HP buys Palm

That’s the breaking news of the day. While they managed to stage their comeback at CES last year, Palm piled up bad choices preventing them to actually get healthy again, one being to get stuck with Sprint wich a CDMA-only version of their phones for over 1 year. they only now managed to release a GSM version of their Palm Pre and Pixi and are struggling with distribution, for instance in France you can buy int through SFR but only online (no retail presence) and the only place you can touch one is the lobby at SFR HQ (picture on the left).

HP invented the iPaq, the first really amazing windows-mobile based PDA in the early 2000 which were instrumental in the decline of Palm and triggered a couple of big reorganizations such as the split between Palm One and Palm Source (hard/soft) and eventually lead to the abandon of PalmOS.

But HP did not understand the move from the PDA to the Smartphone and every experience they did in that area ended up as a catastrophy.

HP buying Palm at such a high valuation  means they want to get back in the Smartphoen business and want to get rid of Windows Mobile as their reference platform (which has obviously been a burden over the last couple of years). I still feel the valuation is very high since they’re buying an OS that was built in about 1 year, some experience in the field of capacitive sensors and a pile of patents.

Here’s the official press release.