm to crush WinCE? :^D OSS/Free or not, defeating M$, IMHO, is a noble cause.

    I read that the reason they (the two Palm founders who left 3COM and started Handspring) left was to be able to build more devices using the PalmOS. The Visor is the first step, but I think they could make a killer e-book. A Steno-pad sized PalmOS device would be a real laptop-killer for most simple uses.

    BTW, they make more money and give up less control and ownership with an IPO than with more VC.

  • I don't agree with your argument that
    two products which are similar cannot
    both survive. Look at Coke and Pepsi,
    Dell and Gateway, Nike and Reebok, Wendy's
    and Burger King, etc.

    It will probably help the palm platform to
    have two manufacturers of palm hardware.
    WinCE devices are manufactured by lots of
    companies, and although the OS may be a reason
    for poor sales, the fact that those devices all
    run the same OS is not.

    Sure, 3Com could put Handspring out of business
    if it wanted to. 3com is probably
    happy to have another company expanding the palm
    platform as a whole.

    Also, since the creators of Handspring are the original innovators who created
    the original Palm, there are
    positive social forces working in everyone's favor.

  • Isn't everyone able to get at the IPO (Initial Public Offering)? I'm clueless about stock markets.
  • Dunno. It may be that since they're delivering an actual tangible product, it may be just the right time for investors who want to believe in the new economy, but are getting cold feet about companies whose worth they don't feel capable of judging because the hype is starting to curdle and they can't see it/don't understand it.

    Handspring has taken a fair amount of heat for their order fulfilment problems, but on the other hand I've heard very little except good things about the Visor itself. Moreover, the tide seems to be really shifting towards handhelds and suddenly products aimed at/solutions meant for seem to be abounding. It's the sort of situation that can spark market interest, IMO. (deserved or not is another story)

    Might do okay. *shrug*

  • In case you didn't notice, on Feb 9, 2000, major shareholders of RHAT sold big holdings. They got $90.73 to $95 a share.

    Now, Red Hat has done a lot for Linux, and I'm happy the guys who put their sweat into the company got to get rich for real, and not just on paper, but look at the stock. It's now trading in the lower $40s.

    I
  • OK... I was bad and didn't preview my post. This is the correct link for WinUAE [codepoet.com], just in case any other ex-Amiga [amiga.com] hackers give a fsck.


    "The axiom 'An honest man has nothing to fear from the police'

  • Can us /.ers get in on this IPO?

  • The value of a share of a public company is a representation of expected future revenues. It is not a representation of the current worth of an organization. Any modern financial analyst would agree. (see below) Red Hat is at an acceptable level now. The one true disgrace that pops into my mind is VA Linux. It opened at ~$300 on it's first day, and closed ~$150. It was purely a victim of hype and ignorance.

    IPOs in technology, communications and biotech routinely open at twice their initial offering price or more. A correction of 10 percent in the tech sector is viewed jubilantly as a buying opportunity. And Internet start-up stocks seem to rise in direct correlation to how much money they lose from one quarter to the next.

    All of which, upon reflection, is perfectly natural.

    The fact is that the market never really rewards anybody for what they do today. The market rewards you for what it thinks you will do in the future. In a period of relative economic stability, earnings can be viewed as a great predictor of future performance, which is why the P/E ratio has been such an important measuring stick for so long. But in a period of relative market turbulence, like the period we're in now - when there is great consensus that the assets, infrastructure and business models of the future will be radically different than those of today - the earnings you report this quarter may have very little to do with tomorrow's earnings.     --Hugh L. McColl, Jr., Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Bank of America
    (Remarks to the John's Island Club)
  • You can even get translator software [lhsl.com] for your Palm now. Who needs Babelfish?!
  • So you say that anyday now we should expect Palm to drop all their lisencees?

    Interestingly, this IPO filing occurs on the same week that they even have their _only_ product in the retail channel (not counting direct mail-order/web sales).

    Supposedly Handspring has a few other products in the pipe (from an interview [visorcentral.com] when the Visor was initially avilable). Maybe they need the cash from an IPO to follow through with them. Though I would think that it really woudn't be that hard for them to get most any VC that they need.

    -mark
  • Well, I'm not sure the Crusoe processor can be considered for this specific market because,
    The bad news is that the market for web pads is basically nonexistent, limiting Transmeta's potential sales. Crusoe burns too much power for today's most popular portable web device, the Palm VII. But this market could grow to tens of millions of units over the next five years, and Transmeta is poised to grow along with it.

    - Linley Gwennap, founder and principal analyst of The Linley Group, a technology analysis firm in Mt. View, CA. He is a former editor in chief of Microprocessor Report. And this text is from Linux Journal, April 2000, page 131 -

    Ok, he may be wrong, I don't know much about the hardware, however, given the fact that the sales are potentially huge for Palm devices and the like, I suspect more the IPO as a mean to position Handspring for the next wave.

    BTW, for those looking at cheap WindowsCE handhelded devices, they are near to give one free to each buyer of Linux, any distro, in the computer stores, here. They accumulate dust and are not shown on the front of displays...

  • Sure, /.ers are not a market for PDAs. However, with the pricing of the hardware decreasing quickly in that market. Few companies, if any, can afford the cost of an operating system which will not decrease as fast or faster in order to preserve profit margins.

    With a 0 $ operating system, a company is in pretty good shape to concentrate on hardware and functionality.

  • The disparaging remarks about the gluttonous IPO mongers are well taken . . . but for god's sake can't we figure out how to take advantage of the moment and leave virtue to the saints? We can join them in their righteous now - or beg forgiveness for our sins from the deck of our party barge somewhere off the coast of New Caledonia, the wine chilling in the hold, the harem toasting on the deck, the resident symphony warming up for their performance of Mahler 5. Serious questions: Should the /. crowd agitate for a cut of the stock in trade for its influencial participation in the technology culture that is propelling palm computing today? What would be an equitable division of shares of a block of stock reserved for Slashdot?

  • another one? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    "IPO". The next time I hear this word I think I'm going to be sick.

    Don't any of you people remember the lessons of 1929? This insane drive to make as many irresponsible investments as possible, each one based on the "greater fool" theory, is going to send our economy back to the virtual Stone Age if we don't start behaving sanely sometime soon.

    Yahoo, Amazon, Red Hat, VA Linux - do ANY of these companies have ANY reason whatsoever to have the stock prices that they do? No. Of course not -- over the long run, everybody who gets stuck holding the bag here is going to get it, and get it hard - and with the current herd mentality, that's going to be a whole bunch of people.

    So I'd like to lead the charge for sane investment here - IF THE COMPANY DOESN'T HAVE PROFITS, IT'S NOT WORTH MONEY. Basic, basic math, people - you own the company, if it doesn't make money, how can you?

    So shame on Handspring for contributing to the madness, and let's all try to make inevitable bursting of the bubble as painless as possible by curbing this mania that so many people seem to have.
  • I recently applied to Handspring for a summer internship. Turns out that the only thing I lacked (compared to the people who went on to the "next round of cuts") was that I hadn't developed applications for PalmOS before.

    Sucks to know that had I just spent a week or two developing a few apps, I mighta been a lot richer this summer :P
  • What do you mean, all my claims are factually incorrect? It's not April 1st anymore.

    Every single thing I said was true. The Visor comes with 8M and an USB cradle; and companies have developed all of the things I listed. To deny this is to waste our time.

    -Billy
  • Have you looked at the power requirements for even the weakest transmeta chip? It would burn through a battery in only a day. The Visor takes several days of continuous use to use up a pair of AAAs.

    Transmeta is WAY cool, but it can't compete against the Palm yet.

    -Billy
  • Good info. Also useful is the Palm Open Source area, at <a href="http://www.openhandheld.org/software.html">t he Open Palm Group</a>; not many compilers, but a lot of good examples.

    Also, Quartus Forth isn't open source, but there's a decent amount of open source stuff written for it, and it's easy to work with interactively.

    -Billy
  • I own a Handspring Visor Pro (one of those wicked icy blue ones) and although I'm sure investors are going to go mad over this, I don't know whether I would buy into the company.

    What are the benefits of a visor that Palm computing can't replicate? I'm not sure they number above three or four.

    1) sane pricing for once (this was my big incentive)
    2) cool expansible port
    3) the PalmOS rep and the notion that this is what a "pure" Palm should be like

    You can bet that (2) will be mimicked soon universally, especially in the beefier WinCE's. I believe Palm Computing is already working on this?

    The pricing issue is not a very effective barrier to Palm Computing, since they can easily offer a stripped down version that eats into Handspring's share. Even had the Visor been considerably less powerful, I would still have purchased it due to the pricing. I have just enough clutter in my life to justify a palmtop, but not enough to make the difference between 4mb RAM and 8mb significant.

    Finally, I suppose OS is a matter of preference, but there are some functionality problems I've encountered with the version that runs on the Visor. And unlike the hardware extensibility, the OS cannot be upgraded, at least in the current models.

    Unless Palm Computing is brainless and doesn't offer a lower end model for entry-level newbies like myself, I don't see how Handspring is ultimately going to differentiate itself. The simple fact is that it is too similar to a Palm to survive.

    That all said, I wish I had $500 bucks for a wicked cool WinCE device.... Ooooh! Heresy! :)

    -konstant
    Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
  • It's true. Nobody has developed anything for the Visor's expansion port. I feel sorry for all the people who got a Visor thinking they could do cool stuff with new hardware coming out. It'll never happen.

    Handspring isn't stupid. They saw how the Palm IPO went and they know Transmeta's Crusoe is going to revolutionize the PDA/Wireless market. Gotta cash out while the going is good.
  • The value of a share of a public company is a representation of expected future revenues.

    Whoa there. That's the kind of thinking that got us into this bubble in the first place. Replace "revenues" with "profits" and we'll be in better shape.

  • Just a brief note or two about CE devices. I support the little devils, and they are as close to awful as anything I have ever encountered. Yes, they can do a number of things that Palm devices can't right now, but from a support standpoint they are not worth it. I support about a thousand users, many of them with handhelds. Probably 2/3 of the handheld users have Palms. We average less than 1 call per month about a Palm misbehaving. We probably average 50 or more calls a month from the CE users. CE devices, from my experience, are unable to communicate with their desktop counterparts, for useful things like synchronization, a majority of the time. Most of our folks have HP Jornadas, and maybe part of the problem is with those devices specifically. From what I've seen though, CE has a habit of crashing randomly in a manner strongly reminiscent of Win 9X. So, my whole point in this diatribe boils down to the fact that Palm devices, and consequently their manufacturers, will be more successful than their more pricey Win CE counterparts, at least in the foreseeable future, because they are simply better designed products. I, for one, am willing to accept a little less functionality for greater stability, lower cost, and the ability to use it with the desktop operating system of my choice.
  • So I'd like to lead the charge for sane investment here - IF THE COMPANY DOESN'T HAVE PROFITS, IT'S NOT WORTH MONEY.

    And to prove this point one of the top 10 ecommerce websites that received over 5 million visits in the month of February is not worth the the money in my savings account. Don't take my word for it look at their share price (CDNW [zdii.com]) and listen to what financial auditors have said here [yahoo.com] and here [zdnet.com].
    A choice quote from an analyst from one of the articles is "I could buy CDNow with what I've got in my wallet right now,'' Sinnreich said. ``The question right now is -- is it worth the expense? Not just the dollar value, but the expense of integrating CDNow into an existing property."
    Other dot comms that are now officially on their last legs despite well received IPOs are Dr. Koop(KOOP [zdii.com]), the online grocer Peabod(PPOD [zdii.com]) as well as Value America (VSUA [yahoo.com]).
    Considering that 3 of the above companies had business plans that involved being loss leaders ("Sell lots of stuff at a loss until no more competition then jack up prices") while the fourth (Dr. Koop) never had a business model, it makes one wonder about the sanity of investors and CEOs alike. It looks like the bottom has begun to drop out of the dot comm industry. Hopefully in a few years this embarrassing era will be viewed for what it truly is...a time of insanity. I wonder if Netpliance [slashdot.org] as well as other Loss Leaders are paying attention to this fundamental rule of business in effect.

    PS:Guess the only thing of value CDNow has left? That's right, their vast database of user information, addresses and buying habits. It's going to be like the collapse of the USSR and all those missing nukes all over again.
    PPS: Even with all this news some cretin still plans to buy the domain name cool.com for $38 million [zdnet.com].

  • Uh, what exactly do you see as being the benefit of a Linux-based PDA? I think most people believe that two of the major benefits of Linux are reliability and security, neither of which are currently big issues in the PDA market. Security is clearly a non-issue, and reliability requirements aren't even marginally as important as they are on server and desktop based applications.

    On the other hand, some extremely important issues in PDA design are useability and user interface, two areas where Linux is behind many of its competitors.

    Nobody except Slashdotters want to hack on their PDA. Most people want to bring up some names and addresses, jot a few notes, maybe play a game or read a document, read e-mail, browse the web. The PalmOS currently handles all these things pretty gracefully. Slashdotters, as self important as they are, are not a major market share in the PDA world, and won't make even a minor dent into the marketplace.
    * mild mannered physics grad student by day *

  • Now that Apache has been released for their PalmOS, they have just enough buzzwords in their company description to go public. Today, they obtain: Apache, OpenSource and HTTP. They where really hoping for the buzzword 'Linux', but developers are still working on the port.

    CEO Jim E. Prefertion was quoted as saying "Due to the release of Apache, the number 1 web server on the Internet, PalmOS is now going to change direction, go public, and compete head on with the major Internet players, like Sun, Linux and Microsoft."

  • There isn't too much information in the article to get excited about, or much that is interest to the /. crowd. So, in the interests of providing some (hopefully) interesting content...

    For anyone interested in developing apps for PalmOS [palm.com], there is a GPL'ed Palm emulator [palm.com]; which borrows code from other neat GPL'ed projects - UAE: The Ultimate Amiga Emulator [linux.de] and WinUAE [codepoet.com] (the windoze port).
    "The axiom 'An honest man has nothing to fear from the police'

  • Forgive the pun.... it was just too easy.

    But seriously, what's the deal? There have been at least 3 /. articles on the Palm today. Did Andover buy 3Com now or something?

    Or maybe Hemos just bought himself a Palm VII, and he's just a tad over-excited about it...

    ==

  • Re:Handspring's service problems (Score:3)

    by William Tanksley ( 1752 ) on Friday March 31, 2000 @02:41PM (#1158460)
    What do you _mean_ a IIIe offers the same stuff? It has six megs less memory -- two megs versus the Visor's eight.

    And it's NOT true that nobody's developed anything for the port; they've developed Bluetooth, AirPort, modems, flash backup, general flash, a pager, two-way pagers, radio, a digital camera, MP3 players (one of which allows you to add up to 128M of RAM to the unit), and more.

    These things have not only been developed, they've been demonstrated. It's true that they're not shipping, but claiming that they'll therefore never ship is royally stupid.

    Oh, and you don't have to buy the cradle seperately; it comes with the unit. Always has. It uses USB, too, so it's a HECK of a lot faster than the Pilot's cradle.

    -Billy

  • Re:Too little too late? (Score:3)

    by tomreagan ( 24487 ) on Friday March 31, 2000 @10:24AM (#1158461)
    I'm impressed by the folks at Handspring, and I think they have a really good product, but I have to wonder about the IPO bit. Those who saw Caldera's IPO a couple of weeks ago probably noticed that it was less impressive.
    ...
    I'm not entirely certain that becoming publicly traded carries the same amount of glitz and glamour that it did a year or two ago.

    I don't think that this is a question of glitz and glamour, or even a question of the relative value of handspring. I think that the market is just going sour on IPOs b/c of market pressures.

    The announcement the other day that US GDP was up 7.8% in the fourth quarter is going to pretty much guarantee that Greenspan will raise rates 2-4 more times this year. As a result, the market has gone haywire over the past few days, as people are reluctant to hold tech stocks at any price. So, even though companies are growing and the economy is booming, the market is suffering b/c of long term predictions.

    That being said, this doesn't make the IPO necessarily a bad idea. If this is nothing more than a get rich quick scheme, then you are in trouble. If you need to raise capital on a large scale, however, this is the way to do it. And don't forget that companies with solid fundamentals and a hotly-demanded product are still doing well, like IBM and Cisco. At the same time, don't think that prices will go through the roof as frequently anymore, because the market has the fear of Greenspan in them.

    So, all in all, a sound business move, and probably not an extraordinary event.

  • Palm was like Apple until Handspring (Score:3)

    by ballestra ( 118297 ) on Friday March 31, 2000 @10:41AM (#1158462) Homepage
    Palm should welcome the competition from Handspring. It makes the Palm OS more widely accepted, while keeping their feet to the fire on hardware. The result will be the dominance of Palm OS over CE. The competition seems to be quite friendly, since the two product can work together harmoniously. It ends up benefitting consumers as well, by encouraging hardware innovation and keeping prices competitive.

    The only advantage that WinCE had over Palm was that there was healthy competition among the hardware makers. That advantage is now gone. (Oh, and color, too)

    I predict the HS IPO will be very successful and that HS and Palm will both be very healthy companies for some time to come as they take more and more marketshare away from WinCE.

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