As expected, HP is set to use its recent acquisition of Palm to develop smartphone, netbook and tablet devices based on the webOS platform. Having stumped up $1.2 billion to get Palm (and dumping the ‘HP Slate’ tablet device like a bad habit earlier this year), reports today indicate that HP aims to create a new “unified cloud-based environment accessible from a range of mobile devices”.

In a promising move, Jon Rubinstein, former Palm chairman and chief executive officer, will move to HP as leader of the devices group there. Okay, Palm wasn’t the roaring success it longed to be but Rubenstein was one of the main brains behind the iPod and, it seems to be widely accepted that he was instrumental in turning Apple’s fortunes around in the late 90s.

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Nokia has unveiled a raft of new smartphones as part of its ongoing efforts to snatch back a significant chunk of the burgeoning smartphone market.

Nokia could certainly stand to grab a bigger share of the smartphone market

Nokia might well be the most popular mobile phone manufacturer on the planet, but the fact is that in the smartphone market, things have been less than sterling for the Finnish mobile giant. Indeed, things have been looking grim for Nokia since around ten months ago, when the company revealed that it had seen profits fall by nearly 50% over the previous twelve months. Now though, it seems that Nokia is attempting to rally, reaching for a share of the smartphone market that might be at least a little more in line with that of its feature phones.

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HP has confirmed that, despite its recent acquisition of smartphone-centric company Palm, it has no intentions to go into the smartphone market, saying that the decision to do so simply wouldn’t make sense.

The confirmation will be sad news for long-time Palm fans...

Word comes via Engadget that HP’s CEO, Mark Hurd, outlined the company’s strategy fairly clearly to investors at a recent conference. According to Hurd, HP has no designs on the smartphone market, and is of the opinion that it would be a little unwise to “spend billions of dollars trying to go into the smartphhone business; that doesn’t in any way make any sense.” That much alone should be a comfort to those who had feared that the OEM might well find itself in some trouble if it attempted to compete with a line of entrenched devices from both Apple and RIM, to say nothing of the morass of Android devices out there.

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Apple has announced that it has, in the sixty days since the device’s April third release in the US, managed to sell 2 million units of its iPad hardware.

Of course, the fact that Apple has managed to push itself up to the 2 million mark so very quickly very likely has something to do with the fact that the international launch of the device proved so successful. Both Japan and the UK have seen a high level of interest in Apple’s tablet device, so we can probably expect to see more announcements coming from Apple as it passes more milestones with the device.

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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,

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Rumours swirling around Research in Motion, better known as RIM, indicate that the company could already be working on a tablet device to complement its BlackBerry line.

A tablet could be a hard sell with business users...

Word of the device itself comes courtesy of BlackBerryLeaks, which boasts a fair few tidbits about the device, which it claims has been codenamed the ‘BlackPad,’ or, quite possibly, the ‘Cobalt.’ The other rumours about the device centre on the physicality of it, compared to Apple’s iPad, with the report indicating that it will be both smaller, at 8.9”, and thinner than Apple’s iPad. Of course, whether it makes sense for RIM, with its business focus, to enter the tablet market is something that remains to be seen, but its not entirely senseless.

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Chinese mobile phone manufacturer High Tech Computer, more commonly known as HTC, is banking on Google’s Android OS to make it some serious cash in coming months.

HTC has done very well out of Google's mobile OS

Word comes via Tomshardware that HTC is expecting a significant bump in demand for Android-based devices, which it hopes to see bump its smartphone shipments by as much as 50% in the coming three months. HTC has already seen impressive figures, and those seem set to grow as the Nexus One continues to roll out, carrying HTC’s name as one of those at the core of the Android platform. Indeed, the sheer number of devices that HTC has already shipped this year is impressive, sitting in the neighbourhood of 3.3 million in the first quarter alone. Given the gradual growth in interest in Android and the hat puts the expected number of handsets to ship at around the 4.5 million mark, which is very impressive altogether.

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Microsoft’s long-rumoured Courier tablet, which boasted two screens, a stylus and opened like a magazine, has apparently been cancelled before it was even officially announced.

The courier's form factor is certainly interesting

Despite the fact that the Courier never received any official confirmation, interest in tablet devices, especially those with unusual form factors, meant that Microsoft’s own tablet effort was fairly hotly anticipated in some quarters. Unfortunately, Gizmodo is now reporting that the device has been cancelled, with Microsoft’s corporate VP of communications responding to questions about the project, saying that,

“At any given time, we’re looking at new ideas, investigating, testing, incubating them. It’s in our DNA to develop new dorm factors and natural user interfaces to foster productivity and creativity. The Courier project is an example of this kind of effort. It will be evaluated for use in future offerings, but we have no plans to build such a device at this time.”

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Hewlett Packard has picked up ailing smartphone manufacturer Palm, whose Pre and Pixi had failed to earn it enough to stave off a buyout. This comes despite Palm’s hopes to remain an independent company.

Alas, poor Pre, we barely knew ye

Palm had admitted last month that things were looking pretty dire, with internal memos indicating that the lack of penetration gained by the Palm Pre, leaving the company without the iPhone killer that many within Palm had firmly believed it had on its hands. Of course, Palm’s whole strategy wasn’t based around a single piece of hardware, and there’s still plenty of interest in the company’s mobile OS, the simply named WebOS. Indeed, it seems as though that was what caught HP’s money-laden attention.

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It looks like the race to buy Palm is about to conclude with Lenovo set to take on the troubled smartphone makers. Lenovo has leapt to the front of the queue after HTC apparently pulled out of any prospective deal.

The Taiwanese firm was invited to make a bid for Palm, but after looking at the company’s books has decided to decline, according to Reuters. Continue Reading

We reported on Palm putting itself up for sale the other day with initial rumours suggesting that HTC and Lenovo were the big contenders to swoop in and purchase the smartphone maker. However the list of possible suitors has since grown dramatically with names such as Huawei, Dell, Research In Motion (RIM) and ZTE being all linked with deals for the company.

Palm’s predicament could spark a billion dollar bidding war.

Indeed, according to reports this morning, it seems that Huawei had been edging towards purchasing Palm since February and even considered the deal to be close to completion until news of Palm’s predicament was made public the other day. Talks are rumoured to have stalled ever since, as the floor was opened to other possible buyers.

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Palm, the makers of the Pre range of smartphones, is said to be up for sale, with a Bloomberg report saying that three sources close to the company have told them that buyers are currently being sought.

The Palm Pre had some fans, and got some great reviews, but that didn’t translate into massive sales.

Though they declined to be identified, as a sale hasn’t yet been officially announced, the sources told Bloomberg that Palm is working with Goldman Sachs and high-end dealmakers Frank Quattrone’s Qatalyst Partners to find someone to take the company on. HTC and Lenovo have looked at the business and may make offers, added Bloomberg’s trio of sources.

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