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.'"
BeOS (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Good for Apply Maybe, good for Palm - NO! (Score:3, Interesting)
Apple will do it correctly if they bring in a pocket PC product. They are not the leading seller of MP3 players for no reason, they did it right when others didnt.
Re:If this happens (Score:3, Interesting)
Not good new for Palm (Score:5, Interesting)
However, I can easily see Apple producing a product of superior technology with as good an interface, based on the iPod. In fact, my iPod supports full motion video, gigs of data, and a simple interface. Start adding features and you face the Palm conundrum: How do you change the interface to a vastly successful product, and keep your customer base?
Part of Palm's other dilemma was its success. I have had the same Palm Pilot since it came out five years ago. It does everything I need, it syncs to my desktop, keeps outlook happy (oops that may be an Apple issue), and allows me to handle the things I want to. It will be interesting to see if iPod suffers the same issues.
If you want to make me a happy camper - make an iPod version with a nice 4" screen, support for palm like applications (notebook, address book, calendar, etc.) and support Ebook formats. Then provide a truly open development environment. One of the great things about palm was how many 3rd part applications were available because Palm wined and dined independent developers. But that means you (the platform owner) do not control everything on your platform.
Such a tool would allow me to hold my videos, books, and all the last things my palm does today. But none of these require palm to provide.
But wait -- what about the phone? Forget it. While some people do use the phone to replace the palm, most never do much but store phone numbers. Further, people are used to a phone being replaced every two years - for free. That is a market that pays for itself in the marketing of minutes. Not a good place to play.
Re:Why now? (Score:3, Interesting)
Why buy a loser? (Score:2, Interesting)
I agree that phones will eventually own the music player market, and probably even the P&S camera market also. Apple would be foolish not to evaluate its choices, but I would choose a platform that is more focused than Palm on smartphones over PDAs.
The phone market is super-intense and super-competitive, especially for global competition. Once 3G rolls out, the market should probably consolidate some as one network standard will prevent as much fragmentation, so it is a bit early to enter the market.
And PALM stock if off a little this morning (Score:4, Interesting)
So, the market doesn't believe the rumor either
Re:Good for Apply Maybe, good for Palm - NO! (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't see that as being a very good idea. Linux (the kernel) is a fast-moving target with constantly changing abilities, features, and APIs. (No comment on the moving ABIs.) For something like a new Palm OS, Palm really needs a stable base that won't require them to redo a lot of work, or suddenly and unexpectedly shift directions because of a major kernel change.
Palm could always fork Linux to keep things more predictable, but then they'd only be criticized for not keeping up to date. Thus the best solution is to do what Apple did: Find a more stable base.
What amazes me is that Palm is sitting with the BeOS technologies in its lap and has done practically nothing with them. BeOS was designed for systems that are pretty much on par with what a modern PDA could offer. (Catchy new slogan: "Just imagine, all the power of your BeBox in the Palm(TM) of your hand!") They obviously can't use it directly due to differences in desktop vs. PDA hardware, but they could easily mine it for technologies and strip the OS down to its core before rebuilding around the PDA technology.
Then again, I don't know what the BeOS core looks like. Perhaps it's all too integrated to be useful. Either way, I think Palm would be chosing poorly by going the Linux route.
Not sure I buy it... at least not yet (Score:2, Interesting)
For FUTURE sales it's a different story though... If Apple were to buy Palm and/or introduce the iPhone then a measurable number of people that have neither iPod nor smart phone would buy the iPhone instead of two separate devices, and that means less iPods sold. Thus there would be an impact on future revenues.
I don't believe that Apple will be buying Palm. Remember that Palm no longer owns PalmOS, so all I can think of that Palm brings to the table is the Palm and Treo brands, domain knowledge around smart phones, and existing relationships with contract manufacturers and carriers.
It is my belief that Apple will introduce the iPhone, and that it's just a matter of time. When they do they will probably contract with someone like HTC to make a custom phone, exclusively for Apple, then load it with Apple's own software. Further, it will either be appropriately crippled to not undercut the Nano, tied to an MVNO so they get ongoing revenue from the monthly subscription, all you can eat subscription iTunes downloads service, or will coincide with some other clever strategy to drive additional revenue growth.
Does this mean that BEOS is coming back? :) (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe they will dump OSX and make a 64 bit version of BEOS!!!!
YAY!!!!
We all knew Jobs couldn't keep his hands off BEOS.
(I'm being levitous)
This is just one of those rumors.. (Score:4, Interesting)
As a pissed off PDA user (Score:3, Interesting)
I still use my Palm T|C but its definitely showing its age with no other alternative in sight. WM2003SE was crap, and WM5 is still crap. It is neither reliable nor big on usability.
Give us something, Apple. I believe you're the only hope for something in this arena that "just works".
Re:Not news (Score:3, Interesting)
The news business used to be about reporting things that actually happened.
/You see how rediculous your statement is?
Re:Newton-Palm Hybrid (Score:4, Interesting)
Palm is - at least from where I'm standing - being pushed out from the market.
This is therefore probably good for both Palm and Apple... it's just that I probably won't be able to afford one of those.
*sigh*
Re:Good for Apply Maybe, good for Palm - NO! (Score:3, Interesting)
As much as I love the Palm product (I've been using Palm devices since the Palm Pilot Pro), they're quickly being edged out by the cell phone market, they still dont have synchronization on 64bit Windows systems, and synchronization on OSX is nowhere near as integrated as everything else that uses iSync and hasn't been progressed for quite a while.
In short, they aren't in a good position, and don't seem to be making the right business moves to improve it either.
Re:Good for Apply Maybe, good for Palm - NO! (Score:2, Interesting)
The BSD layer finally gave Apple a stable (secure? we'll see) foundation upon which to build their compelling UI.
I don't know if this is such a no-brainer in the embedded/mobile space. I wonder how much of Motorola's Linux-on-phones developer relation challenges are realted to their bad business practices, or technical challenges. Given the number of sucessful embedded linux products there are out there, I'm going to vote for bad business,
anyway, a main-stream *NIX based PDA/smartphone would be a winner in my book as long as it's hackable
Re:Not sure I buy it... at least not yet (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't discount this. The area of cell phone manufacturing seems very closed to entry by new players. You need licenses and such to even start playing with prototypes and you need to work with each of the spectrum holders that you want your device to be comaptible with. Clearly it is in Apple's interest to begin making some devices that can natively work with the existing wireless telephone networks which are increasingly being used for data. Palm has already done this with their Treo smartphones, which would mean an aquisition would give Apple a big headstart down this path and would complete its product offerings in this area.
With their ipod flywheel, they could really make a simple easy to use cell phone, where calling a number was as easy as scrolling to it with the flywheel just as you would scroll to a song. I could see them even getting rid of a number pad altogether or combining a flywheel with a graffiti pad.
Re:Good for Apply Maybe, good for Palm - NO! (Score:4, Interesting)
While the OS is kind of primitive, writing, testing and publishing a small program for the original 68K devices used to be much easier than for WinCE or QTopia PDAs that existed at the same time. There is a nearly-perfect hardware emulator, Metrowerks supports C++ exceptions unlike embedded VC++ and on-device debugger is perfectly usable even over the serial port. It's too bad they decided to go with the hideous Eclipse/cygwin based thingy for native ARM development.
Re:I don't see much value (Score:3, Interesting)
Apple will do the right thing (Score:4, Interesting)
The Palm products look like a good match for Apple. Like the iPod they are personal, portable devices that litterally define the niche they fill. They don't exactly compete with the iPod but are technological cousins that could be combined into a killer product.
Having said that, I'm not so sure that Apple needs Palm. Why would they? They have a partnership with Motorola where their product is already married to a phone which incorporates many of the most necessary features of the Palm devices! It seems to me that it may be a smarter move to work with Motorola to come up with a product that is one thrid cel phone, one third iPod, and one third PDA. This would cut their risk in half and would be far less expensive than buying another company outright. The only downside would be that they would have to share revenue with another company. I'm not even sure that would be so bad, the Motorola production capability combined with the Apple marketing savy may mean they could sell far more units than if they tried this on their own.
So, while Palm may look like an attractive pickup, once you got into bed with her, maybe the excitement wouldn't be there (and you would certainly offend your current partner.) Maybe staying in the marriage that you already have is a better option although far less exciting.
I don't know all the angles to this. What I do know is that the Apple managment has been savy enough in the past to recognize opportunity and also understand their market far better than anyone else. This is the primary reason why they are where they are today. Anyone else who has followed the path they did would have fallen in one too many potholes and been burried. Apple is still in the race. This tells me buy or no-buy, they will make the right decision.
Re:Buying palm, or buying BeOS? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I don't see much value (Score:3, Interesting)
Strong existing relationships with all the US wireless telephone companies.
I think that about covers it.
(ok, Treo-related know-how and patents too)
Re:Newton-Palm Hybrid (Score:5, Interesting)
I've made this comment before (to jcr in fact). If Ink is a direct port from the Newton, they broke it along the way. I have bugs filed (if you could search them) the describe this. I'll give you the short version first: Pull out your tablet on your Mac, write the word 'Rosetta' in cursive (and as typical for most writers, cross both Ts at once). On a Newton MP 2100 it will correctly translate this to 'Rosetta' 100% of the time for me. With Ink it gets translated to 'RoseHa' 100% of the time. Somewhere between Newton's 'Rosetta' handwriting recognition and OS X's 'Ink' recognition, they forgot how to 1) understand cursive, 2) learn user handwriting, 3) allow training of the recognizer, 4) allow the insertion caret to be used for punctuation, 5) correctly understand editing gestures in (almost) all cases -- ever try to join a broken word with Ink?.
For completeness sake, let me include that old bug report (which includes a snippet from a thread jcr and I had going about Ink's flaws compared to the Newton): https://bugreport.apple.com/ [apple.com] Problem ID: 3828160 (this bug is still marked "Open")