Palm revolutionized the way people think about portable computers and devices with its Palm series and more recently with their Treo mobile phones. The company has seen diminished market percentage with smartphones over the past year, however, and is now selling itself to Hewlett-Packard for $1.2 billion.
This move is significant since it bails out Palm and puts HP in the race with tech giants like Apple, Google and Microsoft in the smartphone market. HP also plans to use Palm’s Web OS operating system (which is generally well regarded in the tech field) for tablet computers to potentially compete with Apple s iPad. Whether HP can use its pull as the largest personal computer maker with Palm’s various technologies and patents to carve out a place in new mobile computing space remains to be seen.
