Finally it’s HP that solved Palm Mystery

Palm was in dire straits for quite sometime waiting for someone to buy them. So finally HP announced today that they have entered into a definitive agreement to buy Palm , at a price of $5.70 per share, which is an estimated value of $1.2 billion. Earlier there were lot of speculation of HTC, RIM, Lenovo and bunch of other companies bidding to buy Palm. HTC was tipped to be one of the top contenders to buy Palm because of Apple patent lawsuit. However, HTC decided to go with their Mobile OS instead of buying Palm. It’s sad to see Palm, which was one of the pioneers in Smartphone and touch screen technology go down this way.

What does this mean to HP; they will own one of the best available mobile operating system. With the ambition to be in the tablet business and slate on its ways out soon, this looks like a great step forward towards mobile ambition. In addition, they can use WebOS for all future versions of slate and dump windows OS, which sucks anyways. HP is already stuck with windows in the netbook space and iam sure they don’t want to be stuck with windows in the tablet and mobile space. It gives them a big boost in owning a mobile OS than can be used on tablet computers. Does anyone really care about windows mobile anymore?

Off course the big question on everyone’s mind is why not use Android, which is free and open source. I personally feel nothing is free in this world. There is a cost for everything. Owning and controlling in-house OS has many benefits, which includes providing bells and whistles to developers for developing apps on the platform, owning an App Store, control on software updates etc.