HTC Walks From Palm Bid, Will Lenovo Step Up?

MojoKid writes "Earlier in the month, it was reported that Palm was being shopped around. At that time, two of the main potential suitors were HTC and Lenovo. HTC obviously felt like the best fit. Lately, HTC has shown that it has a penchant for creating fantastic hardware, but it has to rely on Google and Microsoft for software. It seemed as if buying Palm would give HTC the power they needed to move ahead as a standalone unit, pairing HTC hardware with the WebOS mobile operating system. Apparently, that's not going to happen. Based on a new report out of Asia, HTC has declined to place an official bid on Palm, leaving Lenovo as the only other potential buyer at the moment."

Re:Good on HTC

[Abreu]

Alas, poor Palm

After having an almost complete domination of the PDA market, they could have blazed new trails into the, then virgin, smartphone territory.

However, they slept on their laurels and after a certain point they stopped all serious development, and they even spinned off their software division.

After a while, they came up with new and fantastic software (WebOS), but it was too late...

Palm is right now only worth what their PDA&Smartphone patents could bring to the legal departments of Google and HTC, but now even HTC is backing away

Re:Good, hopefully Maemo is next.

[maxume]

Why?

I'm pretty sure that there are only about 100 apps that are really nice to have available on a phone, and more and more of them are going to be built into the base install. The rest are variations, or stupid.

I guess for developers it is nice to have a limited number of targets, but for users, the difference between 5,000 apps in the store and 50,000 apps in the store is pretty much nil. Especially users who don't need to install an app to use a web site.

Re:Good on HTC

[sunderland56]

For a long time, EVERY PDA was called a Palm Pilot, they pretty much defined the category.

And then time moved on. Stand-alone PDAs don't exist any more, HTC is a major player in the smartphone world, and Palm is a failing company.
When the Model T arrived, it pretty much defined its category. Don't see them around much any more.

Re:HTC not beholden to Google or MS

[masmullin]

HTC does get Android from Google, but that's FOSS, so they are not beholden at all to Google for that

I think you have an over inflated sense of Google's benevolence when it comes to Android. While most Android is open sourced there are key components needed by cellphones which are not (eg. the radio protocol stack).

Android isn't like Ubuntu where you can download all the source, compile it, and install it on any old x86 system. Android requires special knowledge, special proprietary components, and special tools to run on a cellphone. If you doubt this, I dare you to install android on your mobile phone.

When it comes to a phone producer like HTC, the difference between google and microsoft probably isn't all that much. HTC probably has source access to winMo for it's windows mobile phones, and can probably edit that source code w/o having to push it's changes back up to M$. With Google, HTC probably has less red tape to getting updated source patches.

Re:HTC not beholden to Google or MS

[nine-times]

If you doubt this, I dare you to install android on your mobile phone.

Wasn't there a story recently about a guy who successfully installed Android on his iPhone? Or did that guy have special proprietary knowledge?

Re:Good on HTC

[MartinSchou]

Stand-alone PDAs don't exist any more

Neither do phones really. When's the last time you saw a cell phone that ONLY did phone calls and text messages?

Even the ones I have that don't have a camera have a contact book (semi-phone related), calendar (not phone related), a couple of games, and an alarm clock.

Re:Good on HTC

[cyber-vandal]

The company that produced them has had a pretty good run though.

If they want the patents, they can wait

[symbolset]

The price on Palm will continue to decline until somebody thinks the price is cheap enough for the patents. It's not prudent to overpay, and today the price is too high for just the patents.

Re:Good on HTC

[Locutus]

one big problem was that when the press and marketing moved beyond PDA's, there was nothing between them and the latest smartphones. Microsoft was basically paying companies to make PocketPC devices and they were unreliable and huge from extended batteries to get all day usage from them. The phones had way too small of a display so they didn't have the application usage value the PDA had or todays smartphones. There was about a 7 year dearth of a valid replacement for the PDA.

This is probably why you'll see things like the press saying that Apple created the idea of an app store and a 3rd party application market for handheld apps. It was Palm and there were many apps stores for Palm applications.

So while the Model T may have been passed up, there was more functional and better models year after year after the Model T.

It is great to see this kind of 3rd party app market again. As we've seen on the desktop, letting one company control the application base doesn't make for great products and definitely not a diverse application base.

LoB