Bloomberg Reports That Palm Is Up For Sale 240
leetrout writes with this excerpt from a story at Bloomberg News "Palm Inc., creator of the Pre smartphone, put itself up for sale and is seeking bids for the company as early as this week, according to three people familiar with the situation."
Re:WebOS actually looks great (Score:3, Informative)
The tentativeness of this 'news' seems important. Goes up on a Sunday before markets open. I'd hate to say it, I wouldn't put it past a competitor to drop a rumor like this as a kick in the nuts.
The iPad competitor based on WebOS has me chuckling and dreaming of the possibilities. Steve will be so livid to see this happen I'll be LOL'ing.
Its too bad some cell phones are locked down so much. If price for WebOS wouldn't be so bloody high, would make a really nice project to open source.
Re:BeOS! (Score:2, Informative)
AFAIK, Palm still owns BeOS.
No, they don't own it anymore. PalmSource, the owner of PalmOS and BeOS was sold to ACCESS Co. in 2005.
Source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS#History [wikipedia.org]
Re:I thought U2 had a stake (Score:5, Informative)
Palm doesn't own it anymore. (Score:4, Informative)
No, that would be ACCESS who own the BeOS code base and who have already blessed the Haiku developers with permission to distribute the BeBook and other assorted documentation. The BeOS code is safe. The Haiku clean room implementation will make it easier to modernize the base for R2 once full BeOS compatibility is reached.
--bornagainpenguin
Re:WebOS actually looks great (Score:5, Informative)
WebOS is by far the best mobile OS on the market. It's still young and still has its problems, but the GUI is as beautiful as it is useful. The "type anything anywhere" concept is beautiful. You want to set an alarm and can't remember that you do that in the clock ap and you don't remember where it is? That's fine...type in alarm from anywhere in the UI and it'll show you the clock icon. It handles multitasking well, looks miles better than anything else on the market, and the best part....there's a backdoor purposely left in for us nerd types to install unapproved apps, overclock the processor, etc. Palm did everything right with WebOS except the marketing.
My first choice for a purchaser would be HTC. They could take their form factors they were designing for Windows Mobile phones, dump WebOS on it, and have market penetration nearly over night. They're going to have to have new designs/concepts for WM7 soon anyway. Either way, there's going to be a bidding war for Palm because of all the patents they hold. The WORST possible thing that could happen would be Apple buying them for the patents and dissolving the software.
Re:No surprise. (Score:2, Informative)
And it isn't. Palm already has a vibrant non-official app ecosystem. Because it is so dead-easy to program for, many iPhone and Android programmers have ported their apps to WebOS, and they are in the unofficial "catalogs" (Such as PreWare) already.
Very sad to see this happen to Palm. I have a Pre and absolutely love it. Hopefully they will get picked up by HTC or another handset maker and be turned into an OS company. Let's be honest: While WebOS is without a doubt the very best smartphone OS yet made, (Yes, Google Fanboys, it is better than Android in almost every way possible.) it has been crippled by inadequate hardware since launch.
This is clear when you get a Palm Pre Plus from Verizon and use one of the custom patches that are out there to overclock the processor to a level equal to that of an iPhone or Android handset. WebOS becomes WAY more responsive and is such a dream to use you want to weep for joy.
So with luck we will see WebOS on HTC or some other great handset within a year.
Re:WebOS actually looks great (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, it's a shame he never borrowed ideas from Xerox.
Or Konqueror, or Unix, or Adobe, or Macromedia, or SoundJam, or Tony Fadell, or Fingerworks. And it's too bad Apple never thought to outsource their manufacturing to leverage the PC components designed and built by other companies like Samsung, Seagate, Western Digital, Nvidia, ATI, Intel, etc.
Yeah, it's a shame Apple has insisted on inventing everything themselves.
Re:No surprise. (Score:3, Informative)
There is a lack of some types of apps, but it's not as if the entire app store has no merit. Most of the content of all of the app stores is trivial. It's possible that the overwhelming majority is like that. But there are definitely exceptions to that, and some of them are available on WebOS. Here are a few examples:
- X-Plane (flight simulator series with several forms of it)
- Need for Speed
- Epocrates (Medical reference program)
- TimeTracker (project-coordinated time tracking by GPS location and/or SSID)
- Graphing Calculator
There are also several good fitness tracking apps, some apps for geocaching, and some reasonably good sudoku and crossword apps. I couldn't tell you how good the chess apps are, as I'm not very good at the game.
I haven't seen any stand-alone GPS navigation apps, though it wouldn't be hard to put one together, I think. Google Maps does not (yet) have turn-by-turn, though Sprint's Navigation app is fairly decent and well-integrated (though requires a data connection).