The latest news from Bloombery says that Palm is putting itself up for sale and has retained Goldman Sachs and Qatalyst Partners to find a suitable buyer, with Lenovo and HTC as potential suitors. The news come as somewhat of a surprise considering that the company has consistently denied any suggestions that it may be putting itself for sale, with CEO Jon Rubenstein vehemently denying such rumors and speculations just days ago to Fortune.

Robenstein said several days prior that Palm has made some mis-steps and had miscalculated its Palm Pre exclusivity with Sprint. Rubenstein says that the Pre is a superior product, with webOS, to the Motorola Droid and would have garnered more marketshare on Verizon Wireless had the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus launched before their Android competitor.

Rubenstein has insinuated the parallels with Apple being in the trenches over a decade ago and the situation that Palm is in right now. By making the implicit connection to Apple, it could be inferred that Palm would invest in more research and development and come out on top without having to solicit itself to a buyout.

Yes, with two and a half percent market share. When I got to Apple the company was dying. We brought out the iMac, and the company was really successful, and then the economy cratered, and we went through a major dip, which took like two years to dig our way out of. And during that time period we invested very heavily in R&D and Wall Street was very unhappy with us, because the numbers looked ugly. But then when the economy turned, we had a bunch of really cool products ready to go, the iPod being one of them, and the company quickly scaled up to the point where the economics just made sense.

Palm has a strong reputation in the USA and with the enterprise market and the sale of the company would definitely mark the end of an era. At one point, Palm was the dominant PDA maker and has produced some strong industrial designs, including the Palm V and the Treo line of smartphones.

Neither HTC, Lenovo, nor Palm are commenting on the matter, but Bloomberg is saying that Dell had pass on the deal. If any company buys Palm, they’ll not only inherit Palm’s strategic webOS advantage along with Palm’s patents.

(via: Engadget)