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HTC Walks From Palm Bid, Will Lenovo Step Up?

Posted by Soulskill on from the palm-rejected-out-of-hand dept.

MojoKid writes "Earlier in the month, it was reported that Palm was being shopped around. At that time, two of the main potential suitors were HTC and Lenovo. HTC obviously felt like the best fit. Lately, HTC has shown that it has a penchant for creating fantastic hardware, but it has to rely on Google and Microsoft for software. It seemed as if buying Palm would give HTC the power they needed to move ahead as a standalone unit, pairing HTC hardware with the WebOS mobile operating system. Apparently, that's not going to happen. Based on a new report out of Asia, HTC has declined to place an official bid on Palm, leaving Lenovo as the only other potential buyer at the moment."

2 of 97 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Good on HTC by sunderland56 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    For a long time, EVERY PDA was called a Palm Pilot, they pretty much defined the category.

    And then time moved on. Stand-alone PDAs don't exist any more, HTC is a major player in the smartphone world, and Palm is a failing company.
    When the Model T arrived, it pretty much defined its category. Don't see them around much any more.

  2. Re:HTC not beholden to Google or MS by masmullin · · Score: 4, Insightful

    HTC does get Android from Google, but that's FOSS, so they are not beholden at all to Google for that

    I think you have an over inflated sense of Google's benevolence when it comes to Android. While most Android is open sourced there are key components needed by cellphones which are not (eg. the radio protocol stack).

    Android isn't like Ubuntu where you can download all the source, compile it, and install it on any old x86 system. Android requires special knowledge, special proprietary components, and special tools to run on a cellphone. If you doubt this, I dare you to install android on your mobile phone.

    When it comes to a phone producer like HTC, the difference between google and microsoft probably isn't all that much. HTC probably has source access to winMo for it's windows mobile phones, and can probably edit that source code w/o having to push it's changes back up to M$. With Google, HTC probably has less red tape to getting updated source patches.