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Does HP + Palm = Facepalm?
ChiefMonkeyGrinder submitted a bit of commentary on yesterday's news that
Hewlett-Packard was buying Palm. From TFA:
"When I first read the news that HP was buying Palm for $1.2 billion, my first reaction was that HP had lost its marbles ('clueless' was how I tweeted it). Why, I wondered, did it need to pay $1.2 billion for a dying platform when it could have used the increasingly popular Android for nothing? (OK, it probably picked up a few useful patents, as well.) I also thought that it didn't have the resources to enter the extremely competitive area of smartphones."
called expertise. Palm has a lot of talented employees, a lot of IP, and a lot of faithful users. These things will all be good for HP if they're really serious about competing in the mobile arena. Many companies fail because their business plan/marketing sucks, and not because they don't make a good product. I'm ambivalent about Palm's stuff, but other people, like my father, is absolutely fanatical about his Palm gear.
My guess is that HP, like Apple, sees computing appliances as the death knell for general purpose computers. They want to make sure they're still around for awhile.
That would be if facebook buys palm.
WebOS is a fantastic OS from a user perspective -- the card metaphor for multitasking is very intuitive and the whole design of the interface is easy and elegant and *fun*. It would be a perfect fit for that tablet thing HP is working on.
I have a Pre and despite a few issues with battery life and a wish for a larger screen I think it's a great phone. Most information about the phone is provided by members of the computer press who are too lazy and entranced by their iphones to bother giving the matter any serious thought.
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
In some of the news reports on this, I saw repeated references to the fact that "webOS can scale" or something to that effect. I don't know too much about webOS vs. Android vs. Chrome, but my guess here is that HP is buying Palm for tablets and MIDs, not for smartphones. I doubt HP has much desire to go against the HTCs and Samsungs of the smartphone world in hardware, and they're not naturally a software company (a la Google and Microsoft with their respective mobile OSs).
More likely, I would bet, is that HP has doubts that Android will scale well to tablets (current offerings in the market notwithstanding), with their relatively higher computing power than phones, and their experience with the Slate is probably indicating that Windows 7, despite being a good desktop OS, is not scaling too well down to the netbook level and below. Thus, they might be leaving open the option of pushing a tablet/MID level of computers based on webOS to compete with the iPad on iPhone OS.
And, if that doesn't work, as others have said, Palm has both a valuable name and lots of talented employees that can become HP's mobile arm, thus allowing them to have their asses covered and prevent shareholder panic.
For the day /. supports unicode :)
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
They are able of the best and the worst at the same time: Their old COMPAQ laptop division who's now called Elitebook are in the top best machines. But their consumer branch (Pavillon) are the worst machine ever made. They have a good marketing, they are everywhere and everybody use their product but not many people loved them. When you have warranty the service is great but if you don't and it is a common issue, they will deny the problems, and wait for a court order before making a recall which they will fix by putting exactly the same flawed part. I have tons of broken HP machine coming to my office and it is always a well-known common problem. They make good printer, but they load their half working driver with crap, spyware, crapware... They also are responsible for the ink markup, they encourage customer to buy a new printer every time the ink runs out. They spy their competitor and their customer. I don't know where they are going with palm, I don't even know if it will be for better or worst....
Post back when you actually *try* to write a complex WebKit app that runs well on all the webkit platforms unchanged. WebOS / Android / iPhone Its a sheer and utter fantasy that because its "WebKit" its "write once run everywhere". Maybe someday, but not today.
Yes. Because I want to do my software development from a tablet.
Idiot.
Vanilla Android isn't cutting it, so everyone has to brew their own "secret sauce"
I don't think it is necessarily a negative to be able to provide customized experiences across carriers and devices. *shrugs*
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Actually, at one time, /. did support unicode. Just that well, it's really hard to whitelist unicode codepoints
Nope, sorry, it's really easy to whitelist them and there are existing whitelists that you can easily use. It's slightly harder to blacklist the potentially malicious ones, but even that isn't too hard. Lazy Slashcode developers decided to revert the feature entirely instead of adding the half-a-dozen lines of code that would have made it useful.
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Actually HP has a long history with Unix, both HP-UX and Digital's Unix product. They also have a long history of producing handhelds. This is a really smart move for them, if it works. Right now, they have this iPad-like thing, which is really cool, but only runs Windows, which, frankly, isn't going to be that great on it, and has been a failure in the same market for years. Now they have Palm OS, which is actually a really great product, despite its failure to capture the hearts and minds of enough customers. This means that they are in position to make a genuine run up against the iPad. Plus, they can throw out the x86 cpu in their tablet and replace it with an ARM CPU that will perform better and suck much less battery power.
So yeah, this is a really smart move, and I'm excited to see what they do with it. HP has a lot of management that's skilled at foot-shooting, but if they can get over their cultural tendency towards NIH and really invest in this product, it could be pretty cool.
Which may be the Bingo moment. Think about it. HP (and everybody else) uses Win XP for goddamn everything. Sitdown applications, pumps, little machines, handhelds. They can't do it forever and of course, the WIMP interface isn't the best one for smaller, handheld devices.
Now, imagine a more extensible OS than can be used on smaller "non computer" devices. Especially touch screens. An OS whose Human Interface Guidelines have been worked out and are at least as good as any on the market.
Might not be such a bad thing to pick up.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Think about the number one smartphone (yes, the iPhone).
Isn't RIM the number one smart phone maker in the world?
I agree but Vzw must have been working for a quite a while on getting the license for "Droid" from LucasFilm. Notice that the original Droid was a Motorola but the Droid Incredible is from HTC, so Droid is a Verizon brand. I'm pretty sure Palm wouldn't want their "splash" phone to have a brand they don't own and Vzw probably wanted their first Droid phone to be just "Droid" not "Droid Pre".
Next is AT&T. Yeah, they are going to risk the wrath of The Steve cutting off their money-truck. Notice that AT&T doesn't have much beyond Blackberries competing against the iPhone. The Android OS devices are nerfed and WinMo 6.5 is obviously end of life.
So that leaves Sprint. It's bigger than TMobile, seems to have more advertising dollars for devices, and has a history with Palm.
Soooo yeah. It was the best thing that Palm could pull off.
I've been on slashdot so long I'm starting to get out of touch with the cool stuff if it ain't on slashdot.