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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."
I'd buy that for a dollar!
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 would be happy to see a real Windows Mobile OS pop up
No thanks, I had enough with the pop ups on their desktop OS.
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.
That's a shame, the Palm Pre really is a nice phone, I prefer it to the iPhone. WebOS is nicer, and the native SDK is out now. The browsing experience was comparable when I compared iphone to pre. And it has a real keyboard that pops out. They totally blew the ads though, those horrible TV ads w/the weird chick going "oh wait, I just did that" - most likely alienated many potential customers. I know the freaked me out.
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 live in a rich country in Europe. Palm will not take my money to buy a Pre, over a year after its introduction.
I hope Palm will serve as an example to companies: If you introduce a product whose sales are uncertain, you need to sell it worldwide as soon as possible, otherwise you are just turning down peoples money.
Palm: Great Engineers, Rubbish Marketeers.
I think BeOS stil has a relevance today, as it beats the pants off any current OS in respnsiveness to The User: any command/mouseclick has the highest priority, file copy be damned. I have tested with many current OSes (even OS X fails this test) start copying a huge file, and see if responsiveness is affected at all. With BeOS, it wasn't - not even the slightest. The file would get copied a few secconds later, if I interact a lot with the UI, but so fucking what?
That's it? So what?
How many applications are available for it?
And how many jobs are out there for it?
Any proprietary software on it that can't be moved to OSX or something?
And hardware support? Does it support modern hardware?
The to all the above is 'no'.
BeOS is dead for a reason.
No feedback to give. I just saw all the *rats and had to say hi.
"Common sense will be the death of us all"
I thought the band U2 had a stake in Palm?
I'm here for the experience, not the Hyperbole.
now i dont know jack about the palm-pre of web-os, but since when do you NEED an app store on a proper smartphone? The iphone might have triggered android in hopping onto the "app-store" bandwagon, and with all the ipad-hoopla, the media might make you think that without an app-store you cant do anything, but a proper smart-phone should be able to have software installed which isnt given the official X seal of approval.
My 3 year old nokia doesnt have an app-store (come to think of it, it has the n-gage thing for games), but i still managed to get opera installed... or just about any piece of java code i write.
I thought the entire point of smart-phones was that they grew closer and closer to a general purpose computer, not being a walled-garden
People, what a bunch of bastards
"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!
HTC would own Palm's IP, which appears to be strong enough to ward off Apple - as Apple are suing HTC for features in Android (huh?) currently, this would both strengthen their hand with Apple, and with Google and the Open Handset Alliance, and also give them a choice of going HTC-WebOS, using Android, or Windows Phone 7 (which now you can't skin it removes HTC's Sense UI)
No, that would be ACCESS who own the BeOS code base and who have already blessed the Haiku developers with permission to distribute the BeBook and other assorted documentation. The BeOS code is safe. The Haiku clean room implementation will make it easier to modernize the base for R2 once full BeOS compatibility is reached.
--bornagainpenguin
Have a Virgin Mobile USA smartphone? Give VMRoms.com a try!
That's a sweet couch man, I'll give you £35 for it!
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.
And it isn't. Palm already has a vibrant non-official app ecosystem. Because it is so dead-easy to program for, many iPhone and Android programmers have ported their apps to WebOS, and they are in the unofficial "catalogs" (Such as PreWare) already.
Very sad to see this happen to Palm. I have a Pre and absolutely love it. Hopefully they will get picked up by HTC or another handset maker and be turned into an OS company. Let's be honest: While WebOS is without a doubt the very best smartphone OS yet made, (Yes, Google Fanboys, it is better than Android in almost every way possible.) it has been crippled by inadequate hardware since launch.
This is clear when you get a Palm Pre Plus from Verizon and use one of the custom patches that are out there to overclock the processor to a level equal to that of an iPhone or Android handset. WebOS becomes WAY more responsive and is such a dream to use you want to weep for joy.
So with luck we will see WebOS on HTC or some other great handset within a year.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
There is a lack of some types of apps, but it's not as if the entire app store has no merit. Most of the content of all of the app stores is trivial. It's possible that the overwhelming majority is like that. But there are definitely exceptions to that, and some of them are available on WebOS. Here are a few examples:
- X-Plane (flight simulator series with several forms of it)
- Need for Speed
- Epocrates (Medical reference program)
- TimeTracker (project-coordinated time tracking by GPS location and/or SSID)
- Graphing Calculator
There are also several good fitness tracking apps, some apps for geocaching, and some reasonably good sudoku and crossword apps. I couldn't tell you how good the chess apps are, as I'm not very good at the game.
I haven't seen any stand-alone GPS navigation apps, though it wouldn't be hard to put one together, I think. Google Maps does not (yet) have turn-by-turn, though Sprint's Navigation app is fairly decent and well-integrated (though requires a data connection).
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.