Ewan's comment
The main consideration is HP’s lack of mobile phones in their portfolio. For a company that was one of the strongest supporters of PDA’s with their Windows Mobile based iPaq devices, HP haven’t made any strong moves to the mobile market.
And of course they’re still making hardware that requires them to licence a suitable OS from Microsoft. With webOS from Palm, that’s likely to change. Former Apple employee and current Palm CEO John Rubenstein is expected to carry on in the “Palm division” of HP, so that keeps the mindshare and knowledge of the Palm way of doings things alive and well.
On the Palm side of the equation, for all the history and legacy, the current iteration of Palm is essentially a start-up, backed by Venture Capital money. Elevation Partners ploughed in the majority of Palm’s operating cash, some $460 million, and Business Insider reckons they’ll step away with $485 million. A profitable deal by a small margin, but still more than could have been predicted a few months ago.
Palm should benefit greatly from HP's scale and distribution network; something which has been an uphill struggle for a relatively small company in the last 18 months. HP have the financial resources to realise some of the considerable potential of the WebOS platform.
WebOS, a largely under-rated mobile software platform, is now likely to gain some major investment in engineering time from HP. The first HP / WebOS devices (beyond rebadging and spec bumps on the existing Palm designs) are could become available by the middle of 2011, perhaps in the HP range of Tablet devices.
This is a gamble on HP’s part. WebOS may have excited the geeks and Palm loyalists, but it never got traction in the marketplace or with developers. While the value in the OS or the staff is significant, it is also worth remembering the 1,500 mobile technology patents that are owned by Palm.
The full HP statement can be found here, see also PalmInfoCenter for coverage of the investors conference call.