Palm Inc. goes up for sale

Brian Ambrozy 12 Apr, 2010 at 12:21am ET Article published in Tech

Bloomberg announced today that Palm Inc. has thrown in the towel and is seeking buyers; according to inside sources, HTC and Lenovo have both been eying the company.

Sales of Palm devices have been disappointing, despite their excellent webOS, and Palm apparently could not compete with Apple, HTC, Motorola and RIM in the smartphone market.

This is not the first time Palm has changed hands. Originally purchased by US Robotics and then 3Com, Palm was spun off as a separate company in 2000.

Comments

12 Apr 2010 ~ 12:40am Jamie Favreau My Dad actually owns a few Palm devices. I am not sure if it is his age group.
12 Apr 2010 ~ 7:34am micker Are you calling me old Jamie? I've got a Palm currently, and have owned quite a few since they were still made by 3com.

3com? Oh god, I guess I am old.

Regardless, the WiFi hotspot feature on their latest phones is very cool and hopefully their buyer uses that feature on more phones.
12 Apr 2010 ~ 10:24am mirage Sad. They had started the handheld revolution. But they were too slow moving forward and they had so many missteps. I don't see any value in that company now other than their IP and maybe (with a big question mark) WebOS. I will always keep my Tungsten and Pilot.
12 Apr 2010 ~ 10:30am Thrax Palm has a vast and lucrative patent portfolio, a phenomenal OS packed with great ideas and brilliant software engineers. I sincerely hope Google acquires them, so all that brilliance makes its way into the Android kernel. I also hope Google acquires them because it would be a pretty righteous distraction for Apple in pursuing HTC; it would make Google the #1 target, rather than handset makers.
12 Apr 2010 ~ 10:32am CB How does this effect the resale value of my Palm Zire?
12 Apr 2010 ~ 10:59am Kwitko You now have to pay people $20 to take your Zire.
12 Apr 2010 ~ 12:15pm mirage

Thrax wrote:

I sincerely hope Google acquires them

:thumbup
12 Apr 2010 ~ 9:34pm micker I just realized the most important question in this whole thing...

Who's going to own BeOS now?
12 Apr 2010 ~ 10:22pm CB

micker wrote:

I just realized the most important question in this whole thing...

Who's going to own BeOS now?

I think Graffiti 2 is a more important property.
12 Apr 2010 ~ 10:30pm micker I've gotta go with BeOS on this one. Next to Irix it was my favorite OS of all time. Like Irix I would still be running it if the apps I needed were still developed for it.