HP acquired Palm

When it seemed that the mobile OS market is already overcrowded, the another top player entered the space. Today HP acquired Palm for $1.2 billion. Although Palm was the pioneer on the smartphone and PDA market (during the 1990s), in recent years, it  was taken over by Apple, Microsoft, Google, RIM, HTC, etc. Nevertheless, the company problems were probably caused not by its technologies, but by the lack of sales activities. Last year, Palm introduced the new mobile platform WebOS, which has received many positive reviews, but Palm WebOS sales failed due to the bad contracts with mobile operators. On the contrary, HP (aka the world's largest computer manufacturer) has no problems with sales. If HP install the Palm WebOS on their smartphones, PDAs, tablets and netbooks, this mobile platform will automatically reach the popularity of iPhone OS, Android, Blackberry and Windows Phone.

As we know, HP is a major producer of PDAs running Windows Mobile (iPAQ) and Windows-based netbooks. In addition, soon it will release the first tablet HP Slate with Windows 7, which is called the main iPad competitor. Perhaps one of the factors that influenced the HP's decision to buy Palm, was release of Windows Phone that replaced Windows Mobile. Because the significant part of HP customers are business users that are not very happy with Windows Phone. In any way, Microsoft will probably loose another mobile market share after this deal.

Palm WebOS is (theoretically) one of the best mobile operating system today. It's very light and fast, and provides the intuitive interface. It also supports multitasking and Flash. As goes of its name, the platform is optimized to work with web-services and includes an excellent web browser based on Webkit. But the main WebOS problem - is the lack of a large number of applications.