It was announced recently that HP was purchasing Palm. As both a customer and shareholder of Palm, I’m happy with this. It was, quite probably, Palm’s least bad option.
I’ve had a Pre for almost a year now, and while I love it, and truly think WebOS is by far the best mobile OS on the market, I can see why Palm has had trouble with it. Their advertising strategy has been pretty awful, to put it mildly. They’ve taken some steps to change that recently, and I think their newer ads will work out much better, but it’s unclear if they could sustain themselves long enough for that to happen if they had remained independent.
They’ve also got to make some more appealing hardware. The Pre looks cheap and plasticy, and to some small extent feels that way too. HP might not be Apple, but they’re much better at building attractive hardware (when they try, which they often don’t) than most.
Palm made a seemingly enormous mistake in launching with Sprint. Their hardware had a pretty long technological lead on everyone else when it launched, but was about average by the time it got to the bigger carriers. Whatever Sprint gave them (in excess of what Verizon would have) it wasn’t worth it.
HP is getting a lot in this deal. They’re getting the most user- and developer-friendly mobile OS on the market. They’re getting the carrier relationships (biz-dev is the name of the game in the mobile space) and clearly some engineering talent.
On the other hand, I’m afraid they may be developing the “man with a hammer syndrome” if all of the stories about killing off the Windows 7 Slate are true. While I love my Pre, I have no desire for a bigger, faster one. There’s just too much it can’t do, even at 3x the size.
I’d probably preorder a Windows 7 one. There’s just so much I can do on Windows 7, even on a device designed solely for casual use, that I cannot on an iPad or a comparable WebOS device. I can watch Hulu or play games. I can use Roboform to log into my zillions of web services without having to type passwords (and typing is the Achilles heel of virtual keypad devices, so anything that reduces it is going to be a big usability boon). I can use full-fledged Outlook or Trillian. I can use Dropbox and Windows Live Writer and VLC and uTorrent and play Chess on Yahoo. I can play Starcraft 2… ok maybe not. But you get the point.
The number of things I can do on a full Windows machine dwarfs even the iTunes App Store, which itself makes the WebOS one look flabby and weak. I don’t want an app store, I want good old fashioned programs. Apps suck, they just suck a little less than websites.
I don’t want or need a bigger, less convenient version of my phone, I want a smaller, more convenient version of my laptop.
