Palm is up for sale, and HTC is said to be lining up to make a bid on the struggling smartphone maker.
After an astonishing 18 years, and as many false starts as hero products, it looks like Palm is being put out to pasture.
Bloomberg reports that the smartphone maker has put itself up for sale, with HTC and Lenovo both considering making a bid for the company and its products (although Dell has reportedly passed).
Palm chose not to release the WebOS-powered Pre onto the Australian market, and now we may never see it...
Palm ignited the PDA market with its original Pilot (thence Palm Pilot, and finally just Palm) organisers launched in 1996. Company cofounders Jeff Hawkins, Donna Dubinsky and Ed Colligan later created one of the first smartphones with the 2002 release of the Handspring Treo.
But the post dot-com crunch, ill-considered decisions to sell off and then buy back the source code to the PalmOS and an uneven series of products which were more miss and than hit all failed to capitalise on Palm’s early promise.
The consistent growth of the BlackBerry and Windows Mobile platforms saw Palm lagging rather than leading, and the success of Apple’s iPhone pretty much sealed its fate.
Palm’s last throw of the dice – the Linux-based WebOS operating system behind the Palm Pre and Palm Pixi smartphones – failed to make an dent in market share against the iPhone and especially the raft of phones running Google’s Android OS.
While Lenovo could consider keeping the WebOS, HTC is said to be more interested in Palm’s extensive patents than its products, especially if they can be used to slap back against Apple’s recent legal threats over HTC’s implementations of multitouch in its Sense UI for Windows and Android devices.
Other companies which might stump up for Palm are said to include Chinese telecommunications giants Huawei and ZTE, both of whom could release Palm’s products onto the local and international markets.