Quick! Which major cell phone manufacturer has performed the worst over the past two years in the stock market? If you have been reading business or technology publications lately, you would probably guess Palm. You’d be wrong. They are actually outperforming their non-Apple competitors Nokia, Motorola, RIM, and HTC (Source: Google Finance).

In fact, they are also second only to RIM in terms of interest in the U.S. judging from Google searches (Source: Google Insights).

The same holds true for blog posts (Source: The Nielsen Company, composited from two graphs).

Yet story after story opines the all but certain death of Palm along with its Pre and Pixi. About the only competing phone that gets as much anguish is the Nexus One. How many duds do other phone companies release? Countless. Why do we never hear about those?

What most writers also fail to mention is that Palm has a mere 1,000 employees. They don’t need to be #1 in sales to be successful. The next smallest company in this group is HTC at 8,000. Keeping up with these telecom behemoths at all is an impressive feat.

Many pundits keep telling Palm to build a webOS tablet. Probably to increase their “market cap”. Enter a new industry. Who cares if you succeed? Unfortunately Palm already got burned by listening to “experts” the first time around, when they kept clamoring for an iPhone killer.

Apple products are still the wrong targets, whether it’s the iPhone or the iPad. How many times must it be said? You can’t beat Apple at being cool.

If there is still any hope left in Sunnyvale, Palm should be aiming for RIM instead. Companies keep buying Blackberry phones up and I can’t understand why. Every Blackberry with a trackball seems to have problems. I’ve never met anyone who was happy with their Blackberry Storm. All of their software is outdated.

Of course the Palm Pre (Plus) is far from perfect, but it still has the best user interface, contact management, multitasking software, development environment, and notification system on the market. In short, everything you would want from a phone for the enterprise.

Jon, ignore the press. Your products are still winning awards. Just get a better advertising agency. And expand into new markets, not new industries. It’s tough to compete when your products are only in 10 countries.

Don’t let Palm turn into another Amiga!