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.
RIM won’t buy it. They think their product is fine the way it is. Funny thing is, I think we will be reading this headline about RIM in a few years if they don’t get with the program. BB isn’t even mentioned in many articles talking about smartphones. Everyone is talking about the iphone, Android and even WM7. These will be the last standing companies in the end. I fear RIM will be out.
Pretty rough statement to say RIM is not going to last. They have huge market share and still deliver to their targeted market. The issue is the advancements of RIM’s new OS. It has to start picking up the pace and be competitive with the droid and iphone and windows. But something different. By buying palm, they could incorporate some of the software and rebrand. The one and only cool thing I liked about the pixi’s and pre’s was the ability to run multiple application sat the same time and flip through them with ease. If there was a way I could listen to my pandora while reading my ny times and still be able to respond to sms and mms while sending out a tweet without having delays or forcing to close applications…I must say RIM would have a goldmine on their hands because think of the possibilities for business applications, not just social media and entertainment apps.
I think you both got it wrong about RIM (TeddyB and gquaglia). You’re right RIM wont buy it, RIM will be around for a while due to their target market. As far as somepeople not calling Blackberrys smartphone, they dont care. Palm and RIM have been in the game for a long time and always had some type of apps with their device. it wasnt till the microsoft windows pc phones came out that the term was used. I know cause i bought one immediately even though they crashed alot (and still do). Nokia had multimedia devices before anyone and their market is still strong. I grew up in Europe, majority of them always get a Nokia.
I think palm and Rim should continue being a communication device but they need to do a better job with operating system. Blackberrys and Palm phones shouldnt be classified as a smartphone. The “real” smartphones are the phone with computer like funtions (PC/mac Os) i.e iphone and windows mobile.
Having said that, RIM should be aware that Apple will someday try to branch into RIM targeted market, the new os 4 is just the beginning. a friend of mine has told me they are working on a better emailing system than the one currently used. I think their answer to the typical blackberry used by america will not be called an iphone. it will be a device with better security encryption and emailing. Then RIM just might fade out.
Hmm; interesting points about separating out RIM and Palm as ‘communication devices’ and not smart-phones.