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."

Comments

Well

[OverlordQ]

I totally thought âÅ too.

HP is trying to compete with Acer

[Anonymous Coward]

HP competitor Acer (number 2 in notebooks worldwide behind HP) is coming out with a line of smartphones of its own, and it needs this purchase to leapfrog them.

Re:HP is trying to compete with Acer

[Jezza]

Haven't you just answered the question? HP has been in the PDA/Smartphone space since forever. Now you'll admit that Windows 6.x is hopeless in 2010 (that ship has sailed). Looking across at Android, things aren't pretty. Vanilla Android isn't cutting it, so everyone has to brew their own "secret sauce", lets look at how that's working out?

Motoblur, is quite frankly a mess.
Rachel, the Sony Ericsson UI looks great, but it wedded to a really old build. According to those in the know, they are having a hard time moving it to the latest build.
Sense UI, seems to be the clear winner. HTC have had this working on several builds of Android, most users like it.

So the odds aren't exactly stacked in favour of "doing Android" - there are pitfalls.

So what's up with Palm? Well the Pre looked great on paper, so what went so wrong? Three things really. First is build quality, the device looks great, but the "feel" is somewhat lacking. The perception is the unit feels cheaper than it looks and is. Perhaps there isn't really a problem, but that isn't how it feels when you encounter a Pre. Second, the lack of apps. This is a problem only time will solve. Third is the perception that WebOS might not be around for long. Probably it being under the HP banner solves the last one.

So what's needed? New devices to run WebOS. Sounds like exactly what HP can provide.

So why are HP so keen. Think about the number one smartphone (yes, the iPhone). What's different about it? The hardware and software are built by one company, and no other company can build "clones". That's exactly what HP get from this. So me this sounds good.

Off the topic a bit, don't Palm own BeOS? HP could do something with that too... It's just a thought - if you want to be like Apple, well you need your own OS.I doubt anything will really happen with that - but it would be nice to see HP do something with BeOS (and it would be the greatest comeback since Lazarus or NeXT Computer).

Re:HP is trying to compete with Acer

[edmicman]

What went wrong was that they premiered on Sprint. If they'd been on Verizon from the beginning, VZW would have had it's flagship next-gen smartphone six months earlier, and Palm would have it's device on the largest network in the US. I cannot for the life of me understand why Android and Palm phones debut on 2nd class carriers like TMobile and Sprint. Like it or not, there's really only two players in the business that can offer true national footprint - AT&T and Verizon. Not going on one of those cripples you right out the gate.

You may have heard of this thing

[raddan]

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.

Re:You may have heard of this thing

[LWATCDR]

Also WebOS has a better UI than Android and as good or arguably better than the iPhone.
Not to mention that HP will get the revinue from the Appstore. Really the Palm OS is very good what almost killed it was that stupid limited SDK they pushed. Javascript+HTML just doesn't cut it for every app. Add in the very restricted access you got to the hardware and you are limiting the software you can write.
I had the SDK and within a day I had given up on using it.
First thing I wanted to write was a simple flashlight app. I want to us the LED that they use for the flash but drive it at a lower intensity. I also thought that an more code sender with the flash might have been fun. You couldn't do it. Actually you could on a jail broken phone but not using the official SDK.
Okay fine. I then started to work on the programs I really wanted to write. I wanted to write a pod catcher and a music sync program. The way it would work is when the program detected that the Palm was plugged in and charging it would download your podcast and the music sync program would detect when your palm was plugged in and connected through wifi to you home computer. It would then contact a small sync server that I was going to write as a banshee plug in and syn your Palm. These where two different programs but a lot of code would overlap.
I started to dig into the docs but I couldn't find any way to get the chargeable state! THERE WASN'T ANY!
It was as if the people writing the SDK never wrote a program of a mobile device in their life.
The reason I would would only do the sync when chargeable is that was when you could be sure that you wouldn't drain the battery.

Re:You may have heard of this thing

[Anders]

Palm has a lot of talented employees, a lot of IP, and a lot of faithful users.

HP has 15.0.0.0/8 and 16.0.0.0/8 so I don't think they need any more IP!

Re:You may have heard of this thing

[cryfreedomlove]

Palm has a lot of talented employees, .

Not anymore they don't. I'm a hiring manager in Silicon Valley and I can tell you that any Palm engineer with sense has been interviewing and most have gotten away already.

No...

[Anonymous Coward]

That would be if facebook buys palm.

No.

[FlyingBishop]

But the article basically explains why anyway. The majority of mobile platforms are Linux based, and keeping WebOS strengthens the Linux ecosystem. And objectively, driver support is where most of the issues are going to come into play. Between RIM, iPhone OS, Android, and WinMo, the market is already too fragmented for anyone hoping to reach everyone with a single native application to do so. What's going to be important is what you can plug into your phone (monitor, keyboard, printer, flash drive, etc. ) Apps are icing on the cake, and browser apps for the most part can get all the functionality of a native app. And given that the majority run Webkit, you can even get away with not testing on too many platforms. (Screen size and dimensions are the bigger issue anyway.)

Lots of Patents

[BillLeeLee]

The author does state in the article that he was mistaken about the amount of resources HP has, which amounts to at least $25 billion USD in cash on hand, at least 10x more than HTC and Lenovo (the other big Palm suitors from the past week) have in cash.

When compared to the other major companies in the mobile space, like Nokia, RIM, HTC, or Motorola, Palm seems like a very 'cheap' purchase in order to acquire an entire new line of business, along with their entire patent portfolio.

Additionally, it seems other articles mention the same patent concerns since Apple is now going after HTC (but not Palm).
http://www.businessinsider.com/apples-htc-patent-suit-could-be-another-reason-for-someone-to-buy-palm-2010-3
http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/28/apple-vs-palm-the-in-depth-analysis/

Seems to make sense to me.

[brennanw]

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.

scaling of webOS

[ScottyB]

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.

Re:My take

[wbo]

Correct me if I'm wrong but wasn't Be's IP bought by PalmSource and not by Palm Inc? Keep in mind that PalmSource and Palm Inc. are not the same company (although they worked closely together.) That would mean that Be's IP is currently owned by Access.

I remember PalmSource using some things from Be in PalmOS 6 - which unfortunately never got used in any devices before Access bought them.