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Bloomberg Reports That Palm Is Up For Sale

Posted by timothy on from the handwriting-on-the-wall-is-graffiti dept.

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."

9 of 240 comments (clear)

  1. First bid by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    I'd buy that for a dollar!

  2. BeOS! by Fallingcow · · Score: 5, Interesting

    AFAIK, Palm still owns BeOS.

    Hopefully whoever buys them does something with it, or sells it to someone who will.

    1. Re:BeOS! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Yeah!

      Now we can have a viable competitor to Hurd!

    2. Re:BeOS! by BikeHelmet · · Score: 5, Insightful

      what relevance does it have now?

      The only OS to ever do GUI responsiveness properly?

    3. Re:BeOS! by blind+biker · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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?

      What a pleasure it was to use BeOS. For whatever reason, programmers just refuse to create such pleasant-to-use operating systems.

      (I won't relay the often mentioned smoothness of displaying videos and playing MP3s. It's not that important. But it sure is impressive when you can play 30 MP3s at the same time, and some even backwards. Is there ever been an OS that dominated all the others so blatantly? The things BeOS was able to do were simply ridiculous.)

      --
      "The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
  3. Sad by jsse · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  4. Re:No surprise. by spmkk · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  5. Palm don't want my money by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  6. Obituary for BeOS by DNS-and-BIND · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "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!