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HP's getting a hell of a deal here. They're now a major player in the mobile devices market, overnight. Palm has current relationships with the three biggest
by megaduck 16y ago
HP's getting a hell of a deal here. They're now a major player in the mobile devices market, overnight.
Palm has current relationships with the three biggest American cell carriers, plus channels in Canada, France, Germany, UK, and Mexico. Palm also has an extensive patent portfolio, many of which Apple is infringing upon.
However, the real prize is WebOS. I just got back from Palm's Developer Day, and their technology stack for their next OS version is pretty damn neat. It's a high performance event-driven javascript architecture on the back end, with WebKit on the front, all programmed through a Rails-ish MVC model. As a web developer, it looks shockingly easy to program for.
Of course, if you want to program the phone in raw C/C++ and SDL, you can do that too. It's incredibly flexible.
What Palm has been lacking is cash and time. The WebOS development stack won't be fully built out until Fall, and they haven't had the resources to push new phone models out as quickly as they need. This deal gives Palm much needed juice, and gives HP all the things they need to go head-to-head with Apple.
If HP is smart, they'll start tossing WebOS on tablets as soon as they can. I'd buy an HP slate with WebOS in a heartbeat.
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- tewks 16y agoI laughed because they were also a major player in the mobile devices market upon the acquisition of Compaq. Remember the iPaq? They were solid devices at the time and sold well. Granted, your emphasis on WebOS is correct. That time, they didn't get control of an OS. Microsoft let WinCE stagnate to some degree over the next few years. We'll see how HP does this time around.
- vl 16y agoEven before iPaq HP had it's own Jornada.
- 10ren 16y agoAnd way before that it had the HP200LX, a 300g DOS computer that ran for 35 hours(!) on 2xAA batteries (monochrome LCD). The closest today is the eee PC, which has heavier batteries, worse battery life [I'd have said the iPhone - but no keyboard, no coding allowed. But it shows an ARM-based clamshell is possible...] That was before HP, the original garage startup, went consumer with Carly Fiorina. They'd lost their way before then, with Matrix management, but Messrs H and P were still around to unretire and fix it. No more. :(
- seshagiric 16y agoFirst EDS and now this. HP is just going after mega deals but no real innovation in their own R&D. As an ex-HP employee I can only imagine what all they could do had they invested same in R&D.
- izendejas 16y agoThe memristor alone is a gold mine. They've also innovated tremendously in making data centers more energy efficient. I'm not sure what you consider innovation, but because this stuff doesn't make in the news regularly like some pretty phones do, it doesn't mean large companies like IBM and HP aren't innovating every day.
- seshagiric 16y agoAn example of the point I am trying to make is that HP now has a consulting division that implements SAP (ERP) solutions for other companies. Why would you spend money acquiring businesses like that? Memristor is a great example. But how much time between nano technology research at HP labs and end-user products being released? main point being will the money spent on acquiring other businesses be rather well spent if invested in internal R&D to speedup things.
- lyime 16y agoHP is indirectly investing in R&D. It would take HP years to build something like WebOS on their own. They just bought 1500 patents and years of R&D effort with talent for a good price. I am not sure how they could top that.
- mixmax 16y ago"This deal (...) gives HP all the things they need to go head-to-head with Apple." Except for the one thing that makes apple products special: Design.
- sev 16y agoExcept for the one thing that makes apple products special: Steve Jobs
- jhancock 16y agoI've been using the Palm Pre for the last month after using an iPhone for more than a year. I feel the Pre is as polished from hardware to software as iPhone. They are two different animals, but webOS and the Pre are fine examples of good design.
- potatolicious 16y agoI've used the Pre (I have an iPhone) - it is incredibly solidly designed. Its main problems are twofold: - It's slow. Really slow. If they can get a 2-3x performance improvement overall throughout webOS, they can actually compete with Apple. So far it's just not snappy enough to be a pleasant experience. - The marketing sucked. Seriously, what the hell. It's almost as if they went out of the way to convince you to not buy this device.
- swannodette 16y agoIn the area of performance, going with V8 sounds like a smart move. It's now faster than Python 3k and Ruby 1.9 if the Computer Benchmarks Game is to be believed. I like my iPhone/iPad but it's high time Apple had some real competition.
- potatolicious 16y agoIt's really too bad that the software wasn't faster and more solid out of the gate - they had some key innovations that Apple still doesn't have: social media integration. Do I want my Facebook contacts in my address book? Hell yes. Would I like a dashboard with recent Facebook updates from my friends? Duh. Palm has an innovative head on its shoulders, I for one am glad they are in a position to have a deep pit of money with which to battle Apple.
- pkulak 16y agoIs there more information about the next OS version publicly available? It sounds pretty awesome.
- megaduck 16y agoPalm shot video of everything at the Developer Day, and should be posting it online soon at http://developer.palm.com http://developer.palm.com. If you're interested in taking a look, the Webkit/V8 MVC bits are all there today. The upcoming part is the ability to create event-driven javascript services of your own. At the moment, you're limited to the ones that Palm provides. They've also got a lot of other really net web tech in the pipeline, including things like a pluggable data service on the device that automagically syncs to CouchDB servers in the cloud. Also check out their Ares web-based development environment, which reached 1.0 recently. Very, very cool.
- hackernews 16y agoI saw a slide with the mention of node.js on it. I really want to find out more about that.
- mace 16y agoI'm hopeful, but I'm expecting the worst. webOS seems to be a compelling technology, particularly because its SDK allows developers to use HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript which many more developers know and use than say Objective-C. The reason I'm expecting the worst is that HP has never been a software company and not even Palm can change that.
- danudey 16y agoIf HP keeps the WebOS team as a separate entity (without cramming new management, coding practices, etc. down their throats) they'll win. If they screw it up, they'll have wasted half a billion dollars.
- c00p3r 16y agoAre they still want to develop apps in javascript to run them in browser? Is this called "the real prize"?
- fredmg 16y agoIs it better than android as well?