Apple to Buy out Palm?

JFlex writes "According to a story over at Personal Computer World 'Speculation that Apple plans to buy handheld maker Palm has been revived by a call from two leading Palm investors for the company to be put up for sale, according to the local paper of both companies.'"

Comments

Translation: We want to make money with hype

[denis-The-menace]

According to a story over at Personal Computer World [two leading Palm investors have created the]Speculation that Apple plans to buy handheld maker Palm [in order to drive up the stock price before they dump it and make loads of $$$.]

Re:In other news...

[cabjf]

But then again, so has the "Apple to switch to Intel" rumor.

Good idea

[ZachPruckowski]

Apple could jump back into the market with the Blackberry struggling/in limbo, and offer the sort of solution they're famous for - one which somehow integrates all parts of the product's chain. They could stick Safari on it, and have it synchonize histories and emails with the home iMac/mini, as well as having some sort of iDisk related fun (which will have to drop in price).

Palm has access to interesting IP on their hands

[Coutal]

These come to mind:

* BeOS/BeIA code: no idea how relevant it is today, but could still prove worthwhile.

* Palm-sized device expertise: maybe some of the knowledge and technologies palm has could go to make an even-better iPod. (can't wait to see that).

* Application Base: maybe we're going to see an app translator?

* Synchronization software: maybe newer iPods will need to sync apps and documents too. might want to have access to well-established code for that.

Buying palm, or buying BeOS?

[AVee]

I must admit to not being completely up to date with the whole BeOS saga. But afaik the last company to own BeOS was Palm. And yes, I know about yellowTAB's ZETA, but they never claimed to actually own any of the BeOS code.

So it might just be it's not palm, but BeOS they are after. Which might fit into the whole Apple X86 thing.

I don't see much value

[AKAImBatman]

I'm rather suspicious of this story, in part because I don't see Palm adding much value to Apple. When the Palm Pilot was popular, the fact that so much could be fit in such a small device was nothing short of amazing. It was also a useful little tool for all kinds of data organization. But now? Palm's OS is older than the hills, designed for hardware limits that no longer matter. Palm has been using bits of trickery to extend the limits of their OS, but at the end of the day they just need something new that takes advantage of modern, low-power hardware.

Another problem is that Palm has been about as phlegmatic as you can get when it comes to promoting their market. If they were like Apple, they could have sewn up the electronic book market years ago. Instead, they seem content to allow the rest of the market to make half-hearted attempts at producing solutions. That just isn't going to work. If Palm wants to grab the e-reader market (a market for which they are extremely well suited), they need to follow Apple's lead and grab the bull by the horns. Since they show no signs of doing this, I see nothing but signs of decline for Palm.

If Apple wants to enter the handheld market (again), I see them developing a new device with a high-resolution, high-pixel density screen. They would then try to add the ability to show documents are precisely as possible, utilizing scaling algorithms. (Many books and documents suffer if their layout is changed a la Acrobat Pocket.) These features could be easily built into a new device OS by Apple engineers rather than trying to overhaul the aging Palm OS.

They would then market it with a new "catchy" Apple brand like "iHand" or "iBooklet", and either integrate it into a new eBook/Portable App section of iTunes, or develop a new iTunes-like app.

So given this scenario, where does the Palm value come in? The name? Nope. Apple would want consistent branding. The OS? No way. Palm is so full of cruft I swear that the developers are ready to shoot it. The device designs? Never. They're way too far behind the curve.

So I think I'm going to go with "rumor" on this one.

Re:Newton-Palm Hybrid

[Feneric]

I think there's some truth to the parent post. A single PDA that merged the best features of both the Newton and the Palm could be really slick. While I'll assume that most people reading this are pretty familiar with the Palm and what it has to offer, I recognize that the Newton may be a bit more of a mystery. I blogged a bit about what the Newton has to offer in 2006 elsewhere and won't repeat it all here.

The Newton has actually been mentioned on various news sites a lot lately, due largely in part to the recent Worldwide Newton Conference but also because of recent advances like the Einstein project and the Newton book reader for Firefox.

I'm personally hoping that maybe some of its innovative user interface ideas get carried over into other projects. Obviously Apple's current Ink tablet handwriting recognition system is a direct port from the Newton. Less obviously perhaps is that its Dock removal animation is, too.

there is a lot of value!

[feranick]

Here the situation: Apple is looking (it's not a secret) in penetrating the smartphone market. They experimented with Motorola, but didn't seem to work well. The Treo would be Perfect for Apple (Jobs praised the Treo some time ago).

Palm on the other end has a great device (the Treo) and some farily good ones (the high end PDAs, such as the Tungsten TX). The weakest link is currently the OS. It seems that they are hanging around using a bit of everything. PalmOS in its current version (5.4) is a dinosaur, patched to make it running modern applications. Palm does NOT own PalmOS, being developed by PalmSource, a separate coumpany own by the Japanese company ACCESS. Palm has no control over PalmOS. THey have the 700w running windows targeting consumers. They would like to use Linux too. basically they have no direction, developing a new OS wouldn't go into a device before 2-3 years. Palm would gain A LOT from Apple. An OS to start with, either a scaled down version of MacOSX, or a scaled up version of whatever OS inside an iPod.

It's a win-win deal, that should have been done long ago!

Re:Newton-Palm Hybrid

[Kadin2048]

Frankly, I don't know what the hype about iPod-phones is...the ability to play MP3s from your phone has been around for several years. My Cingular 2125 (HTC Tornado, rebranded), much like other smartphones/PDA phones, has a MiniSD slot and I can watch videos and listen to music with it.

The hype about "iPod phones" is that they'd have a MP3-playing phone that's the ease-of-use equivalent of the iPod.

The iPod, just as a hardware device, is admittedly slick, but it's not that wonderful. It's a hard drive, a funny-shaped battery, a microprocessor, and some controls in a white Lexan box. What gives it most of its value is the integration with iTunes and the automatic syncronization/updating. It's totally brainless -- you never have to worry about what music is on your portable versus what is on your computer (assuming you have one of the larger iPods). When the iPod first came out, this was the selling feature for it, compared to other, smaller-capacity players. You plugged it in, it did its thing, and you could grab the player and go.

I don't know of a cellphone that offers that. You have to add or copy the songs manually, and that's a drag; geeks might be okay with it, but a whole lot of mainstream consumers won't, especially if they use iTunes as their jukebox/music-manager already. People have come to expect total integration from a music player, and anything that offers less just isn't going to fly.

I owned a pre-iPod, flash-based music player. It was called the Pontis, and it was pretty forward-thinking when it was released. It used MMC cards, so the capacity was virtually unlimted, it had great battery life, and it was rugged as hell. But it sucked. It sucked because any time you wanted to add more music to it, you had to fire up a separate program and move the files to it. Later I think they achieved some jukebox integration, but it was with programs that were clunky (Musicmatch) and generally less elegant than iTunes. This is about where cellphones are now; nobody has figured out how to really integrate a cellular phone with the computer, in the same way that Apple integrated the MP3 player.

IMO, it's relentlessly stupid to involve a cable in this integration. A cellphone's integration should be even more transparent than the iPod's, because it ought to do it all wirelessly. Make a playlist in iTunes, and the next time you bring your phone within Bluetooth range of the computer, it gets updated (along with your Address Book, Calendar, etc.). When you have that kind of seamlessness, you will have an iPod equivalent. Otherwise, all you have is a Pontis equivalent.

Re:In other news...

[kisrael]

Palm had a decent run. 1996-200...3? 4?

Around 2001 I was still amazed at how much more usable it was than the winCE alternatives.

It's still my favorite PIM UI, much more elegant than Outlook. I use a Sony Clie regularly. I guess Palm just slipped up in the behind the scenes technology, as well as some of the integration w/ the Outlook Hegemony.

Newton was cooler in many ways, but didn't understand the criticial formfactor issue, and then became a political target.

Perfect? Like Neck stretched over chopping block?

[Gary W. Longsine]

Palm is in the perfect position to build the device.

There really isn't anything obvious that Palm can offer to such an effort that Apple doen't already have a demonstrated ability to do without Palm.

In fact, stretched out over the chopping block, Palm really isn't in the perfect postion to do much of anything. Consider what has been thought to be their core asset for many years -- PalmOS, a system designed from the ground up to run on light weight mobile devices. The software quality is crap, and had been for years. Phone vendors are giving up on PalmOS. Palm is giving up on PalmOS. What do they have left? A few patents, a few hardware and software engineers and Grafiti. Well, honestly, I preferred the handwriting recognition in Newton (presently in suspended animation known as InkWell). The quality of other Palm software (which runs on the PC systems they connect with) is even worse, and demonstrates a deep lack of concern for the user experience of their customers. This leads me to suspect that if you scratch the surface, Palm is really not very much Apple-like in corporate culture in many ways.

No offense intended to those of you who might still work there, but the quality of PalmOS doesn't exactly scream, "Hey, buy the company because you'll get a great engineering team!"

The point is: There are undoubtedly a few good engineers left at Palm, but Apple can simply hire the good ones. They don't need to buy the company and get layers of clearly innefective mangement, legions of pissed off customers, and legacy technology baggage like PalmOS and HotSync as part of the deal.