HP buys Palm - Geeks rejoice

While the Apple Newton was the first attempt at a mass-market PDA, Palm was the company that really brought the idea of a handheld computing platform to the masses. Their "Palm Pilot" transformed the industry and reminded techies that simple is good. In recent years, Palm has fallen on hard times - mostly due to missteps by management teams who had no idea how to compete with the modern threats of Apple and Google - but after a few weeks of uncertainty HP has announced a purchase of Palm for $1.2 billion. This goes a long way toward ensuring some kind of future for the innovative company.

And as Sean has pointed out, this may lead to even more exciting possibilities like an HP branded iPad competitor running the WebOS!

Palm steps up to the gallows

We all knew it was coming. The Palm Pre - while a stunning entry into the smartphone market - could not compete with the twin juggernauts of the Apple iPhone and Google Android. Palm, Inc. simply could not reverse a decade of complacency with a single great product. Now, the venerable father of the successful PDA is up for sale. Apple got there first with the Newton, but Palm put millions of PDAs into the hands of businessmen and changed portable computing. They will be missed.

Rumored buyers include HTC (maker of smartphones), Motorola, Nokia, and Apple.

Apple drops iSync support for Palm

While I own an iPhone 3GS, I have been watching the drama surrounding the Palm Pre with considerable interest. I owned several Palm phones over the years - before Apple changed the game - and it was always a battle to sync those phones with the Mac. Recently, Palm designed the Pre to trick iTunes into allowing it to seamlessly sync with any Mac until Apple disabled the feature twice. Palm still seems to be insistent upon restoring the sync, despite Apple's insistence that only iPhones sync with iTunes.

Now, the next shot may have been fired in the sync war as Apple is abandoning iSync support for classic PalmOS phones in MacOS X 10.6 (snow leopard). This means users of Palm Centros, Treos, and their PDAs will either have to forgo the upgrade, or abandon their PalmOS devices.

Palm Pre Phone Home?

There has been a lot of scrutiny of Apple's iPhone because of its so-called "monopoly status", but it is important to keep your eyes on the smaller guys as well. A hacker, going thru the Palm Pre SDK has determined that the Palm Pre regularly calls home and sends your current location to Palm, Inc. They claim that the privacy policy protects customers, but such a setup could easily allow the company to insert location-targeted ads into their apps to generate extra profit.

Palm announces its Next Generation phone

Palm has been working a LONG time to produce a next-generation operating systems. First, we heard about Palm 5. It was originally going to be a revolutionary upgrade to the PalmOS but wound up being a simple evolutionary change called Garnet. Then we heard about Palm 6... but that fizzled out without making it onto a single device. Then we heard about the new Linux-based OS called ACCESS... but eventually Palm passed on that entirely. Now, finally, Palm has announced their "real" Next Geneation O/S called "webOS" and actually has a product that runs it, called the Palm PRE. The new webOS is webkit based (same as Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome) and is based around the idea of building Apps using web tools like HTML, JavaScript, and XML. The built-in apps are made to automatically and wirelessly sync with Facebook, Google, etc. to keep your contacts always in sync.

One interesting omissions, sure to raise the ire of Palm's few remaining supporters, appears to be PalmOS backwards compatibility. It appears from the press release that existing PalmOS apps do not work with the new system. This was probably necessary to bring about the radical changes needed for webOS (and probably why it is NOT called PalmOS 6 or 7). But if I had invested hundreeds or thousands of dollars in Palm software, I'd be put out to learn it was all throw-away.

Here is hoping this gives Palm a chance to survive in a future where Apple's iPhone and Google's Android increasingly dominate the landscape.

R.I.P. PalmOS

Palm was once the juggernaut of the handheld world. It held nearly the entire PDA space in its iron grip, and only a few surviving Apple Newtons and Windows CE devices were out there to challenge it. Now, however, it is a much different world. Windows Mobile owns much of the American market, Blackberry owns most of the rest, and the PalmOS is being quietly retired in favor of some kind of Linux which Palm will use on future handhelds.

The beginning of the end for PalmOS was when Palm split into two companies - one to handle Palm-branded hardware and another to handle Palm-branded operating systems and software. Ostensibly, this was to foster innovation on both sides. Instead, it institutionalized the tendency toward tunnel vision. Here is hoping devices like the iPhone can return competition to the space, and foster true innovation.