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HTC Walks From Palm Bid, Will Lenovo Step Up?
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."
As an insensitive male chauvinist pig douchebag, I find you offensive.
Do we really want more incompatible software "platforms" than acronyms in our alphabet soup? Does anyone have the courage to stand up and say "compatibility requires talk on standards"?
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Sure, HTC buys and OS from MS to put on *some* of it's phones. If you've been watching, that number has been dropping to zero lately.
HTC does get Android from Google, but that's FOSS, so they are not beholden at all to Google for that...
I've worked with the folks at HTC, they're bright and highly motivated... Any interest that they've got in Palm is NOT because they need an OS to run.
I don't think HTC or any other handset maker is a good fit for Palm. Portions of the Palm IP would just get absorbed into their existing products and quickly lost to the ages.
IMHO Cisco would be a good suitor for Palm. Cisco has international manufacturing & distribution, a lot of hardware/software/networking experience, plenty of consumer & corporate products history with their own brand, Linksys and now Flip, and Palm would be a well established brand name and technology base for Cisco to branch out into the "cell phone when away from home and cell phone over VoIP while at home" tech trend that's starting up.
Two words: "Palm Pilot"
For a long time, EVERY PDA was called a Palm Pilot, they pretty much defined the category.
Now Lenovo has Palm in the palm of their hands ...
Alas, poor Palm
After having an almost complete domination of the PDA market, they could have blazed new trails into the, then virgin, smartphone territory.
However, they slept on their laurels and after a certain point they stopped all serious development, and they even spinned off their software division.
After a while, they came up with new and fantastic software (WebOS), but it was too late...
Palm is right now only worth what their PDA&Smartphone patents could bring to the legal departments of Google and HTC, but now even HTC is backing away
No sig for the moment.
Why?
I'm pretty sure that there are only about 100 apps that are really nice to have available on a phone, and more and more of them are going to be built into the base install. The rest are variations, or stupid.
I guess for developers it is nice to have a limited number of targets, but for users, the difference between 5,000 apps in the store and 50,000 apps in the store is pretty much nil. Especially users who don't need to install an app to use a web site.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
There were some speculations that HTC has interest in Palm mainly due to Palm's patent portfolio. Given the upcoming court fight with Apple, it would probably have been nice for HTC to have as much patents as possible in order to get more leverage in the case. HTC's decision most certainly comes after looking at Palm's books, and since they have decided to pass the offer, maybe this means it's not all rainbows and butterflies at the Palm HQ? Coincidentally, yet another Palm exec left (the VP of carrier marketing), and there was also a rumor that even Robinstein himself was abandoning ship (although he allegedly denied this). This all kind of points that Palm may have a very serious problem. I'm not sure what will happen if Lenovo walks away too... On the technical side, it would have been interesting to see WebOS on some of the high-end hardware HTC has released lately. On the other hand, I'm not sure that yet another OS to support is the best thing for HTC, with WM, Android, and the emerging Brew thing...
Regards, Boyan
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.
It seems Palm could not market water to the thirsty.
The Palm Pilot was the first successful PDA. I'm still using my TX, because it is so reliable and convenient. I'm still looking for as good an experience with smartphones.
The LifeDrive was everything the iPod is, minus the iTunes store, sexy ads, and "nano" option. Fatal oversights, it seems.
The Foleo was a netbook, a couple of years before netbooks took off.
The Treos are basically BlackBerrys without the push mail and the "pro" cachet.
And finally, the Pre has the snazziest mobile OS to this day, but glitchy hardware, and lame ads and distribution.
In the end, it seems to me that Palm got lots of things right, and systematically failed at key final steps. Advertising and distribution certainly, and also that extra feature that would really have made people sit up and notice that they needed the gizmos. I'll be sad to see them go, what a waste.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
Neither do phones really. When's the last time you saw a cell phone that ONLY did phone calls and text messages?
Even the ones I have that don't have a camera have a contact book (semi-phone related), calendar (not phone related), a couple of games, and an alarm clock.
The company that produced them has had a pretty good run though.
Palm will be sold only for the brand name, though the patents, WebOS & such will go with it.
It takes years to establish a new brand and a buyer like Lenovo could launch an Android based Palm in short order.
And even though Lenovo is incorporated in Hong Kong, it is effectively based in Beijing and is 41.5% owned by Legend Holdings; Legend Holdings is based in Beijing and was founded by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (the Chinese government), and is 100% owned by Chinese-controlled operations: 36% the Academy, 35% what appears to be an ESOP, and 29% China Oceanwide Holdings.
PDAs/smartphones or their successors are going to be ubiquitous, and there are reasons other than direct sales profit for a company like Lenovo to want to dominate this market, since their own associates are probably not in the good graces of, say, Google or other U.S. companies that control public e-mail services or other password-protected services that enable private freedom of assembly and speech. I'm not sure Google and Android's main developers are dumb enough to Lenovo introduce un-vetted code back into the official Android Open Source tree, but maybe they are; and even if they aren't, Lenovo can still modify the source code and "release" it to a public that doesn't want it, and/or make modifications at the hardware/firmware level, and still can put enough money behind the Palm name to gain control of a big enough chunk of the worldwide market to get what the Chinese government is after.
The price on Palm will continue to decline until somebody thinks the price is cheap enough for the patents. It's not prudent to overpay, and today the price is too high for just the patents.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
WebOS simply has no momentum. I don't see any company paying top dollar for it. Furthermore, HTC would have taken on huge risk with WebOS, in exchange for dissing its current allies Google and Microsoft.
The only way Lenovo gets involved is if the PRC decides China needs its own smartphone platform for national security reasons. This has merit but I don't see Lenovo willing to pay much. If WebOS is what Lenovo wanted--which is debatable--they could clone it easy enough.
"Stand-alone PDAs don't exist any more"
True,now we call them "ipads"
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one big problem was that when the press and marketing moved beyond PDA's, there was nothing between them and the latest smartphones. Microsoft was basically paying companies to make PocketPC devices and they were unreliable and huge from extended batteries to get all day usage from them. The phones had way too small of a display so they didn't have the application usage value the PDA had or todays smartphones. There was about a 7 year dearth of a valid replacement for the PDA.
This is probably why you'll see things like the press saying that Apple created the idea of an app store and a 3rd party application market for handheld apps. It was Palm and there were many apps stores for Palm applications.
So while the Model T may have been passed up, there was more functional and better models year after year after the Model T.
It is great to see this kind of 3rd party app market again. As we've seen on the desktop, letting one company control the application base doesn't make for great products and definitely not a diverse application base.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus