A Foolish Week of Telecom: General Motors Company (GM), Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ), Ford Motor Company (F)

Gimme five
Hewlett-Packard Company (NYSE:HPQ) was cleaning out its attic the other day and guess what it found? The last remnant of its $1.2 billion investment in Palm — the Palm webOS operating system.

HP’s ill-advised purchase of Palm had been pretty much written off by now, but apparently the Palm OS still has some value and life left in it.

LG Electronics bought the Palm OS from HP — at an undisclosed price — and plans to use it in their smart TVs. LG will also move some webOS staff into its Silicon Valley research and development facility.

You can say that again
A “transient roamer” is not a redundancy in the wireless world. It refers to mobile users avoiding their own networks’ roaming options when traveling. Transient roamers would rather pay for Wi-Fi hot spots or purchase SIM cards than pay conventional roaming charges.

But that roaming revenue being lost by the network providers is being scooped up by others.

Syniverse, a telecommunications services company, found that transient roamers spent more than $17 billion in 2012 as they sought alternative roaming connections.

TRs, let’s call them, spent $8.7 billion on hotel Wi-Fi, $3.9 billion at other paid Wi-Fi hotspots, about $225 million on in-flight Wi-Fi, and $4.8 billion for local SIM cards.

Coming proxy fight
MetroPCS Communications Inc (NYSE:PCS) is supposed to merge with T-Mobile USA sometime this spring — if it can get enough shareholders on board to approve the deal.

MetroPCS announced a special stockholders’ meeting planned for March 28 in Richardson, Texas, to vote on the proposal. But at least one shareholder has launched a campaign to nix the deal, saying that MetroPCS shareholders should have a greater share of the new company formed.

Texting: “a linguistic miracle happening right under our noses”
That is the opinion of Columbia linguistics professor John McWhorter, expressed at the TED conference in Long Beach, Calif.

“Texting is fingered speech,” he said. “Now we can write the way we talk.”

McWhorter called it “a whole new language,” and being able to speak more than one language is good for the brain.

LOL.

The article A Foolish Week of Telecom originally appeared on Fool.com and is written by Dan Radovsky.

Fool contributor Dan Radovsky owns shares of AT&T. The Motley Fool recommends Ford, General Motors, and Google. The Motley Fool owns shares of Ford and Google.

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