We’ve been rather forthright about Palm in recent months here at Mobile Industry Review. Indeed most recently, I posed the question Are we ready to declare the Palm Pre dead in the UK & Ireland.
And so Bloomberg reports this morning that, well, yes, Palm is dead. Not just the Pre, but the company. Kaput. That is, it’s trying to get itself sold.
Goldman Sachs and Qatalyst Partners are currently doing the hawking.
HTC and Lenovo are, Bloomberg reckons, musing on the possibility of making an offer.
Here’s a quote:
“Palm still has quite a good brand in the U.S. market, and some strong technology, so you can do something with it,” said Frank He, a technology analyst at BOC International Holdings Ltd. in Hong Kong. “The shares have gone down a lot and the company may become attractive to anyone looking for a turnaround play.”
Indeed. Quite a turnaround indeed.
Who do you think will be the ultimate acquirer? Who’d you like to see snap up Palm? Microsoft? Nokia?
A Nokia acquisition would certainly raise some eyebrows. Doubtful, though.
What about some Russian trillionaire? It’d be quite exciting to see someone do the equivalent of Roman Abramovich’s reinvigoration of faltering premiership football team, Chelsea (who are now consistently amongst the Premiership titans).
And for all the Pre users out there: Hold on tight…
Russian/Chinese buyers would be very interesting.
What about we all club together as a MIR readers collective? We could buy Palm and install Ewan as the new Chief Exec – then we'd see some interesting changes happen!
I've got a tenner I can put into the pot – anyone else?
I'd go for Lenovo – resources and a rather large homegrown market to capitalise on then move onto the rest of the Asian market. If they could expand WebOS to the tablet format, that could be interesting. Though HTC would be a better fit but maybe too much of OS range to support with Android, WinMob and Brew to contend with.
BTW, I'll match the tenner!
I'm in!
If Nokia wants to win the US market, it better hurry up and buy Palm.
So that's £20 we've got – anyone else? We probably don't need a lot more do we?
There was a recent post in the GigaOm blog suggesting HTC should buy Palm http://gigaom.com/2010/04/12/buying-palm-would-…
Is this feasible/interesting? Is HTC interested in Palm?
Microsoft new KIN phones look v much like the Palm Pré.. is this a hint?
I do like the comment that another reader posted about simply buying Palm for their patents. That's unless anyone really wants to resurrect the devices.
I do like the comment that another reader posted about simply buying Palm for their patents. That's unless anyone really wants to resurrect the devices.