It was an unfortunate and inevitable fate for Palm, makers of the Palm Pre and Pixi, as well as the graphically pleasing webOS platform. Bloomberg has reported that Palm has partnered with Goldman Sachs and Qatalyst Partners to find partners, and interestingly HTC and Lenovo are interested — Dell said “meh”. But if HTC rally does buy Palm, could they nearly jump over the lawsuit they have with patent Apple? Palm was the maker of the “original smartphone”. That is to say they practically made the idea of a “do-everything” phone popular. Because of that, they have more patents than HTC could possibly imagine, or at least important software and hardware-related ones that could allow HTC to slip past by any of Apple’s offensives.
The Bloomberg also says that Lenovo might want to buy Palm, too, however most dibs are on HTC right now. As for the webOS platform, I have several reasons to think that it will not survive this buyout, and many features of it might simply get incorporated into Sense UI Android phones like the EVO 4G. In the meantime, only time can tell who buys Palm, Inc.
Source: Bloomberg
