Apple to Buy out Palm? 331
JFlex writes "According to a story over at Personal Computer World 'Speculation that Apple plans to buy handheld maker Palm has been revived by a call from two leading Palm investors for the company to be put up for sale, according to the local paper of both companies.'"
No. (Score:2, Insightful)
Translation: We want to make money with hype (Score:5, Insightful)
Why /. Why? (Score:2, Insightful)
I thought the
Re:In other news... (Score:5, Insightful)
Good idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Palm has access to interesting IP on their hands (Score:4, Insightful)
* BeOS/BeIA code: no idea how relevant it is today, but could still prove worthwhile.
* Palm-sized device expertise: maybe some of the knowledge and technologies palm has could go to make an even-better iPod. (can't wait to see that).
* Application Base: maybe we're going to see an app translator?
* Synchronization software: maybe newer iPods will need to sync apps and documents too. might want to have access to well-established code for that.
Buying palm, or buying BeOS? (Score:5, Insightful)
So it might just be it's not palm, but BeOS they are after. Which might fit into the whole Apple X86 thing.
I don't see much value (Score:5, Insightful)
Another problem is that Palm has been about as phlegmatic as you can get when it comes to promoting their market. If they were like Apple, they could have sewn up the electronic book market years ago. Instead, they seem content to allow the rest of the market to make half-hearted attempts at producing solutions. That just isn't going to work. If Palm wants to grab the e-reader market (a market for which they are extremely well suited), they need to follow Apple's lead and grab the bull by the horns. Since they show no signs of doing this, I see nothing but signs of decline for Palm.
If Apple wants to enter the handheld market (again), I see them developing a new device with a high-resolution, high-pixel density screen. They would then try to add the ability to show documents are precisely as possible, utilizing scaling algorithms. (Many books and documents suffer if their layout is changed a la Acrobat Pocket.) These features could be easily built into a new device OS by Apple engineers rather than trying to overhaul the aging Palm OS.
They would then market it with a new "catchy" Apple brand like "iHand" or "iBooklet", and either integrate it into a new eBook/Portable App section of iTunes, or develop a new iTunes-like app.
So given this scenario, where does the Palm value come in? The name? Nope. Apple would want consistent branding. The OS? No way. Palm is so full of cruft I swear that the developers are ready to shoot it. The device designs? Never. They're way too far behind the curve.
So I think I'm going to go with "rumor" on this one.
Re:Newton-Palm Hybrid (Score:5, Insightful)
I think there's some truth to the parent post. A single PDA that merged the best features of both the Newton and the Palm could be really slick. While I'll assume that most people reading this are pretty familiar with the Palm and what it has to offer, I recognize that the Newton may be a bit more of a mystery. I blogged a bit about what the Newton has to offer in 2006 [blogspot.com] elsewhere and won't repeat it all here.
The Newton has actually been mentioned on various news sites [osnews.com] a lot lately, due largely in part to the recent Worldwide Newton Conference [newtontalk.net] but also because of recent advances like the Einstein project [kallisys.com] and the Newton book reader for Firefox [newtonslibrary.org].
I'm personally hoping that maybe some of its innovative user interface ideas get carried over into other projects. Obviously Apple's current Ink tablet handwriting recognition system is a direct port from the Newton. Less obviously perhaps is that its Dock removal animation is, too.
Re:Translation: We want to make money with hype (Score:2, Insightful)
How does Palm investors want to sell Palm to Apple become speculation that "Apple plans to buy handheld maker Palm"...?
I don't see Apple having any desire to acquire Palm. Steve Jobs' obsession with style and the holistic approach of complete solutions doesn't seem compatible with the nuisance of acquiring a new platform and having to dilute its efforts in the audio/video market.
Sure, the Palm investors would love to sell the company to Apple; after all, the PDA market share has been decreasing. I think we would sooner see some hybrid device with a concise set of features from Apple than a company sale.
Re:I don't see much value (Score:3, Insightful)
You're probably right. The current market cap of PALM is just under $2G, si figure Apple would pay around $3G to buy it up, for a company expected to make about $100M in profit over the next year. That's easily affordable for AAPL, but a 3% annual ROI isn't worth the trouble unless they have some IP AAPL, really, really wants. The Treo? Maybe, but I don't see it.
Re:competition goes both ways (Score:3, Insightful)
Apple needs a completely new line. Product diversification.
Re:Newton-Palm Hybrid (Score:2, Insightful)
So. If Steve is truly ready to acquire Palm, I guess he's forgiven John Sculley (Newton was Sculley's 'Next Big Thing').
I'd love to dust of my old NewtonScript manuals. Bring on the Soup!
Re:Newton-Palm Hybrid (Score:1, Insightful)
How bizarre. (Score:3, Insightful)
I doubt it's true, but it would be nice.
Re:I don't see much value (Score:2, Insightful)
Imagine handheld organizer/music player that could connect and use the cell networks as well as utilize a local WiFi for VOIP or even the cell network for high-speed net connections...
Now, imagine this device being as sleek and as simple to use as an iPod, able to download email and work with documents like a Palm...
I have never been interested in a PDA, a portable music player, or an overstuffed cell phone, but I would be interested if Apple was to engineer a full combo with their typical high standards and emphasis on sleek and easy design.
Re:Newton-Palm Hybrid (Score:2, Insightful)
Rokr (Score:3, Insightful)
there is a lot of value! (Score:4, Insightful)
Palm on the other end has a great device (the Treo) and some farily good ones (the high end PDAs, such as the Tungsten TX). The weakest link is currently the OS. It seems that they are hanging around using a bit of everything. PalmOS in its current version (5.4) is a dinosaur, patched to make it running modern applications. Palm does NOT own PalmOS, being developed by PalmSource, a separate coumpany own by the Japanese company ACCESS. Palm has no control over PalmOS. THey have the 700w running windows targeting consumers. They would like to use Linux too. basically they have no direction, developing a new OS wouldn't go into a device before 2-3 years. Palm would gain A LOT from Apple. An OS to start with, either a scaled down version of MacOSX, or a scaled up version of whatever OS inside an iPod.
It's a win-win deal, that should have been done long ago!
Re:Newton-Palm Hybrid (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Apple, show Palm some ARM goodness... (Score:3, Insightful)
Seems to me that Palm has to innovate or die. I don't see selling the company as all that viable at this point. It has gone downhill way too far already.
Re:Rokr (Score:3, Insightful)
I have a Treo 650 and I like the phone, overall. Don't get me wrong. But it's no replacement for an iPod - and THAT probably explains why so many Treo owners also have iPods.
Re:In other news... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Good for Apply Maybe, good for Palm - NO! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Newton-Palm Hybrid (Score:5, Insightful)
The hype about "iPod phones" is that they'd have a MP3-playing phone that's the ease-of-use equivalent of the iPod.
The iPod, just as a hardware device, is admittedly slick, but it's not that wonderful. It's a hard drive, a funny-shaped battery, a microprocessor, and some controls in a white Lexan box. What gives it most of its value is the integration with iTunes and the automatic syncronization/updating. It's totally brainless -- you never have to worry about what music is on your portable versus what is on your computer (assuming you have one of the larger iPods). When the iPod first came out, this was the selling feature for it, compared to other, smaller-capacity players. You plugged it in, it did its thing, and you could grab the player and go.
I don't know of a cellphone that offers that. You have to add or copy the songs manually, and that's a drag; geeks might be okay with it, but a whole lot of mainstream consumers won't, especially if they use iTunes as their jukebox/music-manager already. People have come to expect total integration from a music player, and anything that offers less just isn't going to fly.
I owned a pre-iPod, flash-based music player. It was called the Pontis, and it was pretty forward-thinking when it was released. It used MMC cards, so the capacity was virtually unlimted, it had great battery life, and it was rugged as hell. But it sucked. It sucked because any time you wanted to add more music to it, you had to fire up a separate program and move the files to it. Later I think they achieved some jukebox integration, but it was with programs that were clunky (Musicmatch) and generally less elegant than iTunes. This is about where cellphones are now; nobody has figured out how to really integrate a cellular phone with the computer, in the same way that Apple integrated the MP3 player.
IMO, it's relentlessly stupid to involve a cable in this integration. A cellphone's integration should be even more transparent than the iPod's, because it ought to do it all wirelessly. Make a playlist in iTunes, and the next time you bring your phone within Bluetooth range of the computer, it gets updated (along with your Address Book, Calendar, etc.). When you have that kind of seamlessness, you will have an iPod equivalent. Otherwise, all you have is a Pontis equivalent.
Re:Buying palm, or buying BeOS? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:In other news... (Score:4, Insightful)
Around 2001 I was still amazed at how much more usable it was than the winCE alternatives.
It's still my favorite PIM UI, much more elegant than Outlook. I use a Sony Clie regularly. I guess Palm just slipped up in the behind the scenes technology, as well as some of the integration w/ the Outlook Hegemony.
Newton was cooler in many ways, but didn't understand the criticial formfactor issue, and then became a political target.
Perfect? Like Neck stretched over chopping block? (Score:5, Insightful)
In fact, stretched out over the chopping block, Palm really isn't in the perfect postion to do much of anything. Consider what has been thought to be their core asset for many years -- PalmOS, a system designed from the ground up to run on light weight mobile devices. The software quality is crap, and had been for years. Phone vendors are giving up on PalmOS. Palm is giving up on PalmOS. What do they have left? A few patents, a few hardware and software engineers and Grafiti. Well, honestly, I preferred the handwriting recognition in Newton (presently in suspended animation known as InkWell). The quality of other Palm software (which runs on the PC systems they connect with) is even worse, and demonstrates a deep lack of concern for the user experience of their customers. This leads me to suspect that if you scratch the surface, Palm is really not very much Apple-like in corporate culture in many ways.
No offense intended to those of you who might still work there, but the quality of PalmOS doesn't exactly scream, "Hey, buy the company because you'll get a great engineering team!"
The point is: There are undoubtedly a few good engineers left at Palm, but Apple can simply hire the good ones. They don't need to buy the company and get layers of clearly innefective mangement, legions of pissed off customers, and legacy technology baggage like PalmOS and HotSync as part of the deal.
Re:Newton-Palm Hybrid (Score:1, Insightful)
The reason handwriting recognition haven't taken of after the now defunct Newton is that it wasn't a good thing to begin with. And thats probably one of the things Steve Jobs noted when he axed the product.
Re:Apple, show Palm some ARM goodness... (Score:3, Insightful)
As for me personally, my biggest reason for hating the Palm platform involves repeatedly losing data because I didn't care enough to keep replacing batteries on the thing. For me to ever buy another PDA, the data had better be stored in nonvolatile storage---flash, a hard drive, whatever. There's a reason that computers make a distinction between RAM and more permanent data storage.... :-)