Hasta La Gadget!

The HP/Palm acquisition conference call is going on right now, but I wanted to point out an interesting juxtaposition on some of the slides they’re providing along with the call. On slides 5 and 9, they show three images:

Color us excited. HP’s Todd Bradley just made an interesting proposition on the conference call about its Palm acquisition. Specifically, Bradley said, “Between smartphones, slates, and potentially netbooks, there are a lot of opportunities here.” You read that right: slates and potentially netbooks. The tablet route is pretty obvious, but having the netbook / smartbook form factor is quite a twist. Think about it, a Foleo descendant you can be proud of — whodathunkit? If you’re worried HP has forgotten about other platforms, we need only point in the direction of the Android-fueled Airlife. Obviously nothing to announce at this point, but doesn’t that just get us hopeful — roadmap announcements are said to be forthcoming closer to the merger being finalized. The call is still ongoing, so stay tuned!

HP: opportunities for webOS ‘smartphones, slates, and potentially netbooks’ originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 28 Apr 2010 16:55:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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After months of speculation regarding the fate of floundering smartphone manufacturer Palm, as well as a number of buyout rumors involving companies such as Lenovo, the company’s fate is finally clear. HP today issued a press release announcing that it has “entered into a definitive agreement under which [it] will purchase Palm.”

According to the terms of the agreement, HP will purchase Palm for $1.2 billion, or $5.70 a share. The deal has been approved by both Palm and HP. There’s not a lot of information being disclosed at the moment, but some will hopefully surface before the deal is closed at the end of June. According to a press release issued by the company, CEO Jon Rubenstein is expected to stay on board.

Said Rubenstein in the release:

We’re thrilled by HP’s vote of confidence in Palm’s technological leadership, which delivered Palm webOS and iconic products such as the Palm Pre. HP’s longstanding culture of innovation, scale and global operating resources make it the perfect partner to rapidly accelerate the growth of webOS. We look forward to working with HP to continue to deliver industry-leading mobile experiences to our customers and business partners

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Palm has been in rough financial shape for some time, particularly after its Pre and Pixi handsets failed to catch fire in a market dominated by the Apple iPhone and Google Android OSes. Questions have surrounded the future of Palm and whether or not it would license its webOS and get out of the hardware game altogether. From the sound of Rubenstein’s words, it sounds like that may come to pass, under this deal.

Rejoice: HP is buying Palm! If the boring beigeness of HP doesn’t kill it in the process, this could only be good for anyone looking for a neat, solid smartphone that beats Google and Apple in many areas. More »

It’s hard to mention the word “Palm” without also mentioning either “takeover” or “shakeup” in the same sentence these days, but the company was able to change the subject — rather refreshingly, may we add — to the more pleasant topic of new webOS features coming down the pike at its Developer Day conference in Sunnyvale this weekend. It doesn’t look like we’ll see anything Earth-shattering this year, but devs will be getting their grubby paws on some oft-requested features including direct API access to the microphone and camera, new security and cryptography features, some sort of “media indexer” that’ll make life easier on folks trying to make media apps, and support for Bonjour, zero-config networking, and the Bluetooth Serial Port Profile, a rather generic profile that should open up the door to new categories of accessories that we haven’t seen paired to a Pre before.

They’ll also be adding support for asynchronous background services written in JavaScript, which should theoretically allow data-intensive apps to be more responsive while they’re hard at work; a redesigned App Catalog (pictured); and a new set of developer extensions called Mojo Core that promises to let folks with existing web apps convert them into webOS apps way faster. Palm’s being coy about when exactly we’ll see this, but the official word is that everything they’re discussing this weekend should be in users’ hands by Fall. As far as we know, they didn’t append “come hell, high water, or acquisition” to that timeline, but we figure it was implied.

[Thanks, David R.]

Palm Developer Day reveals interesting bits on the webOS 2010 roadmap originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 25 Apr 2010 23:55:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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