Palm may get a new lease on life thanks to the overnight buyout by HP, which was once Palm’s biggest competitor owing to its range of Windows-powered iPaq PDAs.
HP has stepped in where Dell, HTC and Lenovo reportedly walked away by scooping up ailing smartphone maker and PDA pioneer Palm.
The deal, costed at US$1.2 billion, will ensure the survival of Palm’s WebOS through a new range of HP-branded smartphones.
HP and Palm were once fierce competitors in the PDA space, with HP’s iPaq lined up as the champion of Microsoft’s Windows-powered Pocket PC devices against the nimble PalmOS.
But Palm proved more successful in the transition from PDAs to smartphones whereas HP’s iPaq devices are all but dead, with the company still offering a few iPaq phones to selected markets.
Now it’s up to HP to show what they can do with Palm’s highly-regarded WebOS, if the company can turn around its fortunes in the smartphone space.