HP to Acquire Palm
Last week HP announced that it is acquiring Palm for approximately $1.2 billion. The once thriving mobile device manufacturer, famous for its PDAs by the same name, was on the verge of collapse. They put the company up for sale hoping someone would take the bait, but few anticipated a major PC and server vendor like HP would be the one.
The Palm Pre and Palm Pixi smartphones received good reviews, but the sales did not equal the hype. At any rate, it was not the hardware that was viewed as so revolutionary but rather the software that ran on it. The Linux-based WebOS that Palm created was innovative and appealing to the eye. HP is quite capable of making its own mobile hardware, but WebOS was apparently attractive enough for the IT giant.
The move puts HP in direct competition with Microsoft, Apple, Nokia, and Google in the mobile operating system market, a market that Google is gradually securing for itself. Tech enthusiasts are already drooling at the prospects of a tablet, similar to the iPad, running Palm’s WebOS, which supports many of the multi-touch features that could have Apple and HTC in a long court battle.
HP says it has plans to scale WebOS across multiple connected devices, and they plan to increase the development rate, maintaining much of Palm’s existing structure. What this means is that there is now another major player in the open mobile platform market.
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Android has competition, and the amount of success HP has with WebOS will depend on how much community support they can actually draw for it. One could argue Palm did not truly understand open source development, and while HP has a track record of supporting Linux and other free software on their servers, development of an open platform is new for them. Will we see HP WebOS tablets soon? That is certainly a strong possibility. Will they be successful? That remains to be seen.
Tags: HP, HP to acquire palm, Palm, WebOS
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