After a couple of months of speculations on who’s going to end Palm’s misery and buy the company, the cat has been officially let out of the bag. The official Palm blog announced that the company will merge with “a little shop down the street called HP”. Hewlett-Packard probably feels great right now, having acquired all of Palm’s patents, too.
The deal will be closed by the end of July and HP will take over Palm for $1.2 billion, as claimed by Business Week. This transaction will mark HP’s re-entry in the smartphone biz, which they haven’t been handling that well, considering the tough competition from the likes of Apple and RIM. iPaq smartphones were in no way rivals to BlackBerries or iPhones, that’s for sure…
Maybe webOS will change the game and Palm’s technologies, too, with the great power saving systems included. In spite of the more important presence on the handset market, Palm has had its share of misfortunes, struggling with losses for 11 straight quarters. The Palm Pre and Pixi models seemed to announce a comeback for the brand, but even that didn’t help.
This news comes as a follow-up to the stories saying that HTC was likely to acquire Palm, but the Taiwanese company gave up the initiative, being followed by ZTE, Huawei and Lenovo.
[via Business Week]
