Merril Lynch Upgrades Palm to Buy, Stock Breaks the $10 Mark

@Scoobie just pinged us on Twitter (you can too: right here) to let us know that Merril Lynch analyst Vivek Arya has just upgraded Palm to "Buy" and expects a good target for them will be $14.  Arya, like us here at PreCentral.net, notes that Sprint intends to go for broke with the Pre and believes that will spur pretty significant sales.  How significant? How about "2.5 million Pre smartphones in the 2009 second half; for 2010, he thinks the company could ship as many as 6.2 million phones."  Now, these are just analyst estimates (aka "shots in the dark"), but it does sound like a pretty good target for a successful (though not blockbuster) smartphone.

In any case, Palm's stock this morning seems to finally be up over the $10 per share mark, a number it's been flirting with for a few days now.  Before you get too excited, though, it's still well below the $17 it was trading at just before Palm completed its deal with Elevation partners and paid out a $9 cash distribution.

What does it mean to us?  Not much -- we're not financial analysts nor do we own any stock in Palm.  We are happy, however, to hear that Merril Lynch seems to think that the worst of Palm's cash woes will be behind them if the Pre is successful (though the risk in that department is still high).

Thanks Scoobie!