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

Not good new for Palm

[Kefaa]

Other than a full license to Graffiti, there is little for Palm to offer. Don't get me wrong, I own a Palm Pilot and am probably one of the few left who love it.

However, I can easily see Apple producing a product of superior technology with as good an interface, based on the iPod. In fact, my iPod supports full motion video, gigs of data, and a simple interface. Start adding features and you face the Palm conundrum: How do you change the interface to a vastly successful product, and keep your customer base?

Part of Palm's other dilemma was its success. I have had the same Palm Pilot since it came out five years ago. It does everything I need, it syncs to my desktop, keeps outlook happy (oops that may be an Apple issue), and allows me to handle the things I want to. It will be interesting to see if iPod suffers the same issues.

If you want to make me a happy camper - make an iPod version with a nice 4" screen, support for palm like applications (notebook, address book, calendar, etc.) and support Ebook formats. Then provide a truly open development environment. One of the great things about palm was how many 3rd part applications were available because Palm wined and dined independent developers. But that means you (the platform owner) do not control everything on your platform.

Such a tool would allow me to hold my videos, books, and all the last things my palm does today. But none of these require palm to provide.

But wait -- what about the phone? Forget it. While some people do use the phone to replace the palm, most never do much but store phone numbers. Further, people are used to a phone being replaced every two years - for free. That is a market that pays for itself in the marketing of minutes. Not a good place to play.

And PALM stock if off a little this morning

[Cujo]

So, the market doesn't believe the rumor either

Does this mean that BEOS is coming back? :)

[stoicio]

Wow! Great news.
Maybe they will dump OSX and make a 64 bit version of BEOS!!!!
YAY!!!!
We all knew Jobs couldn't keep his hands off BEOS. ;)

(I'm being levitous)

This is just one of those rumors..

[Dutchmaan]

It's comes up from time to time, "Apple is going to buy Palm!" "Apple is creating a version of their OS to work with Intel chips!" .. . . err.... uh.... hmmm.

Re:Newton-Palm Hybrid

[cp.tar]

Newton or no Newton, I feel this is great.

Palm is - at least from where I'm standing - being pushed out from the market.

This is therefore probably good for both Palm and Apple... it's just that I probably won't be able to afford one of those.

*sigh*

Re:Good for Apply Maybe, good for Palm - NO!

[iamacat]

Huh? Bank switching? Palm has a flat memory space. You can unprotect all the databases with MemSemaphoreReserve(true), do your dids and do MemSemaphoreRelease(true). The only catch is that blocking system calls like sockets or waiting for user events do not work while the semaphore is locked. If you need memory blocks > 64K, just use FtrNew.

While the OS is kind of primitive, writing, testing and publishing a small program for the original 68K devices used to be much easier than for WinCE or QTopia PDAs that existed at the same time. There is a nearly-perfect hardware emulator, Metrowerks supports C++ exceptions unlike embedded VC++ and on-device debugger is perfectly usable even over the serial port. It's too bad they decided to go with the hideous Eclipse/cygwin based thingy for native ARM development.

Apple will do the right thing

[gone.fishing]

Apple is sitting on a boatload of money and has a couple of hot products that will continue to show amazing growth for the near future at least. Like the Sony Walkman before it, the iPod line is an industry leader that can command a higher price than it's immitators.

The Palm products look like a good match for Apple. Like the iPod they are personal, portable devices that litterally define the niche they fill. They don't exactly compete with the iPod but are technological cousins that could be combined into a killer product.

Having said that, I'm not so sure that Apple needs Palm. Why would they? They have a partnership with Motorola where their product is already married to a phone which incorporates many of the most necessary features of the Palm devices! It seems to me that it may be a smarter move to work with Motorola to come up with a product that is one thrid cel phone, one third iPod, and one third PDA. This would cut their risk in half and would be far less expensive than buying another company outright. The only downside would be that they would have to share revenue with another company. I'm not even sure that would be so bad, the Motorola production capability combined with the Apple marketing savy may mean they could sell far more units than if they tried this on their own.

So, while Palm may look like an attractive pickup, once you got into bed with her, maybe the excitement wouldn't be there (and you would certainly offend your current partner.) Maybe staying in the marriage that you already have is a better option although far less exciting.

I don't know all the angles to this. What I do know is that the Apple managment has been savy enough in the past to recognize opportunity and also understand their market far better than anyone else. This is the primary reason why they are where they are today. Anyone else who has followed the path they did would have fallen in one too many potholes and been burried. Apple is still in the race. This tells me buy or no-buy, they will make the right decision.

Re:Newton-Palm Hybrid

[David Rolfe]

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.

I've made this comment before (to jcr in fact). If Ink is a direct port from the Newton, they broke it along the way. I have bugs filed (if you could search them) the describe this. I'll give you the short version first: Pull out your tablet on your Mac, write the word 'Rosetta' in cursive (and as typical for most writers, cross both Ts at once). On a Newton MP 2100 it will correctly translate this to 'Rosetta' 100% of the time for me. With Ink it gets translated to 'RoseHa' 100% of the time. Somewhere between Newton's 'Rosetta' handwriting recognition and OS X's 'Ink' recognition, they forgot how to 1) understand cursive, 2) learn user handwriting, 3) allow training of the recognizer, 4) allow the insertion caret to be used for punctuation, 5) correctly understand editing gestures in (almost) all cases -- ever try to join a broken word with Ink?.

For completeness sake, let me include that old bug report (which includes a snippet from a thread jcr and I had going about Ink's flaws compared to the Newton): https://bugreport.apple.com/ Problem ID: 3828160 (this bug is still marked "Open")

06-Oct-2004 02:53 AM David Rolfe:
Steps to reproduce:

Write the word "Rosetta" crossing both Ts at once.

Expecteed Results:

As opposed to the expected "Rosetta" appearing in the Ink Window (or current text field, instead a result similar to "RoseHa" will appear.

Workaround:

Write slowly, and unnaturally. Avoid mixed-printing. Never use cursive.

For more information, I provide this summary from a conversation with an non-Apple (third party) OS X developer. I outline other bugs and missing features below. Especially, THE LACK OF A PUNCTUATION POP-UP ATTACHED TO THE INSERTION CARET IN THE INK WINDOW. Would it be appropriate to file that as another bug/feature?

----
I certainly have not spent as much time training Ink [compared to the time spent using the Newton MP2100, which I use as a baseline for comparison]. For one, it doesn't have the quick interface to teach a misrecognized word (you know: double tap, select correct guess) even in the 'Ink Window' where they try to emulate the Newton environment. Second, clicking on the caret in the Ink Window doesn't give a punctuation pop-up like the Newton, which makes punctuating things written in Ink a CHORE; good thing Apple doesn't make computers without keyboards these days... Otherwise your punctuation would he half-assed as it tries to guess whether something is a period or an accidental tap. Finally, Ink in 10.3 doesn't supply some training app like the Newton's prefs, the closest option is specifically adding words to a list that it frequently gets wrong, or that it can't dictionary guess. This list doesn't even learn (i.e. it doesn't automatically populate with a list of words that the recognizer knows it had a low confidence score on).

I know Ink is an afterthought -- Apple can't seriously consider Ink to be a 'solution' as it stands today. I'll give it two things though - the scribble sound it plays while you write sure is cute and it's fun to be able to include doodles right into iChat. However, you could not use an iBook, feasibly, without a keyboard, and get the same range of functionality as a heavy, 10 year old MP 2100.

I know again I'm coming off like some kind of freak -- but really, the Newton could tell when you crossed two Ts at once, and that chokes Ink in OS X -- so whatever changes they made since its [Rosetta's?] implementation on the ARM and the PPC they broke it.

I mean seriously JCR -- do you have both [an MP and a tablet equipped Mac]? Can you