According to Businessweek there are rumors that Intel is about to purchase german chip manufacturer Infineon. Infineon is a former Siemens subsidary that has been spun out of the parent company in 1999. Infineon is the main supplyer of the baseband modem chips of Apple’s iPhone.
According to Hewlett Packard’s press release Palm is gonna be acquired fo US$ 1.2 Billion. This means besides HP smart phones, which are running Windows Mobile, they are now entering the smart phone market with Palm’s best asset: WebOS. Anyway PreCentral.net picked that HP don’t intend to give up on selling Windows Mobile phones as they
intend to continue to be a strategic partner for Microsoft.
According to PreCentral.net Palm will operate as a business unit besides groups like the “Imaging and Printing Group” or “Personal Systems Group” within the HP organization.
Golem.de reports that HP sees WebOS as an ideal platform to strengthen their mobile strategy. The merger is intended to be finished in July 2010.
Our Comment
It’s complicated to estimate the situation of HP and Palm, but HP now bought a company that has lots of patents for the mobile age. We suppose $1.2 billion is not too expensive for a company that also with WebOS offers a superior operating system for mobile devices. HP clearly sees the mobile market is the market of the future. Apple showed how a business model for mobile devices looks like and now all the companies are moving into that direction. With buying Palm, HP tries to take the short cut. Until now they haven’t played a serious role in the mobile App market.
Anyway Microsoft is a strategic partner for HP – has been explicitly said by HP officials – and HP is using Windows Mobile currently on their mobile devices. Moreover Microsoft is to release Windows 7 Mobile to the market at the end of 2010. Windows 7 development will be quite easy as it will be based on Microsoft’s Silverlight technology.
We don’t want to sound too pessimistically but that might bring a new situation to the future of WebOS. As HP is company who then has to estimate if it is cheaper to license another Microsoft operating system – namely Windows 7 Mobile or the put money into developing an own operating system – namely WebOS.
Let’s hope for the best. We really like WebOS a lot and we feel the brand Palm still sounds very good worldwide.