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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It seems that Palm is lining up for a fairly disappointing conversation with its shareholders, with word that the company’s CEO has warned employees that times things have been rough for Palm.

Palm's Pre has always looked nice, but it seems like that's not quite enough...

Word of the shaky figures comes via a letter sent to Palm employees by company CEO Jon Rubinstein, in which it’s pointed out that the company will be posting revenues for Q3 of somewhere between the $300 million mark and $320 million, which will very likely be something of a disappointment for any Palm investors, who had previously been told to expect somewhere in the realm of $1.6-1.8 billion. Still, Rubinstein was fairly open about the situation, saying that,

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Palm has found itself in a bit of legal trouble surrounding the WebOS PDF viewer to be found on its Pre smartphone, extending the laundry list of headaches that the company has had since it launched the Pre.

According to PCWorld, the issue stems from the manner in which Artifex Software has had its PDF engine licensed, a feature which seems, for the moment at least, to be a little up-in-the-air, at least where Palm is concerned. It seems that Artifex’s PDF rendering engine, muPDF, has been included in Palm’s WebOS, which is the source of all the bother for Palm.

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Google’s news aggregator, the appropriately named Google News, is going mobile, with the latest iteration of the service will hit different devices in custom formats, specifically to get the most from the hardware.

Word of the new update comes from the Google Mobile Blog, which is fairly quick to point out that there are already some offerings of Google News with specific hardware in mind, including Blackberries, Windows Mobile devices and S60. Now though, Google has rounded out that line-up a little with new versions of Google News available for the iPhone, Android devices and Palm’s Pre smartphone.

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Palm has announced that its upcoming update to its WebOS, for use with its Pre smartphone, brings back the ability to sync the device with iTunes.

Of course, this comes in the wake of news from the USB Implimenters Forum that what Palm was doing to get iTunes to recognise its devices as an iPod was essentially a violation of the policy under which the USB IF operates. Basically, in order to get iTunes to sync to the Pre, Palm had set up the smartphone so that it identified itself using the vendor code distributed to Apple for its iPod line… which is, to say the least, a bit frowned upon.

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O2 has finally announced the release dates for Palm’s Pre Smartphone in Europe, including the Irish release date, which is to be October 16th.

Moreover, we haven’t just been given a release date for the device in Ireland, the UK and Germany, O2 has also posted details of the pricing plans it will have available to its Irish customers when the phone hits here, and the news is a lot like the news we posted during the iPhone launch. Palm’s Pre will cost you more if you’re Irish than if you’re living in the UK. Fortunately, it’s a bit less severe.

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Palm’s appeal to the USB Implementers Forum has had pretty much the polar opposite of the effect it was hoping for, with the USB IF ruling in Apple’s favour on pretty much all counts.

Apple’s repeated blocking of Palm’s Pre Smartphone from the sync functionality had begun to stick in Palm’s craw a little. While Apple was busy making iTunes updates to specifically block the Pre, it seems that Palm’s response was to essentially hijack the USB Vendor ID used by Apple’s iPod line to trick iTunes into believing that Palm’s hardware was Apple approved, and for a while it worked (right down to the Pre having an iPod image under iTunes).

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The latest shot in the shambling fight between Apple and Palm that’s gone on just long enough to be embarrassing for both parties is the news that Apple’s latest iTunes update, bringing the application up to iTunes 9, once again breaks the Sync function in Palm’s Pre smartphone.

For those of you who missed it, Apple initially updated iTunes to 8.1, breaking the ability of Palm’s Pre to sync content with Apple’s music player. The move is presumed to have been a direct response to the Pre as a threat to Apple’s smartphone, the iPhone. The real question now is how Palm will respond.

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It’s looking as though Palm has accidentally released the upcoming version of its WebOS, WebOS 1.2, with the latest build of its WebOS Doctor recovery tool for users of its Pre smartphone.

According to a report over on PreCentral, it looks as though using the WebOS Doctor to restore factory defaults to a dodgy Pre results in the WebOS Doctor installing WebOS 1.2. The current build of Palm’s WebOS Doctor is, of course, not the same one as was available earlier in the weekend, but that didn’t stop some people grabbing the botched copy and installing WebOS1.2 If nothing else this means that some users have been getting a bit of a sneak preview of the direction Palm is headed with its newest update. Some of the new features are particularly interesting.

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Despite the incredibly rigorous and often inexplicable security measures of the iPhone App Store, it seems as though some fairly dodgy spyware-type behaviour has managed to seep through, finding its way onto innocuous users’ iPhones.

The revelation that the iPhone’s tremendously popular App Store serves up spyware comes in the week following the news that Palm’s smart phone, the Pre, phones home with its users’ locations when using certain applications. For the past few days, it had seemed a feather in the iPhone’s cap that it wasn’t guilty of the same kind of behaviour, though now it seems that for many users it may well be.

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News emerged last night that Palm’s smartphone, the Pre might well be sending a little more than most of its users are aware back to home base. One of the details that has people really flummoxed is the news that the Pre reports its location to Palm daily.

While everyone has been focussing on the fact that Palm has been receiving information about their locations and how strange that is, for us the most interesting (and certainly more unnerving) news is that Palm has also been receiving updates on how long its users have spent with each application running. While it makes a lot of sense to report crash details to Palm, the amount of time spent using individual apps is a little more dubious.

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While it’s all been good, clean fun while Apple and Palm updated both the iTunes and the firmware for Palm’s Pre in an attempt to lock out and unlock the Apple applications functionality for the device, things have gotten a little heady now with Palm filing a complaint to a USB standards group.

TheRegister is reporting that Palm’s cmplaint says a fair bit about just how the Pre manages to talk to iTunes. In short, it disguises itself as an iPod extremely convincingly. Of course, we all already knew that, what’s interesting is the way in which it’s been done, which is nice and simple.

According to the document Palm sent to the USB Implementers Forum, the whole rigmarole comes out of Standard Device Descriptors, which would normally pass along all kinds of information about a device that you’ve plugged in… unless of course you somehow manage to set yourself up in such a way that you appear to be another device – but who’d do such a nefarious thing?

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