It seems that Hewlett Packard wasn’t alone in its bid to pick up Palm last month, with reports indicating that as many as six other companies were involved in a ‘bidding war’ over the company.
Reports indicate that HP has cancelled the Slate since its purchase of Palm
While Palm’s Pre and Pixi never quite took off to quite the extent that Palm clearly hoped, the devices seem to have attracted more than enough attention to ensure that Palm was, at the very least, an attractive prospect for other, healthier companies to pick up. According to the report from Cnet, some of the highlights of Palm’s own statement on how the whole purchase went include,
“The company was in a tailspin after Verizon Wireless partnership failed to deliver sales;
Liquidity was about to become an issue;
And Palm didn’t have the scale of rivals to compete.”
Those first two points are things that have been hinted at before, especially towards the end of Palm’s days as an independent company, when an internal memo indicated that the company just wasn’t seeing sufficient sales to guarantee that it might be able to stay afloat. The memo went on to say that members of Verizon’s staff should be retrained to better shift Palm devices.
Of course, the one feather in Palm’s cap all along has been its long years spent in the mobile sector, which account largely for the elegance and polish of its WebOS. Considering the fact that HP has very quickly moved to point out just how much it intends to use WebOS, it seems clear that it’s been one of the reasons that HP considered Palm an attractive offering in the first place.
Since the acquisition, HP has reportedly cancelled its erstwhile Slate tablet device, which had been set to run Windows 7, but of which the early reviews weren’t entirely flattering. It seems likely that HP will be moving its touch-based efforts over to the touch-friendly WebOS, though for now nothing’s been made official.
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