Kara Swisher

Recent Posts by Kara Swisher

Palm: Those Were the Videos, My Friend, I Thought Roger McNamee Would Never End (Up Selling)

palmlady

With rumors flying hither and yon about the sale of Palm–likely to an Asian company, such as HTC or Lenovo–BoomTown is getting all misty for those days of hope that the little innovative smartphone pioneer might actually prevail against the giants.

Not for the creepy lady in the advertising for the Pre, mind you, but everything else.

Thus, here are three videos in which the dream was still alive at Palm (PALM).

The first, below, is an interview BoomTown did with Elevation Partners’ Roger McNamee, who sank $425 million into Palm and talks about the sky-high prospects for the company at the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show, where Palm was the belle of the geeks.

The second is from the seventh D: All Things Digital conference, where McNamee and Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein appeared in June 2009 to talk up the launch of the device.

In it, McNamee pooh-poohed the idea that Apple (AAPL) would care about the Palm Pre mimicking an iPhone in iTunes (which Apple did care about a lot) and had a delightful cat fight with me about the mirror on the phone for the “ladies.” It begins with a mock video Rubinstein and McNamee made for D7 in which they make fun of McNamee’s proclivity for telling tall tales about the Pre.

The third is a highlights reel from an interview I did with Rubinstein at this year’s CES, as well as a short clip from that interview of him telling me he had never touched an iPhone.

No, unfortunately, he never did.

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