So it’s finally HP to the rescue. After all the talk around Lenovo, HTC, Huawei - Palm finally headed the HP way. Most of the talk on the management call was around Palm’s webOS and how it will prove beneficial to HP - whether further developing an app store or expanding the platform to netbooks and tablets.

I’ll look at it from a technological perspective a little later. For the moment, my U2 roots led me, with higher priority, to look at how Elevation Partners fared in the transaction.

Starting from 2007, the firm invested around $460 million in preferred and common shares and warrants. An analysis:

With a $5.7 per share acquisition price and considering the preference return of capital and other terms of investment, Elevation has a return of $485 million.

That’s a sigh of relief not a celebration.

I know it’s easier to be intelligent in hindsight but frankly, $16.25 per share in September 2009! What were they thinking....