According to the San Francisco Chronicle, a source close to the negotiations said that Apple, Google, and Research in Motion all tried to acquire Palm.
The source stated that RIM pretty much had the deal in its hands, however, “had to work incredibly hard to blow it”.
BerryReview.com puts it best when they say that, even though RIM failed at buying Palm, they could learn a thing or two… “Don’t hang onto a legacy OS so long that even a complete overhaul can’t save you…“
Well, we knew someone was going to acquire Palm at a basement bargain price. I hoped that it would be RIM, thought that it would be HTC or Lenovo, but, it looks like the spoils are going to HP.
This probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone but, maybe, CEO Jon Rubinstein, however, the inevitable Palm buyout is imminent. According to Bloomberg, Palm is working with Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Qatalyst Partners to find a buyer, although the company has not officially said that they are doing so as of yet.
The big question for everyone is who will the buyer be? Both HTC and Lenovo have expressed interest. I’ve been saying for years that RIM should have picked the company up if for nothing more than the intellectual property. My guess is that there are a few big companies that might be interested.
Who do you think will buy Palm? Whomever it is will get on heck of a consumer oriented mobile operating system in webOS.
If you’ve read more than 2 or 3 posts here on RIMarkable, you’ve probably gathered that I am a pretty big fan of the BlackBerry. Some would even call me a BlackBerry Fanboy… That being said, I recently bought a Palm Pre Plus from Verizon. I’d be willing to bet, however, that it was for reasons other than what you are thinking…
To make a long story short, if you are at all interested in a Verizon MiFi 2200, strongly consider the Palm Pre Plus or Palm Pixi Plus as an alternative…
When it comes to smartphone market share in the United States, the BlackBerry is still king of the hill according to a recent report by comScore, however, Android is coming on strong.
For the three month period ending Feb. 10, RIM’s percentage of market share was 42.1%, up 1.3% from the same period a year earlier. Android is still just a fraction of the total smartphone market at 9%, however, they were the only other platform to actually increase share, up 5.2% year over year. Apple remained relatively flat, down 0.1%, and Palm and Microsoft lost share, with -1.8% and -4.0% drops year over year.
This is just a quick little poll that I probably should have included with my Note to RIM post that I wrote earlier today.
[poll id=”9″]
As some of you long time RIMarkable readers may know, I am on the record several times stating that Research in Motion should buy Palm. The last time that I felt strongly about this was back in late 2008 before webOS came out and Palm’s stock price was down under $2.00.
Even though webOS is a strong mobile operating system, in my opinion, Palm just can’t seem to get right when it comes to running the company. Their stock price today (at the time of this posting) is down 19% or so to $4.60 and the downward spiral, according to some analysts, is going to continue downward to $0. (I’ve never heard of a $0 target before)
I will go on the record again…
Palm reports today the COB and it is expected that they are going to have a pretty big miss on earnings… $0.43-$0.48 per share. Normally you would see companies stock price in this situate tank, however, Palm has been on an upward journey most of the day. The reason for this, I’m guessing, is that Palm is a prime takeover target about right now and the rumor mill is churning.
Palm today released the the Plug-in Developer Kit (PDK) beta, a new component in the webOS SDK that will make for dramatically better gaming on devices running webOS, is now available.
The PDK allows developers to use C, C++, and the OpenGL ES graphics API for 3D graphics in the creation of applications (really cool games) in webOS. The PDK will also make it “easy” to port games on other platforms (read iPhone games) over to webOS.
You can download the Palm PDK from the Palm Developer Center.
[via Mashable]
So, I was just taking a look Engadget’s 10 Gadgets That Defined The Decade and I have simply got to call foul. In some type of complete travesty of justice, the Palm Treo makes the list, yet, the BlackBerry only gets an honorable mention.
I just have four words… Are you frigging kidding!?!