Thank you HP for taking Palm out of the news

I was getting really tired of news bandwidth being wasted on speculation over the future of Palm, namely who would buy them. HTC, yes, no. Lenovo, maybe. Finally, thankfully, HP just announced that they would be buying Palm for $1.2 billion in cash. Given the iPhone and Android and the upcoming software refresh from Microsoft, et al, the future of the Palm mobile computing devices is still up in the air, but at least the financial future of Palm as a standalone company will be wiped off the media map, for good.

The deal will close sometime over the next three months, before the July 31, 2010 close of HP's third fiscal quarter, so we will still have Palm's financial future in the news for awhile longer, but at least the life of the Palm takeover story has its days numbered.

In a way, it is quite sad to see Palm "go", but this is life in the technology sector.

I personally do not have a cell phone, but I still carry an eight-year old Sony PDA that runs the Palm software.

My biggest question right now is whether HP really intends to actively and wholeheartedly pursue the Palm OS (webOS) beyond the near-term. More specifically, does HP intend to focus on the hardware or the software for mobile devices? Personally, I would rather see HP become more of a U.S. version of HTC and offer both Android and Microsoft mobile device software on their own quality hardware. Sure, keep the Palm OS software for a couple more years, but focus more attention on shifting the Palm app features to Android and Microsoft. But that is just my opinion.

-- Jack Krupansky