What he meant to say...Palm scrambles to correct its own investor's comments

Elevation Partners' Managing Director and Co-Founder Roger McNamee -- whose firm has a big stake in the restoration of Palm -- was interviewed by Bloomberg last week, both for television and print, discussing the upcoming launch of the Palm Pre. This morning, Palm issued everything short of a full retraction of McNamee's statements, in a statement filed with no less than the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

McNamee's casual and plain-spoken rapport with Bloomberg interviewers raised eyebrows in the tech community and has led Palm to print a disquisition of McNamee's statements.

Some of the highlights of McNamee's television spot included off-the-cuff statements about the iPhone ("For media they're fantastic, but our product is just going to run rings around it on the Web,") about the Palm Pre ("We think that women are going to find it very attractive,") and about 3G network operators, ("If you're using 3G, you're just going to be happier on Sprint or on Verizon than you are on AT&T.")

McNamee's statements in the printed Bloomberg interview went even further, saying, "June 29, 2009, is the two-year anniversary of the first shipment of the iPhone. Not one of those people will still be using an iPhone a month later," and also, "The underlying technology for Research In Motion Ltd.'s BlackBerry is about 13 years old, while the technology behind the iPhone goes back almost nine years."

While Palm attached a lot of quantifiers to statements McNamee made in the television interview, it withdrew the later statements as exaggerated predictions of consumer behavior, and inherently imprecise.