The Wall Street Journal
Hewlett-Packard Co. is placing a nearly $1 billion bet that it can do more with Palm Inc.’s critically lauded but commercially troubled mobile software than the embattled smartphone pioneer could do by itself.
H-P is making a large move into the smartphone world with its agreement to acquire Palm for $5.70 a share in cash, which represents a 23% premium to Wednesday’s closing price. Including debt, the deal is valued at $1.2 billion.
Palm has been the subject of takeover speculation for the past several months as its business has slumped and new products failed to catch on with consumers.
You mean The Fox Street Journal. To hell with News Corpse
They’ll be sorrrrrreeeeeey….
Poor (small) app store, but a great OS, perhaps the best out there. Nothing works as simple and well. Done right, could be great.
Looks like HP is playing catch up to Dell.
Now it is a phone free for all.
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April 1, is it?
Man, I really hope HP goes down in flames because of this. Outsourcing bastards! 🙂
Could be a good acquisition. I’m led to believe Palm owns some of the defining patents in the smart phone arena. And, what the hey! If it turns out to be a total fart of a purchase, a billion dollars is chump change to a company like HP.
#7. Yeah. $1.2 billion = gallon of printer ink. And how much bloatware can HP put on a Pre?
Talking about printer ink, I swore to never buy another HP product again. That’s a shame because I always did like palm phones, even though I was forced to abadon them…
Tilt. Fail.
Might as well flush the money down the toilet.
#7 The one thing most people figure out is Palm has to have a war chest full of patents that predate anything Apple has. If HP wants in the game this is one way to do it but I think using Android would have been a heck of a lot cheaper.
Maybe I’m missing something vital but when HP bought Compact I thought and still think they wasted money that could have been better spent working on their own lines.
I tend to see this the same way but smart phones are becoming the major computing device for a lot of people and I think that trend will continue.
I don’t care if you’re a man or a woman, gay or straight, if you watched this video then you’d never have sex again.
They must have called Carly and asked her how best to piss away some spare cash.
On the surface it looks stupid.
What is funny is that HP already has a smartphone. The iPaq, which runs on Windows Mobile. Does anyone out there have one? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?
It makes perfect sense to me. HP is a pretty good hardware company. But software … let’s see, as a small example, I bought an HP LJ II in 1988. Twenty-two years later, the Windows print driver on for the HP 2605dn (d stands for duplex) does not allow you to set duplex (print both sides of the paper) as the default option. You have to go in to setup every time and set it. So, yeah, HP needs software smarts, and Palm’s got ’em. E.G., the giraffe script recognition.