Apple, RIM, Google All Bid On Palm 117
Posted
by
timothy
from the face-palm-apple dept.
from the face-palm-apple dept.
imamac writes "It seems HP was only one of many bidders for the struggling Palm. The others included Apple, RIM and even Google. You may now commence speculation on why the various companies wanted Palm."
Re:It seems to me (Score:4, Informative)
aaa.. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:BeOS (Score:4, Informative)
BeOS was sold when Palm spun off PalmSource, which is now owned by Access http://www.access-company.com/ [access-company.com]
Be Inc included (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Why not Microsoft, Nokia, or Sony? (Score:3, Informative)
Microsoft would gain the WebOS,
Not in a million years. Remember the Kin. MSFT could buy the Pre, spend two years porting windows 7 to it then sell a few thousand units and write it off on their tax.
How are they not starting from scratch? (Score:2, Informative)
I think any of these companies could develop an OS for less than $1.2bn and I can't see it taking them that much time either. It's not like they would have to start from scratch.
That's true of Nokia, since they have Meego.
But Microsoft and Sony - Microsoft did pretty much start from scratch, it's Windows Mobile 7. And Sony has less than nothing, not even really having mobile hardware at the moment.
For them it could have been a big boost. But Sony is for some reason staying out of Mobile, and Microsoft turns down anything that's not somehow C# based.
Re:Isn't it obvious? (Score:5, Informative)
To explain the joke, Palm got started selling its Graffiti software for Newton to replace Apple's dismal handmall reaquisition.
Re:Has anyone ever used the WebOS? (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, iPhone & Android fanboys just don't know.
However WebOS has its fair share of nasty bugs that include a system-wide memory that forces you to reboot at some point. The messaging app is barebones and need notifications for when a user comes online.
The cloud aware contact integration is pretty much out of this world at this point. I was able to add a simple Jabber protocol and it was able to 'join' folks I know against all existing contacts intelligently.
The browser could be better as well, fewer bugs. Overclocked kernels running at 720mhz with 24M compcache seems to be the magic sweet spot now for the original Sprint device.
A lot of folks in the homebrew community is pretty hardcore about hacking this device.
Re:It seems to me (Score:3, Informative)
I just picked up a Palm Pre a couple weeks ago, yeah I was late to the show. The OS is really (really) nice. I prefer it over the iPhone and I think it blows Android out of the water. But the hardware isn't great and the form factor is rather bad. The phone takes 3-4 minutes to boot and must be rebooted fairly frequently. The only way to turn on your screen is to press an awkwardly placed button on the corner, even harder to get to when you have the slider open. The web browser works far better than I ever expected for any phone, but it's limited by the relatively low screen resolution. The CPU is not fast enough (but are they ever?) and causes awkward delays when trying to answer phone calls.
I held out on buying a Pre for so long because I wanted to see a taller, slimmer, faster and perhaps touch-only model of the phone. Now I know it's what they needed. Instead, they waited a year to dish out AT&T and Verizon re-hashes of the same old stuff. I wish they were purchased by someone better than HP, but if they ever release a WebOS-based tablet I will definitely be interested.
Re:To jack up the price for HP (Score:3, Informative)
By that definition, fraud doesn't exist, just FYI. It's a really fucking dumb meme you're spreading.