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Bloomberg Reports That Palm Is Up For Sale
leetrout writes with this excerpt from a story at Bloomberg News "Palm Inc., creator of the Pre smartphone, put itself up for sale and is seeking bids for the company as early as this week, according to three people familiar with the situation."
AFAIK, Palm still owns BeOS.
Hopefully whoever buys them does something with it, or sells it to someone who will.
To expand on your point; Google lacks a great deal of intellectual property that puts them at legal risk from competitors such as RIM and Apple when it comes to their Android OS. A Google acquisition would spell a quick end to the HTC vs. Apple suit. On the other hand, if RIM, Apple, or Nokia acquires Palm, we can say hello to a torrent of lawsuits directed at every aspect of their respective smartphone manufacturing competitors.
As an aside, I don't think it would be bad if Microsoft purchased Palm, since Microsoft's smartphone IP is shallow at best. I would be happy to see a real Windows Mobile OS pop up that could cut it with iPhone OS or Android, and I don't think that WM 7 is going to do it.
One of their original flagship 'Pilot 5000' is my first PDA, and people can see the immense potential in it - a lightweight programmable widget. Few months after its first launch a guy called Adams set up a website to share homebrew Pilot's applications and games around the world, the era of Palm had since begun. (Regardless of million hits daily, Adams fold his website after marriage, by his wife's order. He should really regret it by now)
Palm was actually doing good until one day some pinheads in the management decided that sales is more important than technology advancement. It's amazing to see history repeated itself over and over again in tech world.
Another good line of products ruined by great management decision. Sad, really sad.
I just picked up a Palm Pre for Verizon *yesterday*. I was wondering why Verizon was basically giving these away... Now I know.
I (speculate/hope/hope-not) Apple might scoop in and buy them under HTC at the last minute. Palm has a nice portfolio of mobile technology patents, and letting HTC have them (besides making Apple-HTC lawsuit difficult) could be very damaging for them.
I'd say it looks better than iPhone OS, and that says something. I hope HTC (or Lenovo, or someone else competent) buys them (and their substantial patent portfolio) and makes an iPad competitor based on WebOS, just to piss off Apple. Steve Jobs will be livid -- any lawsuit will only bring an equal and opposite countersuit, and the software is Apple quality (indeed, much of it was written by ex-Apple engineers and designed by ex-Apple designers), which makes it twice as painful.
Not compelling enough? Quick: name two smartphones that have a touchscreen AND a physical keyboard on one surface, with no (other) moving parts. The Pre may not be a godsend, but the Pixi certainly is.
I have the Pixi Plus with Verizon service. Other than battery life (which is a well-documented issue that has several acceptable solutions), I cannot find a SINGLE thing I don't love about it.
It's a shame the app store isn't on par with Apple's. As devices go, it's not only one of the most technically capable phones on the market, it's also the ONLY real smartphone that fits in the pocket of a pair of jeans. For someone who doesn't carry a purse, that is a huge factor.
One of the problems is that in all the side-by-side reviews, the Pre always beats out the Pixi because...wait for it...it can't run as many apps at once. (Note: the iPhone presently can't run more than one, and reviewers worship it.) So people buy the Pre, and then aren't happy with it because the form factor is annoying and the keyboard is unusable (and because they expect their battery to last three days while they watch videos over Wi-Fi). And Palm gets a bad rap, even though they make a device that people would fall in love en masse with if they weren't talked out of giving it half a chance.
To each his own, but for me Palm offers a product that nothing else today can compete with. I really hope the market gives them a fair shake before letting their technology fade away.
The problem is there is nothing Google really needs at Palm. The patents would just be used for defense against really crappy patents that should never have been issued in the first place to Apple. As for Android, i personally prefer it over both iPhone, Symbian and WebOS. Palm wouldnt bring anything to the table.
Nokia on the other hand, they would benefit greatly.
HTTP/1.1 400
buy out of palm will be great move if it leads to consolidation of mobile OSes. as of now, we have OS X, android, symbian, winmo, blackberry, webOS, etc... typically most industry have 3 big guys, that is the case for desktop too - win, mac, linux. i think blackberry should buy out palm. blackberry makes solid devices but lack the gee-whiz factor which webOS and ex-apple employees at palm can bring. nokia in turn should buy out blackberry to create a platform which is solid, functional and cool.
i have it with me. kept in my old drawer. even though its b/w touchscreen is old, and the cpu is 21Mhz, it was still very good. it had all the customizability my e71 has and had a very painless ui. indeed, it was better than the s60 ui in 5800.
i have never used the pre because its cdma, there's no decent cdma network here. and of course palm did not launch it outside the us.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
I thought the band U2 had a stake in Palm?
I'm here for the experience, not the Hyperbole.
"I once preached peaceful coexistence with Windows. You may laugh at my expense - I deserve it."
-- Jean-Louis Gassée, CEO Be, Inc.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
BeOS is dead for a reason.
Yes, and the reason is: Microsoft bullied PC makers so they would not sell computers with any other OS. See here.
People hate Microsoft for a reason.
Circumcision is child abuse.
You are wrong.
The problem is that the disk I/O priority in Windows is done in a (presumably) FIFO kind of way, regardless of which application and thread is performing the request. So when Explorer requests 5 x 10 KB files (the icons for the start menu items) from disk, it has to wait 5-10 seconds before Windows finally delivers because 10 other services currently booting are loading DLLs.
Suggesting that Explorer should instead have already loaded the icons into memory will not work simply because the user STILL has to wait 10 seconds extra before he can click his start menu. Not to mention the problem of how deep you want to load icons in the start menu tree. Even if it loaded them all it would still not help you because when you then selected your application to boot, that process would now need to load 10 megabytes of executable data and that too would be delayed by the other processes doing disk I/O.
Sadly when faced with this problem Microsoft chose to first ignore it for 10 years. Then they made the hack called Superfetch in Windows Vista. It attempts to solve the problem by actively loading all DLLs into memory and thereby reducing the amount of I/O requests that require actual disk access, hiding the problem somewhat in certain situations. Unfortunately that tactic still doesn't work when you start your file copy or when Windows Search decides to start scanning your disk in the background or if you do a simple file copy.
I have an USB disk that can stall Windows 7's I/O so badly that if I start copying large movie files to it, any other I/O request can end up being delayed for over 30 seconds! And these other requests were not even intended for the USB drive but my primary Velociraptor SATA disk. Clearly there is something in kernel space that could benefit from some serious improvements. But hey, at least we got ribbons in MS Paint in this release. ;)
I do agree that resurrecting BeOS for this feature alone is fairly pointless when one could simply just improve the I/O code in the kernels used today. Too bad it requires someone at Microsoft to do it.