Lenovo – with Huawei and ZTE reportedly out of the picture – may be the most likely to bid for ailing smartphone-maker Palm, according to a report. Palm, meanwhile, insists it can still be just fine on its own – thank you very much – but would consider licensing out its webOS platform. Palm is also working on new smartphones to complement the Pre and Pixi.

HTC, Nokia, Motorola and Research in Motion have all been named as companies that might benefit from purchasing smartphone-maker Palm, which has struggled for some time to keep a foothold in the market it initially helped create.

However, an April 23 Reuters reported finds that Lenovo appears to be the most likely candidate to place a bid.

Source: eWeek.

Handhelds · HTC Corporation · Huawei · Lenovo · Nokia · Palm OS · Smartphone · WebOS

Saul Hansell’s blog post for the NY Times talks about Palm’s chances, here are some highlights:
In a land of cellphone giants, Palm is a mouse. Palm is tiny compared with Apple, Research in Motion, Samsung, Google, Microsoft and Nokia, which are battling to control the future of smartphones.
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While no one expected Palm’s sales would rival the sales of iPhones or BlackBerrys — and they have not — developers have not rushed to write applications for the phone as they have for the iPhone and Android phones.
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Jon Rubinstein, Palm’s chief executive who was the top Apple engineer and the first head of its iPod division, said in an interview that Palm does not need to be as big as its rivals to thrive. His former employer, after all, was long able to carve out a lucrative niche in the computer business.

“One of the key things we need to do as a company is to get to scale,” he said. “We need to bring on more carriers and more regions.”

Analysts expect that Palm will sell an upgraded version of the Pre with Verizon early next year and add AT&T later in the year. It sells phones in six countries and is steadily expanding to others in Europe and North America.
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Mr. Rubinstein said Palm would never need as many applications as the iPhone. “We are focused on quality over quantity,” he said.

Palm is still testing its app store, called the App Catalog, with a small group of developers. It will open to anyone who wants to write an app next month — six months after the Pre was introduced.

Mr. Rubinstein says he expects developers will write for Palm devices, in part because Palm’s operating system, called webOS, is based largely on the same languages used to design Web sites. Android, by contrast, is based on Sun’s Java language, and Apple uses a variation of the C computer programming language.

He discounts Android’s chances because, he says, it does not yet have mass appeal. “Android, and the Droid in particular, are designed for the techie audience,” Mr. Rubinstein said. “We are doing a more general product that helps people live their lives seamlessly.”

While Android is getting a lot of attention because it has attracted so many phone makers, those companies, Mr. Rubinstein, argues “have to depend on the kindness of strangers” — meaning Google — for their software.

“The companies that will deliver the best products are the ones that integrate the whole experience — the hardware, the software and the services — and aren’t getting one piece from here and one piece from there and trying to bolt it all together,” he said.
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“The Palm Pixi is the only low-end smartphone with a new operating system,” said Mr. Kuittinen. “That is fairly impressive.”

He estimates Palm may be able to sell 10 million handsets next year, about 5 percent of the smartphone market. That assumes the company can get more carriers in the United States and Europe to sell Palm phones.

Apple · Google · iPhone · Microsoft · Nokia · Palm · Research in Motion · WebOS

Palm shares are on the rise again with renewed speculation that cell phone giant Nokia is interested in acquiring the Sunnyvale company.

Palm’s shares have risen about 9 percent today to about $12.50 a share. It’s unclear that there is anything new to the Nokia rumor, which has surfaced before.

In late September, Palm’s shares hit an almost two-year high when the Nokia talk surfaced. Palm’s stock peaked above $17 a share before subsiding.

There is differing opinion about whether it makes sense for Nokia to buy Palm. Nokia already owns a commanding lead in the global smart phone market with its devices based on the Symbian operating system. It’s also developing a new Linux-based operating system called Maemo that could vault it into the smart phone market in the U.S.

Nokia, however, might see the much lauded Palm webOS as a way to jump ahead, especially in the U.S. where Nokia is a minor presence. The Palm webOS is a very good modern operating system that, with the right support, is a legitimate challenger to the iPhone OS.

So, we’ll see if Palm can hold out any longer. They just released the Palm Pixi, the follow up to the Palm Pre. And Palm is slated to release the Palm Pre on more U.S. carriers early next year including Verizon Wireless. With the iPhone and BlackBerry still strong and Android coming on in a hurry, Palm may need the backing of a bigger company to compete.

[source: SF Gate]

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