Handspring's cautious debut as a public company yesterday saw the company's share price grow 34.69 per cent, which sounds good, but when you're only starting at $20, in fact leaves you only $6.93 up on the deal.

Still, colossal growth of the kind seen in previous hi-tech IPOs wasn't to be expected. Palm may have shot up to $165 from $38 on its first day of trading, but that was before Wall Street decided it wasn't too keen on technology stocks after all.

Palm is now trading at around $27.75. The relevance of Palm to Handspring lies not only in the latter's use of the PalmOS in its own products but the fact that both companies were founded by the same team: Donna Dubinsky and Jeff Hawkins.

Handspring stock reached a peak of 28.25 before closing at 26.93, market capping the handheld computing specialist at $3.6 billion. ®

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