Old news by now, but I couldn’t make the post earlier yesterday. It’s great news for Palm, and most especially the Palm community. While my earlier opining that RIM/Blackberry should buy Palm was wrong, the dynamic isn’t far off. ZDNet probably has the best analysis (and here) of the acquisition, and one of their observations is that HP is more likely to use webOS as a further wedge into the enterprise against RIM, than in to the consumer space against Apple. That makes alot of sense as HP has very strong channel partnerships there, and already has the practice of bundling their (now lame) iPaq smartphones with enterprise hardware deals.
Now … maybe we’ll see a tablet running webOS in the future. Would make a great platform for mobile ad hoc collaboration ;-)
This article makes an accurate case that the Blackberry OS (and app store) is what’s holding the Blackberry back these days.
RIM should buy Palm and switch to / integrate their webOS. Palm could be gotten on the cheap, and their UI is at least as elegant as the iPhone’s, and demonstrably superior to many of the Android flavors. webOS is built on a Linux variant, which would leverage RIM’s QNX acquisition. Palm has excellent app store (the “App Catalog”) – and everything on the device works quite elegantly.
One thing …. Specifically regarding this line in the article , “… [Apple's iPhones] have by far the best API of any mobile platform.” Not sure I agree with that one. The iPhone definitely has the lion share of apps, although Android will likely eclipse it before long. However, the webOS development environment is far and away the best API. HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Writing Palm apps is little more dificult than writing modern websites. Their device API is equivalent to the iPhone’s … access to contacts, the camera, GPS data, accelerometer, device attributes, all the goodies. Plus, integration of data amongst the applications is arguably better than in the iPhone.
With Apple’s ascendence over time, somebody had to lose. And without Microsoft’s deep pockets or RIMs corner on the enterprise space, Palm was it. But, Palm is at least equal to Apple’s iPhone in tech, and definitely superior to RIM on many fronts. It could make a great combination.
Cheers,
Eric
Update: here’s a nice ad from AT&T for the Palm Pre Plus. Shows off its UI pretty well.
