Now it’s official, HP is buying Palm! A clean and solid smartphone capable of beating Google and Apple in many areas could take early life.
It is not the first time that Palm back from the dead. After the Palm PDA, Treo temporarily resurrected and WebOS arrived late, it seemed that nobody could get to save the situation. After a decline in business from Palm, and several weeks of speculation, HP announced today that they are acquiring the company for $ 1.2 billion. The deal should close by July 31, the end of the third fiscal quarter, HP. Jon Rubinstein, Palm’s CEO will remain with the company, even if you do not know in what capacity. He had initially spoken of as potential suitors HTC or Lenovo, HP decided to make the big step that allows him simultaneously to become soon a major player in the smartphone.
WebOS Palm might be a good platform for future HP tablet, but it’s lacking a solid community of developers, since its 2000 apps pale in comparison to what is currently Apple App Store and Android Market offer.
HP has the resources to fully exploit the software and hardware of Palm, and the significant investment on their TouchSmart interface could use many things from the future brother webOS. There will probably be another generation of mobile webOS which will be released. HP and its considerable resources will enable the operating system to grow and go beyond the first generation, a very complete development. It may be near a smartphone with WVGA resolution webOS, Snapdragon processor and interface very responsive.
But here we find a rock big enough, because HP is the official partner of Microsoft Windows Phone 7. The house has undertaken to continue to work with Windows 7 Phone, though you might well think that their concern for the Microsoft platform could be reduced significantly now that they have a real mobile operating system.
HP provided the slate running Windows 7, a desktop OS, while the rest of the industry seems to have opted for mobile operating systems. HP has never had much interest in Android, and their plans for the tablet industry has so far ignored the Google OS. Which leads to think of a tablet webOS, with a more intuitive interface of Android, a notification system better than anyone else and throw a blind eye to social networking.
